Here's what the heck I'm up to

[darkemeralds]

In a long and thoughtful comment on my recent post about the new disciplines I'm undertaking, tehomet raised some important points about my decision to lose what I consider to be excess fat. (I won't try to summarize her ideas here--her comment is well worth reading.)

I was discussing some of the Fat Acceptance and feminism ideas that tehomet mentions with kis yesterday, and she said a couple of things that I hadn't been aware of:

One, that my writing style on this blog has a Voice of Authority quality to it that might make it seem as if I Speak For All when I'm really only speaking for myself.

And two, that I never actually described the food-related discipline that I've decided to undertake, so that it's easy for people to misinterpret what I'm up to as "dieting" in some commonly-understood and rightfully-maligned sense.

So, to address kis' first point, I really am only speaking for myself. I'm excited enough about what I've undertaken to want to write about it. I do my best thinking in writing anyway, and I'm still thinking: everything on this subject is provisional, experimental, and still open. I'm way too old to believe that I've found the Answer--especially the answer that applies to anyone else--but I move forward by means of enthusiasm, by embracing new ideas, running with them, talking about them, living them; and that's what I'm doing here. That's all I'm doing here.

And to address her second point, here's what the heck I'm up to:

1. Carefully and accurately counting the caloric content of what I eat
2. Deducting the calories I burn with exercise
3. Keeping the total as near to 2000 per day as I can, averaged over a week

Why 2000? Because if I weighed 175 lbs I would need 2000 calories a day to maintain that weight.

(How do I know that? A sedentary 55 year old woman's body metabolizes between 11 and 12 or so calories per day per pound of body weight. 175 x 11.5 = 2012.5)

Why 175 pounds? That's a harder question. It's a working hypothesis, and subject to change, but I needed a number and 175 seemed about right. It will probably result in 25-28% body fat, which is a healthy range according to both my experience and the data I can find. Plus, I liked my appearance and felt good the last time I weighed 175 lbs.

(And yes, this is about my appearance. And my comfort. And my feet. But there is a large body of medical evidence supporting the unhappy notion that excessive fatness is a health risk, one which increases with age. I understand that not everyone agrees with this body of evidence, but I have chosen to give it credence.)

So how will I get there? In a way, I'm already there.

Here's what I mean. Arithmetic ahoy.

If I weighed 255 to start with, which I'm pretty sure I did, I was eating about 2925 calories a day to maintain that mass. So cutting down to 2000 calories a day creates a 925 calorie a day deficit.

A pound of fat contains 3500 calories, so in (3500/925) days (3.8), presumably, I've lost a pound of fat--about 1.85 lbs in a week. I know, I know: there are variables. But stick with me.

That means that at the beginning of the second week, I weigh 253, and now my slightly smaller body needs slightly fewer calories a day. I'm still eating 2000, but the deficit is smaller, and I'll lose a little less this week than last.

If I keep eating 2000 calories a day, the weight-loss curve that started off steep soon flattens out, slowing week by week until it just...stops. It flatlines at around 175 lbs. In about December, 2015. Yes, five years from now.



And in all that time, I won't have really made any food behavior changes. I made the one change on October 17, 2010, and that was it. No "weight loss diet" versus "maintenance diet". No "prancing around with a trophy for a few days" (as kis vividly put it) when I Win The Game and then stop playing.

In theory, I've effectively already made all the changes I need to make, and I'm on "lifelong maintenance" from the get-go.

So far, I'm doing pretty well. (Note--the calorie counts are before exercise.)



...but that is a VERY SMALL DATASET and I know it. I could revert tomorrow.

The big trick, of course, lies in not reverting tomorrow, but in managing to do the same thing every day, every week, pretty much for all the days.

I have never tried this before. I've tried every "diet" except the one where I commit to the kitchen scale, the bathroom scale, the measuring cups and the teaspoons for the rest of my life.

I might fail spectacularly. I might fail modestly. I might just say "fuck it" tomorrow and get back to those yummy nearly-3000 calories a day I was enjoying.

But I might succeed in forging this new (neural) pathway, and I've decided that I want to try, and to marshal all the resources available to me to bolster my chances of success.

One of those resources is writing about the journey here. I'll keep it behind cuts for easy skipping, but I certainly welcome comment and discussion.

Comments

[scribblemoose]

I've nearly replied to a couple of your weight loss posts but needed some time to properly formulate my thoughts, because this is something I've struggled with for decades, and while I'm pretty clear what my issues are, it's always wise not to assume that's true of everyone.

I would say this, though - goals and goal tracking is an excellent way to improve anything, including the self, BUT - only if you treat yourself kindly.

There's a fine line between healthy discipline and self-punishment, and I have wondered if you're really asking too much of yourself all at once? I know that's something I do a lot, so I'd ask you just to do a quick check that you're not doing that?

