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Exercise can make you fat. So what?

This Daily Mail article has been getting around -- it's a popular-press take on the theme "exercise can make you fat."

I am always kind of interested in how this particular idea gets reported in the popular press, because it strikes me that the tone is very important. Too much emphasis on the difficulty of losing weight through exercise alone, and the article can come across as saying "Why even bother increasing your activity when it is going to make weight loss harder?"

And if the article suggests tips for encouraging weight loss while exercising, it runs the risk of making exercise seem even more complicated by introducing extra "rules" to worry about. The Daily Mail article, for example, suggests

• Choosing "fairly vigorous aerobic exercise, such as running or cycling," over weight training
• Fasting for two to four hours before a workout
• Instead of energy bars or energy drinks, consume "a bowl of porridge a couple of hours before a workout" and drink a half-liter (think two glasses, folks) of water with a tiny pinch of salt an hour before and during exercise. (Well, being Brits, the Mail also suggested drinking "squash" as an alternative to water. This confused me momentarily, but Wikipedia is here to help you.)
• Choose intense, 20- to 30-minute workouts over longer, more leisurely ones.

There is not a whole lot here, but I think the article could have been a little more helpful by repackaging it to counteract some of the most-often-perceived barriers to exercise.

 

• You need less time than you might think for a good workout. A 20-minute, vigorous workout might be as effective as a much longer one.
  
• You don't need to have eaten anything just before a workout.
• Skip the energy bars and energy drinks. Drink water.

 

Anyway, it seems a good enough time for me to reiterate my personal advice regarding the interaction of exercise with nutritional behavior.

 

• Don't start an exercise program and a food-restriction program at the same time. Pick one and spend a few months on it before adding the other.
• I recommend starting with exercise. If you're starting from sedentary, begin with either two 20-minute sessions a week, or 5 minutes every day -- whichever makes more sense depending on what you are doing and what fits into your schedule. Work up gradually from there. "Gradually" means "slowly enough to give your life a chance to remold around the exercise sessions as a permanent feature of your schedule."
• Evaluate your progress in the fitness program based on performance, not loss of weight or inches. You are not allowed to quit or change your fitness program because of any observations whatsoever about weight gain/loss.
• The first metric of performance is "Did I show up for my scheduled session or not?" Once you have "showing up" pretty well down pat, you can move on to the second metric, which is "Did I finish my session?" After that is established, then you can work on lengthening the sessions, up to some sustainable, schedule-able level that allows enough time to work on performance. (Say, 45 minutes twice a week, or 20 minutes 5 days a week.) Then you can start increasing intensity.
• Expect that adding exercise to your life will disrupt your appetite, but don't worry about it -- except, maybe, to repeat to yourself affirmations like "Energy bars are just expensive candy, and energy drinks are just expensive soda."
• A few months of showing up to your sessions and finishing your sessions, maybe even having worked them up to longer sessions and started to improve your performance, will have put you in a very different frame of mind. You don't anymore regard exercise as a bizarre anomaly of the schedule that gives you license to have a bunch of extra snacks just because you exercised today. When you get to that point -- when exercising really feels normal, whether you do it every day or only a few days a week -- that is a good time to add in some kind of attentive nutrition program. Hold steady on the exercise habit, and begin.
• If your exercise habit slips, back off on the food restriction. Also vice versa. Change one thing at a time.

It isn't terribly scientific, but I can't see how it can hurt, considering that exercise has so many known benefits going for it even without weight loss, and (unlike diet-induced weight loss) exercise-induced performance improvement is something much closer to your direct control.

Maintenance blues II -- re-establishing on the new "default day" plan.

I stayed up late for two nights finishing Reamde and now I'm paying for it.  There is not enough coffee in this pot.  

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I just went back to my archives from May of this year and read through the "Maintenance Blues" post.  (It's number four of a short series on "accepting your body:" First post.  Second post.  Third post. Fourth post (maintenance blues). Fifth post.  Sixth post.  Seventh.)

I wrote then:

It's three years this week since my successful weight loss began.  And lately?  Weight maintenance has been hard.  

I feel as though I'm slipping, right on the edge.  I weigh myself every day and faithfully plot each point on a chart.  The paper charts stack up in a drawer in my bathroom, one for every month since I reached my weight loss goal in November 2008.  The zigzag lines rise up through my pregnancy and back down again after the birth of #4, not quite as low as I was pre-pregnancy but back to where I decided to be.

