Gauging.

It's kind of odd to be saying "No" to ginger-vinegared coleslaw as a weight loss technique, but I am back to doing it again.  Post-pregnancy dietary habits are starting to coalesce and firm up.  And I'm finding that my thoughts about it all have coalesced, too.  I'm not someone who's constantly tried, I'm someone who's done it:   lost 40 pounds and kept it off for six months before my pregnancy.  And the months of my pregnancy were months in which I could reflect, without the confusion of action.

The habits are coalescing around an observation, maybe specific just to me, but one I'm increasingly certain about:

If I don't feel hungry or chilly periodically throughout the day, I'm not losing weight.

I'm pretty well convinced that the "empty-stomach" sensation, the tummy grumble,  is not literally a sense of an empty stomach.  It's not as simple as nerves in my stomach sending "No food here!" messages to my brain.  Hunger signals appear to travel through the body via hormones:  insulin, ghrelin, leptin.  And if that sounds newfangled, that's because it is:   leptin was identified in 1994, ghrelin in 1999.  They're generated at the cellular level, not just because the stomach is empty or full.

Here's what I've observed:  If I go to bed hungry, and notice real hunger before meals, my weight is down a couple of days later.

It could mean that I make myself hungry, and that causes me to lose weight.  That is, it could be that "I'm burning body fat because I'm letting myself get hungry."

My observation of myself makes me think that the causation runs the other way.  If I am burning my fat reserves, my body tells me I am doing so by sending me a hunger signal.   In other words: "I'm burning body fat because I'm losing weight."

I think it makes a difference in attitude for sure. 

 If hunger causes fat-burning, then I must suffer in order to burn fat.  If I cannot generate the will to suffer, I will never lose weight.

 But if fat-burning causes hunger, then I can try to find the habits that send me the hunger signal -- not all the time, not for long waking periods, but several times a day, a little while in advance of meals.  And when the hunger signal arrives, I can regard it as a messenger bringing me the news that I am succeeding.  

The message, by the way, is not "You must eat."   If it were, it would be nearly irresistible (hold your breath and see how "You must breathe" feels).  

The message is more like:  "Hey there,  just wanted to let you know that we're burning fat reserves here, mmmkay?  And, like, if that's a problem, you might want to, y'know, ingest some food pretty soon, mmmkay?  OK, well, we'll check back later, dude."  

Understand that message, and it's not so hard to think, "That's good news."  

I don't have to be hungry all the time.  I don't have to burn fat reserves all the time.  But a few times a day is effective, apparently, because I notice that when my weight goes down, it's after a day in which I felt hungry a few times.

And also it seems to be pretty effective for me to go to bed feeling hungry.  Occasionally I enjoy a bedtime snack with the rest of my family, but I find that if I go to bed still feeling the "we're burning fat reserves" signal, I do fall asleep eventually, and then of course I'm not bothered until just before breakfast.  (Except when I'm up late with a noisy baby, but whattayagonnado.  It's not every night.)  So I try to enjoy the satisfaction of knowing I'm getting that message instead.

Incidentally, I sometimes weigh myself right before bed (even though my "official" weigh-in is in the morning) to reinforce that satisfaction.  I think to myself:  If I don't eat anything between now and morning, I won't weigh any MORE than this.  It's surprisingly helpful.

I mentioned being chilly.  (Remember this post?) That's another thing.  If I'm losing weight, I find that I've often felt cold even when the ambient temperature has been comfortable.  The chilly feelings don't necessarily come at the same time as the hunger.  So I regard "cold" and "hungry" as twin messages that tell me I'm burning fat.  

The hungry and chilly messages give me a slightly-more-immediate feedback on my habits.  There is a time delay -- it's vital to think of it not as Am I hungry now?  but more as Over the past day, have I gotten hungry and/or chilly a few times?  If not, it's time to scale back on the calories.  And that's pretty easy to do -- just eat less at my next meal than I have at the last few meals.   And make sure I stick to my planned eating schedule.

Which is where saying "No" to coleslaw comes in.  Last night when everyone else was having ice cream before bed, I thought about having a bowl of leftover cabbage slaw.  It's a tasty slaw, very healthful and not at all high-calorie.  But... the habit of "No bedtime snack" is a habit that is correlated with that hungry feeling.  It's what I wanted.  So.  Even the healthy bedtime snack had to go.  It's better to keep the habit than to use a healthful food as a pretext to subvert my habit and thus my plans.

Comments

[Kate]

I understand the feeling hungry part, but isn't the chilly feeling your body telling you there is something wrong? I had episodes were I was lying in bed shivering under lots of blankets and just couldn't get warm. My naturopath told me that wasn't good and I wasn't taking in enough calories and my body was telling me so. So I'd eat a banana or a bowl of cereal and I'd feel much better and could get to sleep. So from my experience I'd say feeling hungry before a meal is good, but feeling chilly is a sign that I'm abusing my body? Your thoughts?

[bearing]

No, I'm not worried. I don't feel chilly constantly, just periodically. I felt colder when I was losing weight in 2008.

I should note that when I was stable at 156, I ate about *three times* as much food as I do now. I wasn't gaining, so where did the extra calories go? I must have been wasting them profligately as heat. I rarely felt cold back then.

Physiologists can tell you that your tolerance for temperature extremes is variable. You can "reset" your body's "I'm cold!" and "I'm hot!" sensors by exposing yourself to temperature extremes -- soak in enough cool baths and you'll be able to tolerate cold better. I don't think I was used to the sensation of not burning lots of extra calories as waste heat. I don't seem to be quite as cold this time. Even though it's a similarly chilly time of year.

But in a simpler sense -- inherent in the idea of purposeful weight loss is not eating "enough" calories. Your body has to consume itself to lose weight. For that to happen you *have* to eat not "enough" calories. You have to deplete yourself. Which is why the calories you do eat should be accompanied by food of the highest quality you can afford, or tolerate, or whatever.

There are people who will tell you it is unhealthy to eat below a certain minimum -- I keep seeing the number 1200 for women. I can guarantee you I am eating more than 1200 calories per day. And the baby

[shelly]

wow, I've been reading this blog for a few weeks and have been inspired! Been actively trying to lose weight for a year (net zero). I like your ideas. But, don'r you get a headache if you go to bed hungry? When I do I almost always wake up hungry in the middle of the night with a headache. Did you experience this at all? If so, what did you change?

[bearing]

Hm, no, I do wake up a little lightheaded sometimes, but then it's breakfast so I'm OK.

If I ever wake up uncomfortably hungry, so that I can't sleep, I go downstairs and have a small snack, about 150 calories: maybe three crackers with some cheese. But that doesn't happen very often.

I think if I found myself too hungry before morning to sleep, I'd rather try to make sure my dinner was more filling or slower-to-digest, then to reinforce the bedtime snacking habit.

Check out the No S Diet (www.nosdiet.com) for related ideas that I endorse if not follow exactly...