bearing blog

The new ground rules.

For a couple of years, 2008 or so, I wrote frequently about exercise and eating strategies.   Sometimes I wrote about how those intersect with theology of the body, or Thomist morality.  I returned to the topic sporadically, but not steadily, since then.  It's been a while since I've written much.

I wrote all that because I was in the midst of two major life changes.

• First, that year when my third child was a toddler, I was prioritizing regular exercise for me for the first time.  Having taken lessons before that pregnancy, afterwards I started swimming twice a week, later adding running.   In order to keep it up, I thought, I had to be obsessive and inflexible; for better or worse, I was obsessive and inflexible, and I did keep it up.  Still am doing it today.

 

• Later, after the shock of having sustained this new habit for several months, I began restricting calories, and over the course of about six months I lost 27 percent of my initial body weight.    Having thought of myself as perpetually dumpy and sedentary since childhood, I found myself now active, and also, not fat.

Note the causality:  My writing about this didn't bring it about.  I wrote because I was having what I called success, and I was desperately trying to make sense of it.  I needed to understand why it was happening, was because I was afraid that if I didn't figure out why it was happening, I would not be able to keep from going back to "the way I was before."

+ + +

Ha.  As if I could slip back accidentally to "the way I was before."   Back to my early thirties?  I am older!  Human beings are not reversible.  For one thing, my windows of possibility have shifted.  For another, I understand more.

I've learned that the effort required to track calories closely enough to override the body's own cues is seriously intensive, tends to push out other satisfying activities, and requires a constant input of motivation.   And I've learned that I don't want to live in that kind of monomaniacal relationship with myself.

It may seem odd, but motivation itself is part of the problem.  I do lift myself up with messages that are true and encouraging, and celebrate with rewards that are both pleasant and good.    That's great when they work.  But if those don't do the job, I've often been tempted to use any mental means to the end of self-control:  shame, fear, dwelling on bad memories, threats of self-punishment; contempt for my body, contempt for other bodies.    Those thoughts still pop up, even though I understand better the damage they can do.

+ + +

Sometimes I betrayed those thoughts in my writing.

Writing has been a way to motivate myself, maybe spread a little motivation to others who might enjoy it.  I think this is, in principle, a worthy endeavor.   I've always used writing to to see if my ideas make sense and to improve them, and the promise (threat) of a small audience raises the stakes enough to make it meaningful.    I feel reward when a reader comments that something clicked, gave them an idea, helped.   

But when you write, in part, as a tool to root out error.... a corollary is that frequently, the error spends some time noodling around on the page.  And one might not catch them all.    It's not inherently wrong to try to work out ideas in public that way.  But there are limits. 

First of all, I have to be clear about what I'm doing (sometimes, literally, making it up as I go along).

Second:  when the topic is one that has been as historically fraught as exercise and diet and body image and fat loss, one about which many people carry a great deal of internalized harm... I need to be selective about setting down those first drafts of my thoughts. 

Because I also carry internalized messages that have power, and maybe not just over me.  Some of my thoughts are not great, especially some that in the intervening years I've learned to recognize as intrusive thoughts.  It might help me to exorcise them by giving voice to their content, but will it help anyone else?  If I'm going to straighten myself out by writing about those, best to write them longhand on one of the yellow pads I buy by the case, at least in first draft.  And maybe just keep them to myself, or share with a therapist instead.

+ + + 

It's hard for me to precisely sort my previous writing about this stuff into "definitely okay, maybe even good" and "definitely problematic."  I've considered going back and editing, but the task is too overwhelming.  I've considered deleting stuff, but I think there are kernels of insight there worth rescuing.   For now it's still all there, waiting for me to decide what to do about it.

Meanwhile:  I'm changing up my lifestyle once again.  I'm committing myself to strengthen patterns of thinking that are much more compatible with good mental health and body care.   I would very much like to clarify them by setting them out on the blog. 

But:  when I blogged about fitness and nutrition before, expressing what I was going through 10-12 years ago, I wanted to write conversationally and frankly but that really amounted to being careless:  careless about language, careless about the words I used relative to the philosophy of the human person; careless about how pouring all my unfiltered thoughts out on the page might affect people who have a history of eating disorders, or of scrupulosity, or of difficulty caring for themselves.   I don't want to make the same mistakes again.

Would it be better just to... not write about this sort of thing at all?  I'm open to that possibility.  I'm not sure I can find out unless I give it a try.

What if I could write about it without making those mistakes?  What would it look like?  

+ + +

Ground rules.

 

1.  I will not conflate weight, fatness, or appearance with health.   

It's not just that these, as indicators of health, are poor and incomplete—though they are.   

It also means no more blithe writing about "desire for health" as a nobler-sounding euphemism for desires to look better, be less fat, or weigh less.  Pretended concern for "health" has justified many rude and abusive people.   Let me call things what they are.

A crucial reason to carefully acknowledge the difference:  Fat people frequently report that health care providers become fixated on fatness as the primary indicator of their health, the sole probable cause of pain or other symptoms, and the first problem that must be "fixed" before they are allowed to access other levels of care.  (See this recent commentary by Aubrey Gordon.)

 

2.  I will acknowledge other biomarkers of general health that are better-supported by evidence.  

Anyone can self-assess the time they spend physically active, the number of alcoholic drinks they have per week, the hours they sleep, the number of fruit/vegetable portions they are able to serve themselves each day.   These behavior-based markers are much more often under an individual's direct control (although the range of available choice varies).  Hydration can be assessed by checking if the urine is consistently a pale yellow color.  Blood pressure,  lipid panels, and blood glucose testing are accessible to those who can afford at least annual basic preventive care.   