And lately I don't like what I see.   It's not that I'm not still at a healthy weight.  I am.  But after reaching my postpartum target, my weight crept back up, and I've been on the high side of it for months now.

Worse, I can't seem to bring it back down.  Several times since just before the baby's first birthday, I have tried to lose just one pound.  Not because I needed to but because I wanted to see if I could still do it. 

I haven't done it.  I haven't sustained the effort for more than a few days.  After about three days of sticking to my habits, I start feeling hungry and cold all the time, and shortly thereafter I find myself helping myself to a third plate of dinner, or eating all the kids' sandwich crusts.    I recognize this as classic "body defending its fat stores."  Still, it's frustrating -- I managed to overcome it once, what's wrong with me now?  Have I lost my hard-earned habits for good?

I thought maybe it was worth highlighting that now, a few months later, I seem to have finally gotten a handle on it.  Seriously, it took almost four months of false starts.

Weight maintenance is not easy.  It is difficult.  It was especially difficult over this past summer, mainly (I think) because my husband had a lot of business travel.  That generally makes it harder for me to run the household, and I don't have much energy left over either for willpower or for necessary tasks like meal planning.  Also I tend to rely on packaged food and carryout more when he's gone, and those foods tend to be less satisfying in smaller portions.   And it makes it marginally more difficult (though more appealing) to get to the gym.

So a lot of my strategies that require advance planning were not as helpful as they have been in the past.  I was seeing my weight stay about three pounds higher than I wanted it to be.  At the same time, I was waking up every morning and recommitting to following my good habits, then only marginally managing to follow them.  Would I be gaining weight, if I wasn't trying?  Maybe. 

Back when I was losing the 40 pounds, there came a point when I sort of got into a groove with it.  It was still physically uncomfortable to resist gluttonous behaviors.  I felt hungry, I felt cravings, and it didn't feel good to resist them; but it felt mentally easy to resist them.  I had bought into the idea that I had already made my choices.  "I don't do that anymore" was all it took -- I didn't like the experience of self-control, but I could do it and I did do it.

But back in May, the groove just refused to come.  I kept "forgetting" that I was trying to practice good habits and self-control.  I would sit down in front of, say, a plate of pasta at a restaurant, and it would suddenly and quite literally seem not at all important that I was trying to reboot my good habits.  I wouldn't exactly make a fully conscious decision to abandon the habits -- it was really like I was forgetting what I was trying to do.  And I wouldn't remember until afterwards, when I felt the overfull sensation.  And then I would feel awful.

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I kept plugging away at the attempts, though.  (Like ChristyP says: It's a new day every day.)  I tried some different strategies, because it was plain that many of my old reliable ones were not working in the particular family dynamic that we had going at the time.

And I think I finally hit my stride.  We'll have to see if it lasts, but I think I have gotten a mental handle on myself again.  I have stopped "forgetting."

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The new strategy that has been most helpful in this season has been a radically simplified calorie-counting technique.  

If you are a longtime reader, you may remember that periodically counting and journaling my daily calories (I used SparkPeople) was a very helpful strategy for me during my 40-pound loss.  I didn't do it every day, but doing so once every few days helped me maintain realistic expectations of appropriate portion size and of reasonable tradeoffs (an egg or a blueberry muffin, or half of each?).  I do think that having this realistic understanding of my body's needs helped me understand the line between gluttonous behaviors and non-gluttonous variations.  And, of course, on days I did it, following the plan literally controlled the calories.   I tended to count the calories the night before and make a plan that I would try to stick to, rather than counting things after I ate them.

But even occasionally performing the calorie-count was too time-consuming for me in this season.  It takes about half an hour to sit down and make a calorie-controlled plan for a full day.  I just could not scrape together the time to make it stick.  Other things were higher on my priority list.  I worked on other important behaviors (not taking seconds, for example) but I couldn't shake the feeling that the calorie counting was a missing piece of the puzzle.  On the few days when I managed to squeeze it in, I found it much easier to keep my intentions in mind.

Finally I found a technique that worked, because it eliminated the need to sit down and plan the whole day.  Essentially, I went from "It's a new day every day" to "It's a new meal every meal."  Here's what I did.

1 - I identified a maintenance calorie target.  

For me, the target that maintains weight reliably is about 1600 calories per day.  Probably I actually eat more calories than that (my guess is something like 1700-1900), but I have found that if I pretend that I'm trying to eat 1600 calories a day, I stay the same.  I guess you could say that a buffer of a couple hundred calories -- the nibbles off the kids' sandwich crusts, the tasting the soup to check the seasoning, the "just one more" potato chip -- must be built into that number.  

