Resolutions: Health and Fitness part 1: Diet
Or, as I like to call it, The Diet Part II.
My "resolution," if you can call it that, for 2006 was The Diet. And it worked, as the graph can attest. I lost 30 pounds in 5 months. (The blue dots are a 10 day moving average. The ends of the red lines are actual weight measurements). I gave up at the end of May even though everything was going along exactly according to plan (except for that riboflavin incident). Barbecue season was starting up. And I was getting sick of frozen dinners. I decided then I'd resume in January 2007. Because losing weight seemed like a fairly natural thing for the body to do in the winter. After Christmas, anyway.
I did it mostly following the advice in The Hacker's Diet (by John Walker, founder of Autodesk and overall ubergeek). although I did a lot more research to corroborate the details. The Hacker's Diet, though, was the most comprehensive and detailed resource I found. Strangely, there isn't a whole lot of advice out there on (reasonably) healthy dieting.
I didn't talk to my doctor like everyone says you're supposed to, even though they specialize in this sort of thing. Or maybe because they specialize in this sort of thing. Which seemed like reason enough not to trust them. Does that make sense? It's complicated. I also didn't want to wait 4 hours in the waiting room with sick people.
There is a lot of hearsay out there that says that dieting doesn't work. Okay, the last two months notwithstanding, I'm a bit concerned about that too. I spent most of the second half of 2006, though, hovering around a pretty consistant 180lbs. (The 5 pounds I gained back in May and June I'm attributing to rebuilding muscle mass that was lost over the diet). I went into this in the first place from the standpoint that I'd maintained a relatively consistant weight (about 205lbs) for a long time. I'm concerned about the jump over the holidays, but that always happened to some extent. That said, I may have to excercise more restraint next year.
Regardless, I've proved to myself, at least, that this dieting stuff does work, and while I haven't planned as much this year as last year and my enthusiasm's a little lower, I want to get myself into a healthy weight (well, what that BMI crap claims is a healthy weight, but let's not get into that) once and for all. As quickly and painlessly as possible. This year.
Received wisdom has it that you lose weight by controlling your diet (keeping it more or less the same, in other words), and excercising more. Which most people take as you do absolutely nothing about diet and get a gym membership. And then you never go to the gym. This is why people who earnestly want to lose weight never do. It doesn't work like that.
You lose weight by eating fewer calories than your body burns. There are some subtleties beyond that, but that's pretty much all there is to it. 1 pound equals 3500 calories. Burn 3500 calories more than you consume and you lose 1 pound. You can do that in one week by running a caloric deficit of 500 calories a day. 2 pounds a week is a 1000 calorie per day deficit. You can't really burn more than 2 pounds a week of body fat. So don't even try.
The trouble with excercising to lose weight is that you really don't burn that many more calories. An hour-long jog burns about 500 calories. I can't even jog for an hour. Granted, if I took up jogging, I might be able to get there, but I don't have time to jog one hour every day for months. It just won't happen. And it's pretty much guaranteed I'd be eating to compensate. 500 calories is a Big Mac. Or two peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Or three cans of pop. If my goal is weight loss, it would take a depressingly long time to get there, and I'd probably give up before I started.
It's not that I'm against excercise. I'll get to that in Health and Fitness part 2. (Stay tuned!) If my goal is weight loss, however, I'm going to have to go on a diet.
I'd like to stick to a weight loss rate of between 1-1.5lbs/week (that's 500-750kcal deficit/day, which, for me, works out to about 1750-2000kcal/day total intake (considering I'm walking to work...). The nice thing about the Hacker's Diet is you can just pick a target and work the feedback loop. I haven't worked out a meal plan yet, but I figure I'll stay under 500 calories per meal, and allow myself a limited number of 100 calorie snacks (I like cottage cheese... and apple sauce and things... I allow stuff like cereal bars and low fat pudding too). Last year, meals came mostly in the form of frozen dinners, but I'm going to see if I can expand on that a little bit. I'm okay with frozen dinners, but if that's all you're eating for 5 months, you start to curse the name of Michaelina. Not to mention riboflavin.
I'm not really looking forward to this, but I know from experience that after the first week, it's pretty smooth sailing. We've evolved to deal with scarcity, and the body knows what to do. It would prefer you didn't starve yourself, but if you're going to, it just deals with it and leaves you alone.
comments:
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Whoa. That's a lot of science. Does thinking all this through burn calories from sheer effort? Hm... Submitted 2007-01-07 15:53:56
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Oh, gosh--serendipity! Submitted 2007-01-07 20:42:51
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