The more exercise + less calories = weight loss equation sounds so simple, and yet it's so not, especially if you're aiming for steady weight loss. For one thing, it's a lot easier to burn calories when you're heavier - as a fitness instructor pointed out to me once, it's like you're doing everything with weights permanently affixed to your body. Also, different kinds of exercise have different effects on your metabolism: some burn fat, others burn sugar and some even burn lean tissue, so it's important to get the right kind of exercise at the right time, and always to mix exercise into your program; if you only control food without increasing exercise you'll just fuck your metabolism even more.

But the most important advice I've ever been given (by that same fitness instructor) was that it's pointless trying to control food intake and exercise by will power alone. It doesn't last, or if it does it has a terrible toll because it requires a strong streak of compulsive behaviour which isn't healthy. (The only exception to that rule, she suggested, was for people who are naturally fit but have got out of condition due to some externally imposed factor, like injury.) The first thing to do is to work out why you aren't fit already. The first question, if you eat more than your body needs, is 'Why do you want to eat when you're not hungry?'

Because that's where the problem really lies. The human body is designed to regulate itself to its own healthy weight. It's the mind that causes the trouble. And while you can change things with grit and determination, you can change things more permanently and healthily by changing the behaviours that got you into trouble in the first place.

Paul McKenna has exploited these theories to good effect with his weight loss programme - it's horribly hyped-up and commercial and ugh, but it's based on very sound principles - it includes things like tapping to help ward off cravings etc., but it comes from that principle that if you are kind to yourself, only eat what your body really wants (not what your mind wants), and get yourself out and being active, the rest takes care of itself.

I've lost about 15 lbs that way - it's hard at the moment because I can't exercise, and food is difficult with Ste's illness, but I haven't put back on what I'd lost. Previously I lost about 28lbs with calorie/fat control and exercise through a slimming class, but it all piled on again, and more, when I finally cracked and couldn't take the discipline any more.

I hope that's helpful. Whatever you decide is the best route for you, make sure you're being kind to yourself, okay? *hugs*

[darkemeralds]

All very important points. I've been a very long time working up to this stage--for instance, I completed trauma therapy five or six years ago (that ended binge and unconscious eating for me); made the gradual switch to all home-prepared natural foods three years ago, and I took up daily exercise more than a year ago. Really, the only thing left to ask of myself was to start eating less.

As I said in my post, I'm not aiming for steady weight loss. That's the biggest lie of the diet industry: "Lose two pounds a week!" I did the math, and it showed clearly that to do something like that, I'd have to cut my intake steadily with every pound I lose, to where I'd be eating something like 25 calories a day towards the end in order to be still losing two pounds a week. That's what the line graph in my post shows: that on a fixed caloric intake, the rate of weight loss tails off gradually. At no time in my graph do I lose even as much as two pounds a week. I project at least two years before I'm even within range of my desired weight.

I think this is a really important point, and a non-starter for the diet industry, because nobody wants to buy into a program that promises significant weight loss but only over three or four years.

I'm so glad you mentioned tapping, because it's been crucial to this whole process. It is an excellent tool for dealing with cravings. It's what I used to overcome my fear of hunger pangs, and I use it every day to settle those "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to" that I've always responded to in the past with a nice comforting bit of food. I didn't say anything about it here because it's pretty far out, but I've been using it for years, and recently learned a technique called Turbo-tapping (sorry about the ad on that link--all other links I can find to the technique have been buried in members-only sites) that is AMAZING and highly recommended.

My only quibble with what you say here is about natural body weight regulation. I pursued that holy grail for years--it's what made me go to all natural cooking and eating (so it wasn't a waste of effort), but when I was pretty much free from additives and industrial preservatives, hormones, sweeteners and MSG and hydrogenated fats and high fructose corn syrup, and then from wheat and gluten, and I was still steadily gaining weight on a natural and intuitive diet (complete with daily exercise)--I had to reconsider. I was healthier, sure, but I was getting fatter and fatter.

I have tentatively concluded that in fact what's natural to us is to eat ALL THE FOOD, to pack on as much fat as we can whenever we get the chance, because throughout all but the last 50 years or so of human evolution, winter and drought and bad hunting always came. Now they don't, so our getting really fat is a perfectly natural evolutionary response to the constant abundant availability of food. The moment I glimpsed that idea, conscious choice, self-discipline and technology suddenly loomed for me as the right path.

As to exercise, I ride my bike for an hour every day as transportation. That's it. I've been down the gym-and-workout road and it was too much discipline for me. Bike-riding is a year-round joy, at least six days a week. Perhaps, if and when I get a little lighter, I'll get back to some serious walking, which I used to enjoy before time and excess weight took their toll on my feet.

I'm really not being hard on myself. I'm eating 2000 calories a day--hardly starvation--and having a wonderful time with the counting and tracking, which are very much in my nature. I hope I haven't conveyed some idea that I'm on a long, grinding slog, because I don't remember when I've had this much fun.