Please remember that the 1600 calories is me-specific.  I am not a large person, and as I said, that number is probably lower than my "real" maintenance intake.  If you don't know what your maintenance level is, start with an online calorie needs estimator -- don't just use mine.

2 - I subtracted some calories. 

I happened to be a couple of pounds heavier than I would like to be; my bad habits had caused my weight to creep up.  So my new target (temporarily) became 1450 calories per day.  This was roughly the target during my 2008 weight loss, by the way. 

3 - I divided the calories among the meals and snacks that I would like to eat.

I thought about the "meal" and "snack" habits that I would like to reinforce.  I do better if I have a couple of  snacks; I find that I am going to eat between meals anyway, so "no-snacking" is not a realistic goal.  But I would prefer to be in the habit of  keeping those snacks small.  I have also found that I do nicely on a fairly light breakfast, a medium lunch, and a heartier dinner.  So that's how I split things up.

I made a little text file called "A Default Day" and wrote this in it:

• Breakfast -- About 250 calories
• Lunch -- About 400 calories
• Dinner --  About 600 calories
• Two snacks -- About 100 calories each

4 - I started to try to stick to those targets one meal at a time.  

I didn't bother with trying to make up at dinner for overshooting at lunch.  (Just like during my weight loss I didn't try to starve myself on one day to make up for overshooting on the previous day).  

This really is easier than trying to do the whole day at once, especially with years of calorie-counting under my belt.  I can use various rules of thumb plus the nutrition labels to estimate calorie counts while I'm preparing food.  I can tell you off the top of my head that one piece of toast with a little bit of butter, coffee, and a boiled egg will come in at about 250 calories for breakfast, for example.

(quick fact check using SparkPeople:  1 egg = 70 calories, 1 slice whole wheat bread = 128 calories, 5 cups coffee = 12 calories, 1 pat salted butter = 36 calories, total = 246 calories.  CHA CHING.)

5 - When I had time, I thought about the sorts of meals I like to eat, and I calculated the portion sizes necessary to hit the targets.

So,  for example, I often have eggs and toast for breakfast, or a fried egg on top of leftover rice pilaf.  I sometimes make biscuits for the family and usually have bacon with them.  I like cottage cheese or yogurt with fruit.  If I'm in a hurry, I might have peanut butter on an apple or on toast.  I make pancakes and waffles from time to time.  And, let's face it, once in a while I have to hit a drive-through.

So I made this list of 250-calorie breakfasts -- it's almost like a list you might find in a magazine diet plan, except that it only has stuff I actually make and eat regularly (plus an emergency drive-through option).  No mini frittatas here, nor breakfast cereal (since I don't much like it at breakfast and tend to eat it for dessert instead), nor prepackaged items (another thing I don't rely on much at breakfast time).  But if you eat those things, then they could be on your list.

• boiled egg, tomato juice, one slice toast, half a tablespoon butter OR jam
• egg fried in 1 tsp butter, plus 100 calories of bread or leftover grains
• 2 small biscuits and 1-1/2 strips bacon
• Mix and match:  2/3 cup cottage cheese or 3/4 cup yogurt or 1 cup oatmeal, plus 1-1/4 cup blueberries or 1 cup applesauce or 1 sliced banana or 2 cups sliced strawberries.
• 1-1/2 tablespoons peanut butter on either 1 apple or 1 slice toast.
• Two pancakes (1/4 cup batter each) or half a waffle, topped with either one pat butter and one tablespoon syrup, or 2/3 cup berries.
• McDonald's oatmeal without the extra brown sugar, or an egg McMuffin with no cheese.

I made a similar list for 400-calorie  lunches.  Two examples:

• Pile of veggies, 100 to 150 calories of bread or crackers, and one can of sardines.
• Drive-through option:  One or two side salads with one packet of vinaigrette dressing and six chicken nuggets or a grilled chicken sandwich.

And another one for 600-calorie dinners.  One example:

• 3.5 ounces of pizza, plus a bowl of homemade salad.

You see that I got less precise about the portions as I went later in the day.  I didn't specify the sort of pizza, or how big a pile of vegetables.  This kind of meshes with how I roll in calorie counting anyway.  In 2008, I had success even though I often would count the breakfast and lunch very precisely, and then (assuming I followed my plan) reward myself by eating whatever at dinner, just not more than one plate.

And I didn't bother making a list of 100-calorie snacks.  It is not so hard to figure that out, especially since many of the snacks I have are prepackaged with labels.  Like ice cream.  (1/3 of a cup is roughly 100 calories for most of the flavors we buy).  And I can always get one of the six billion "100-Calorie Portions" that are out there now.  I have become particularly fond of 100-calorie ice cream bars, which we keep around anyway to give to the baby instead of the big ones his siblings are eating.

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Anyway, this technique, for some reason, seems  to have done the trick:  I am back to not being as much of an idiot at the dinner table (mostly).  And my weight has come back down within the bounds it is supposed to be.  I think the reason it's working, where large-scale whole-day calorie counting did not, is simply because the effort fits into my day better right now.  It also makes the "yes! I did it!" reward of having stuck to my plan just a little bit more immediate.  And when I don't stick to my plan -- when I eat four peanut butter sandwich crusts for dessert after lunch -- it isn't too disheartening because the chance to try again is very soon.

One caveat:  I decided not to bother counting alcoholic beverages in the calories as long as I waited to have them until after dinner.    I just had this vague idea that it would create a better incentive structure for me, since the biggest problem I have with alcohol is that I tend to overeat while I am consuming it.  This seems to have worked pretty well.  I tend to drink beer about three ounces at a time, though (I split beers with Mark), so maybe it just wasn't enough volume to make a difference.

 Key to the whole structure is something I learned in 2008:   I refuse to carry my failures over.  Not from day to day, and not from meal to meal.  My dinner goal is still 650 even if my lunch was 700 calories.  Because it is ultimately not about the calories, but the habit of moderation.  And alternately stuffing and starving is not moderation. 

Accepting the facts and deciding to act on them.

In the last post, I replaced the vague question of "should I accept myself as I am?" with a process of discernment of a decision to change.  

It occurred to me that these decisions have long-, medium-, and short-term manifestations, so I thought I'd work through an example.  Perhaps this will become a series.

Here's what I came up with in that post:

1.  Understand and believe the relevant facts.

2.  From those facts, judge whether a change offers benefits.

3.  If a change offers benefits,  judge from the facts whether they are possible to attain.

4.  If there are benefits that are possible to attain, determine from the facts how they could be attained. 

5.  Decide whether you want to expend the effort to attain them.

  

LONG-TERM LEVEL

Understand and believe the facts:  "I wear such-and-such a dress size, or I went to the doctor and he told me I risk diabetes if I stay at my current weight."

Judge if a change is desirable:  "Yes, I want to have a smaller dress size, or avoid developing diabetes."

Judge if a change is possible:  "Yes, it must be possible because other people have permanently dropped a dress size or lost weight or changed their risk of developing diabetes.  Many of them have done it by eating less or otherwise changing their diets.  I don't yet have evidence that this approach would not work if I made a similar change in my behavior.  So it's possible that if I permanently changed my behavior, I'd permanently drop a dress size or avoid diabetes."

Judge how such a change is possible:  "Well, I could sit down and figure out what behaviors I could change most easily.  Then I could develop some strategies to remind me of my motivation.  That would take some planning time.  I'd have to practice the new behaviors.  That means learning to do something that's hard, over and over again.  I'd also have to learn how to deal with negative comments from people who notice the changes I'm making.  And I'll have to be ready to respond to setbacks by making useful adjustments instead of just giving up."

Decide:  "Do I want to do this?"

 

MEDIUM-TERM LEVEL

Understand and believe the facts: "I figured out that I habitually take second and third helpings at meals.  I don't actually know whether I could be satisfied with only one helping."

Judge if a change is desirable:  "Yes, I don't want to be ignorant about whether I can be satisfied with only one helping.  If I knew the answer to that question, I'd know whether sticking to one helping would be an easy way for me to permanently change my habits in the direction I want to go."

Judge if a change is possible:  "Yes, I could find out the answer by trying out the behavior of stopping after one plateful, and then seeing if I feel satisfied after the food has been put away."

Judge how such a change is possible:  "I'd have to resist eating second helpings after I finished my plate, and then I'd have to pay attention to how I feel for a while after the meal, and maybe write down my observations.  I'll need several strategies to resist the temptation to take seconds -- I could try eating slowly so that I don't finish my plate until it's nearly time to clear the dishes, or I could have a stick of gum ready to pop into my mouth as soon as I finish, or I could have a cup of coffee after dinner, or I could get up and leave the table as soon as my plate is empty.   I'd have to eat this way at several meals -- say, five or six dinners -- before I could really come to a conclusion. "

Decide:  "Do I want to do this?"

   SHORT-TERM LEVEL

Understand and believe the facts: "I told myself I wanted to know whether I'd be satisfied with one helping.  Now I've finished my helping and I want to eat more food.  I won't know whether one helping satisfies me unless I can get to the end of the meal to find out how I feel after only having had one helping.  But I want to eat more food and it sucks."

Judge if a change is desirable:  "Yes, I don't want to sit here any more looking at the food and wanting it and knowing I could have it if I chose."

Judge if a change is possible:  "Yes, I don't have to sit here any longer looking at the food.  I could eat it.  Or I could escape this situation.  Or I could change the situation somehow so I wouldn't want the food anymore."

Judge how such a change is possible:  "I could get up from the table and walk away. "

Decide:  Do you want to do it?

 

See how small the changes can be?  Even the long-term example needn't be "do I want to lose fifty pounds" or "do I want to drop six dress sizes," but can be a much tinier goal: "do I want to lose some weight" or "do I want a smaller dress size."   It's long-term because the intent is for it to be long-lasting, not because it'll take a long time to achieve.  The medium-term example needn't be "do I want to eat fewer helpings at dinner," but "do I want to find out whether I would be satisfied with fewer helpings at dinner?"  The short-term example is the most immediate:  shall I resist this helping? 

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I made up those examples.  Tune in next time for a real-life, real-time example from my own frustrations with maintaining my current weight loss...

Cutting back the recipe.

Kara at Mama Sweat posts her favorite one-hour gym workout, involving 30 minutes on the stationary bike, 20 minutes on the treadmill, and 10 minutes in the pool:  a mini-triathlon.  It sounds pretty good, and has the advantage of being simple and easy to remember. 

I was pretty fixated on the idea that because of time to change/shower, I had to either swim or run at the gym.  Not both.

Then I recently started doing some running drills that only took up 20 minutes, and part of the drill was to keep the running short, so I tried "jumping in the pool for a quick swim."  I found out something important:  It doesn't actually take all that much extra time to change for a brief swim, if you were going to shower anyway.  And if you love swimming, it feels really good.

So now I'm one of those crazy gym people who heads all sweaty into the locker room, puts on a suit, and heads right back out again for "workout number two."  (Sure, workout number two is only ten minutes, but still.)
 
One little thing to add though. I think the act of calling something a "one hour" workout sets up a mental block of sorts.  I know that some people will look at this and say "I don't have an hour" or "I have an hour, but it's really only 45 minutes because I have to change and shower in my hour."  And then they will skip right over it, looking for a "great 45-minute workout."

But of course, any "one-hour" workout (including this one) can be shortened if necessary.  It's just like cutting back on a recipe:  divide all the ingredients by whatever amount you need to cut back.  Round to the nearest minute, and you're good.

So, for instance, Kara's 30-20-10 workout can become 22-15-8. Voila. A forty-five minute workout.  And it's just as "great" as the one-hour workout she posted.

I know it may SEEM obvious, but it's almost as if sometimes you feel like you need "permission" to tweak someone else's "perfect one-hour workout." It took me a while as a novice exerciser to realize I could do this.

Seven in a row. And a new ID.

This morning I'm going back into "weight loss mode" for, I think, the first time since I got back down to my postpartum goal weight.  I've been within bounds for close to three months -- not a bad run, considering I'm dealing with the ups and downs of breastfeeding.

(A note on that -- When I was heavy, I didn't even notice that breastfeeding made me need more food.  I figure I was already eating so much and throwing off the excess in heat, that my body just threw off less heat and fed the baby from that.  Now it's very, very obvious that feeding the baby means I have to eat more, though the exact quantity is difficult to hit.)

I weigh daily.  One way I make this work for me -- one rule -- is that I return to stricter habits when I have seven readings in a row that are above my target weight of 112.  It goes very nicely with daily weighings (seven days = one week) and it's not hard to remember.   Seven is enough data points that a trend can be visible among the random ups-and-downs.  

I still have a hard time understanding why people say "Oh, I can't weigh daily."  Data from the National Weight Control Registry has me convinced that daily weighing is not harmful (even though you will frequently see that advice on dieting sites and in books as if there was evidence that daily weighing stalls weight loss all by itself).  

I guess I can understand it depending on the personality.  I have to hold myself back from restricting my habits too soon -- like, oh no, I had a bad food day and the next day the scale reads 2 lbs higher, I better act NOW.   Well, I hadn't thought of this possibility, but it can act the other way too -- a friend of mine told me she doesn't weigh daily because, when she happens to have a lower reading, it's easy to convince herself she "has room" to go off habits that day.  

(Which is a normal part of maintenance -- but is an act of pure self-sabotage in attempts to reduce weight.  "The data shows that what I've been doing is working!  I should do the opposite today!")

Anyway.  Seven "high" days in a row, and it's time to check my habits.  I consider myself back in maintenance after I bring my five-day running average under the target.  That can take a few weeks.  

Habit number one:  tomato juice and boiled egg for breakfast...

 

 * * *

In other news, my new driver's license arrived today.  It strikes me as a really stupid idea to scan pictures of my ID and put them on my blog, so I won't, but let me tell you -- the difference between the old one and the new one is really cool.  I keep putting them side by side and looking at them.

A couple of times over the last couple of years, I pulled my driver's license out to prove to someone that I used to be heavy.  (The weight listed on my old DL is 160 lbs; my new one, 112.)  I think I'll go on carrying the old one in a spare slot in my wallet.

 

Just maintaining.

I'm almost done going through and finding all my weight loss posts and categorizing them into broad categories so that I can maybe, eventually, produce a printable version.    

Along the way I'm re-reading some of them, remembering where I was at each stage, and occasionally thinking of interesting updates.  (Remember those cookies on my dresser?  Guess what?  They are STILL THERE.)

One thing I've been trying to figure out is whether there is really anything original or unique about my own approach and philosophy.  I know that I have an original and unique personal experience and an original and unique voice, because everyone does, sheesh.  But what is there in the meat of what I did and what I write about that is different from all the other gazillion books out there?  If not, why bother?  (Of course, the other way of looking at it is -- if so many other people can publish and self-publish the same old advice over and over again, why not me?  But I digress.)

The part that seems to me like it might not have been done (much) before is the notion that what we really can control is the habit-changing, not the numbers changing.   To let go of the numbers and embrace the desirable habits whether they "pay" in numbers or not.  Add that to the idea of measuring and celebrating success in habits, not in numbers -- and the idea of adding habits slowly, systematically, and deliberately ---and I'm not sure I've seen that anywhere else.  

The closest thing I've seen is in The Beck Diet, which is a cognitive-behavioral therapist's take on it.  I am not a cognitive-behavioral therapist, but it seems like a good approach (or at least, it seems similar to mine).

Is there something I'm missing, or does that sound about right?

This occurred to me a couple of weeks ago when a friend who has been changing her habits and who has dropped 20-odd pounds in the last several months posted that she was changing her goals during an upcoming stressful time.  She was going to work on maintaining her weight rather than on losing weight during that period of predictable high stress.  

It is the sort of thing that years ago I would have said "Great goal!"  about, but these days I just don't believe that anymore.  I commented that I didn't think maintaining the scale was a "goal."  The reason I gave is that it's not directly under your control the way habit is.  (Post and comment are here.)

It bugged me and bugged me for a few days because there was something else about the notion of easing up on yourself, and just maintaining weight rather than continuing to lose it, during a stressful time that bugged me. Even though on the surface it sounded perfectly reasonable.

And then this morning I think I figured it out.  Here on the other side of weight loss, it's perfectly obvious that "how I lost the weight" and "how I maintain the weight" are THE SAME.  There is not a  significant difference between my behaviors as a weight-losing person and my behaviors as a weight-maintaining person.  

Oh, sure, I must be consuming more calories.  (Especially since I am breastfeeding an eight-month-old.)  But the habits are not very different.  At least, if you compare these three versions of me:

•  (A) stable-but-heavy, pre-2008 me; 
• (B) 2008, weight-losing me; 
• (C) stable-but-normal weight, current me

... well, (A) and (C) behave very, very differently.  (B) and (C) behave much the same.  

(Whereas conventional energy-balance wisdom might seem to imply that (A) and (C) would behave similarly, and (B) is the one who would be behaving differently.)

I guess I now believe that maintaining is just as hard, or just as easy, as losing weight.  I guess I now believe that you can't really save much effort and stress by changing from "trying to lose" to "trying to maintain."  Going back to old habits is not "maintaining" behavior, it's "gaining" behavior.

What you can do to ease up on yourself, to make things less stressful, is to temporarily stop adding new good habits and "maintain" the ones you have.  

Like much that I've learned, it's kind of bad news.   But it's good news in a way too, I think.

30 variations on the push-up.

I haven't started yet, but I'm pondering adding push-ups to my exercise routine.  This video may help me get in the mood.

As for me, an old wrist injury makes "normal" pushups pretty hard to do, so I think I might try the trick with the barbells or possibly the bosu half-ball thingy.

The answer depends on the question.

A friend of mine asked me a week ago, "So, how important do you really think exercise is for weight loss?"  I gave a rambly off-the-cuff answer, but I wasn't satisfied with it.  Let me try again.

Research data does exist about the subject.  But the kind of data that's out there is not the sort that can be translated into advice for everyone.

Some of it reports a relationship between exercise and immediate weight loss; some of it reports a relationship between exercise and long-term weight maintenance.  Some of it compares cardiovascular-type exercise to resistance-type exercise.  Some of it reports what happens when totally sedentary people take up very minimal exercise; some of it reports what happens when people who move around during their normal lives introduce sessions of intense exercise; some of it reports what happens when people who already exercise in sessions add more sessions.  Some work studies people who are generally healthy, some work studies people who are ill or frail.  Clearly not all of the results are relevant to each person.

And then, what comes out in the headlines isn't necessarily what the researchers were studying.  Check out this apparently decent article in The Guardian:  "Why exercise won't make you thin."  The article reports:

In what has become a defining experiment at the University of Louisiana, led by Dr Timothy Church, hundreds of overweight women were put on exercise regimes for a six-month period. Some worked out for 72 minutes each week, some for 136 minutes, and some for 194. A fourth group kept to their normal daily routine with no additional exercise.

Against all the laws of natural justice, at the end of the study, there was no significant difference in weight loss between those who had exercised – some of them for several days a week – and those who hadn't. (Church doesn't record whether he told the women who he'd had training for three and half hours a week, or whether he was wearing protective clothing when he did.) Some of the women even gained weight.

But if you go to the journal article abstract, you will find no mention of weight loss.  The study's authors apparently felt that the really important result was the relationship between exercise and cardiorespiratory fitness.  (There is one.)

Finally, the numbers are not really simple enough to be distilled into headlines without losing some subtlety.  Let's say that "New study shows that X is superior to Y when it comes to losing weight."  This may mean that the average weight loss in the X group was significantly more than the average weight loss in the Y group.  Or it might mean that a greater percentage of the X group than of the Y group achieved some criterion for "success." But often there are some individuals in the Y group who outperformed individuals in the X group for some unknown reason.  How do you know which group you would do better in?  You don't, unless you try X and you try Y.

So:  Most of what you read in the papers may as well be ignored as acted upon.

That being said, I am personally convinced of this:

Exercise is next to useless for weight loss.  If there is an effect, it is so small as to be not worth the time and effort anyone puts into weight loss.  If the only reason you want to exercise is to lose weight, don't bother.  Seriously. 

(I've written about this before.)

But.

Why do you want to lose weight?

If any part of that is "Because I want to be healthier" --- or "stronger" --- or "able to do more things" --- or "longer-lived" ---

--- then exercise will give you that, EVEN IF YOU DO NOT LOSE ANY WEIGHT AT ALL.

I can't stress this one enough.

Mark told me about a paper that he saw presented at a conference that, while I cannot link to it, will do for an illustration.  The research subjects were overweight people who increased their exercise for the study.  Rather than just presenting averages and standard deviations and the like, the presenter showed data for all the individuals.  A few gained weight.  Most lost very little weight or no weight.  Some lost a significant amount of weight.  But all of them increased their muscle mass, and all of them increased their lean-to-fat body ratio. 

Yeah, some people will lose weight after they start exercising.  Good for them.  But why not just start with the assumption:  "Exercise will probably not help me lose weight, but it will definitely make me healthier."

So fess up.  If you are the sort to say you don't care so much about your appearance, but you want to lose weight because it's good for your health... well, if that's true then the only logical response is to get some exercise.

Or even if you DO care about your appearance, AND you want to lose weight because it's good for your health, then the only logical response is STILL to get some exercise.

"But wait," you might be saying.  "I do only care about my health, but we all know that simply being obese is so very bad for my health, that if I stay obese I'm going to be unhealthy anyway.  I should try to lose weight first, and if exercise won't help me lose weight or might even make it harder to lose weight, then it'll actually be standing in the way of better health."

Bzzt.  Very, very little evidence exists for the assertion that being obese, alone, causes health problems.  Correlation has been demonstrated.  Causation, not so much.

Exercise will definitely make you healthier.  Losing weight will not definitely make you healthier.

So.  Let me distill this into a handy Q&A.

***

Q.  I want to lose weight, so should I be getting regular exercise?

A.  Yes.

***

Q.   If I want to GAIN weight, should I be getting regular exercise?

A.  Yes.

***

Q.   Let's suppose I don't give a flying fig newton whether my weight goes up or down or stays the same.  Should I be getting regular exercise?

A.  Do I really have to answer that?  

Q.  Yes, just for the sake of completeness.

A.  Yes.

Q.  That's what I thought you would say.

A.  Glad to oblige.

Q.   Okay, this is what I REALLY meant to say. I'm not getting regular exercise, and I'm not losing weight as fast as I want to.  Will it help me lose weight if I get more exercise?

A. I can't be sure, but probably not.

Q.  Is that bad news or good news?

A.  Yes.

"One raw, one plain, one fancy."

From a comment I made on an earlier post. 

It's a rule of thumb I use when putting together meals -- for getting three vegetable side dishes on the table with a minimum of fuss.

I don't always have three vegetable (or fruit) side dishes on the table, especially if my main dishes have plenty of veg in them, but it is nice to shoot for.

"Raw" includes most salads, fresh cut fruit, and also simple things like a bowl of baby carrots.

"Plain" is anything steamed, boiled, or roasted, either truly plain or maybe with a little butter or oil.  Roast sweet potatoes, plain microwave-steamed fresh vegetables, or cooked frozen vegetables.  Also something like applesauce would count here.  The essence of "plain," though, for the purpose I mean (not doing too much work at dinner time) is "simply prepared."  I didn't have to stir it or cut it up much or measure anything.

"Fancy" would be anything cooked any other way, or anything that required a recipe.  Sauteed broccoli with olive oil and lemon; cream of tomato soup; stuffed squash; marinara sauce.  That kind of thing.

"One raw, one plain, one fancy" puts a variety of textures (and usually colors) on the table without my overdoing it in the last minutes before supper.

Announcing a new category: "Lower on the food chain."

I hear that some readers are interested in my family's ongoing project to eat "lower on the food chain," consuming fewer meat meals and less meat overall.  I have written a number of posts about this topic, and I think it would be good to gather them together in this new category.

Most people know how to make a meat meal and how to make a meatless meal, but a very-low-meat meal -- the "meat as a flavoring agent" meal -- often seems trickier to put together.  I want to blog some more about those recipes, but even more, about the whole menu -- because it's really the menu, the way a small amount of meat can fit into a whole meal, that is the tricky part.

Last night's dinner was an excellent example of a summer low-meat meal.  I split one twelve-ounce steak among five people (our genders and ages are, by the way, M-37, F-35, M-10, M-6, F-4).  The baby is only just beginning solids so he doesn't count.

Here was the dinner menu:

Marinated White Bean Salad

Roast Sweet Potatoes

Sauteed Broccoli with Lemon and Garlic

Skewers of Bell Peppers, Red Onions and Sirloin Steak

Fresh Peaches

One thing you have to get over, if you're going to eat low-meat meals, is the idea that it's not worth firing up the grill to cook one steak.  

Skewers help.  Midday, I partially thawed the 0.75-lb steak and cut it into about twelve one-inch cubes -- so I guess each cube was about an ounce -- which I threaded onto two skewers and then salted.  I placed the skewers over a plate so the beef could drip if necessary, covered it up so I wouldn't contaminate anything, and left it in the fridge until about an hour before grilling.

Three bell peppers and part of a red onion, I cut up and put on different skewers.  I find it's better to skewer veggies separately from meat, because they may cook for different times.

Roast sweet potatoes are pretty easy, of course, you just pierce them and put them in a parchment-lined roasting pan in the oven for a couple of hours.   Or, if you forget until the last minute, you can always microwave them, or peel them, cut them up, and boil them for ten minutes.

The marinated white bean salad I made the day before.  This is one of those recipes that doesn't need a recipe.  Cut into small dice:  some celery, some carrots, some red onion.  Mince a couple of cloves of garlic.  Toss in a bowl with olive oil, red wine vinegar, basil, and dill.  Stir in a couple of cans of well drained white beans.  Refrigerate at least a few hours, overnight is even better.

The broccoli was cooked briefly in boiling water ahead of time, and then as soon as the other stuff went on the grill, I finished it by sauteeing in olive oil with minced garlic and lemon zest, the juice of the lemon being added at the end.

Mark and I each got three cubes of meat, and the three eating kids each got two cubes of meat, plus as much of the veggies as we wanted.  I put my steak on top of the white bean salad, but everybody else dredged theirs in ketchup or barbecue sauce.