As for body-size-related markers of general health, my understanding is that neither body-fat percentage, nor weight, nor BMI work well at all as a predictor of eventual development of cardiovascular or metabolic disease.  The one exception may be waist circumference.   If I find myself casting about for a NUMBER, perhaps that one will work; otherwise, maybe I need to write something else.

(Two examples of papers with this finding; two examples don't substitute for a careful literature review, of course.  Note that adjusting the results for BMI does appear to improve the correlation.  This is possibly because it brings in a dependence of height; naturally short stature is itself an attribute that raises the risk of developing these diseases.)    

 

3.  I am not a fitness professional.  I am not a health care provider.  I am not a registered dietician.

I have my own experience.  I have scientific training; it is not in this field, but I have good scientific literacy and am able to assess the general usefulness of papers and applicability of research.   I know where to go for more information, and I know how to identify the difference between a broad scientific consensus and a matter with competing viable theories.   I also know how to take a piece of popular science writing and pick it apart, if I want to, or use it for entertainment purposes, if I want to do that instead.  All these mean that I can form an educated and reasonable opinion (you will not catch me scoffing about "Dr. Google," any more than I would scoff at public access to medical libraries), and I can write commentary about it if I like.  These are not, however, substitutes for authority.  I'm an educated amateur, not an expert in any of these areas, and I have an academic responsibility to remain clear about that to anyone who stumbles across my blog.

(This isn't a ground rule about which I really needed a reminder.  I try hard to live by it anyway.  But I thought it worth mentioning for completeness.)

 

4.  No biomarker, and few health-related behaviors, imply a specific moral conclusion.

Yeah, I know myself (imperfectly).   I might be able to tell you when I've made a poor choice, or developed a poor habit, or experienced a consequence, for lack of some virtue.   I know where I have agency, and I have some ideas where my agency has been damaged by circumstances.  I don't know that about others.  I can't speak for everyone else.

Assumptions about real people are tricky at best, and at worst they are outright bad and harmful.

Moreover, the following ought to go without saying:  there are no bad foods, there are no bad bodies, there is no such thing as cheating.  There is room for rest, and room for feasting, and room for fun, and no one else gets to tell you how much; there is room for you.

 

5.  Nevertheless, I'll stand by this:  morality, theology, charity, the philosophy of the human person, the demands of justice, aren't off limits here.

Nothing that human beings do or decide is untouched by the disciplines and philosophy of my faith tradition, and there aren't many traditions that pretend otherwise for themselves.    I hope to explore them in a way that doesn't violate the very principles I'm seeking to understand.  I'm not certain that I can, but I hope to.  

It is good to use appropriate self-discipline to strengthen virtue.  It is good to consider how to use resources prudently.  It is good to exercise detachment from outcomes.  At the same time, discipline is personal, resources are personal, outcomes are definitely personal.  So I need to take care:  if I write about my discipline and my resources, I need to make clear that they are mine and no one else's.

 

6.  I will be explicit about the limits of hypothetical situations and imaginary characters.  

Ah, the hypothetical situation.  Much maligned for good reason, sometimes useful for illustration, always a bit tricky in their execution.

I love hypotheticals, but I must be more careful with them.  It is tempting to think that if I think up a hypothetical situation, decorate it with only those details that seem to me significant, and imagining human-like actors, I can treat it as my very own creature of pure reason.   Since it is mine, I can manipulate as I please and  judge with omniscience. 

In one sense it's true, I can do that.  But real human readers have a tendency to see in these hypothetical characters someone "like" themselves, or perhaps real people they know.  And I am not allowed to manipulate or to judge the real person based on my fan-fic. 

Even if I think up a hypothetical, and along comes a real person who embodies the imaginary one in every detail I created, I can't use my reason to reach deductive conclusions about the real person.   Why not?  After all, the hypothetical (in this hypothesis) is perfectly matched!  Well, the real human may possess every detail of my hypothetical, but the hypothetical on which I exercised my reason could not possibly possess every detail of the human.   Humans possess an infinite detail and and an infinite worth, far beyond the scope of any model problem.   So watch it.

Once again.  Watch out when you are tempted to make assumptions about real people.

 

7.  If I write about specific activities, I'll make room for modifications for different bodies, variations that make training plans more enjoyable, and goals unrelated to weight reduction.

That short wish list appears in this commentary piece by Rebecca Scritchfield.

 

8.  Athletic performance metrics are useful, far preferable to body-size metrics, but highly individual and unrelated to either value or virtue.

It's probably a step in the right direction to go from "my body's value comes from its appearance" to "my body's value comes from what it can do."   But it's still wrong.

Training is experiment, and experiment requires observation and measurement.  I can use performance metrics to evaluate whether my training is having the effect I desire.  I don't have to be clinical about everything, either:  I can celebrate when I meet the metric goals I've set, and I can express disappointment when I don't.   It's crucial not to connect the results to my value or my "good"-ness.   People do not, in fact, get what they deserve.

 

9.  "Quality of life" is a universal goal, but an individual measure:  how closely reality matches a person's hopes and expectations.

There are multiple ways of going about working for one's quality of life, too.  Much fitness writing is aimed at improving quality of life through hard work; but I also want to honor the effort to maintain quality of life in situations of increasing difficulty.  There is also the tough mirror process of re-adjusting those hopes and expectations to match an unlooked-for reality, maybe in the face of injury or illness, maybe other changes in circumstance, maybe after learning more about oneself.

 

10.  The big picture of what I'm getting at:  an authentically human understanding of self-care.  

Maybe that sounds like an overly grandiose aim.  Especially since, if history is any guide I'll probably be putting up posts like "here's what's in my gym bag these days!" and "I've discovered that it's a mistake for me to forget to eat breakfast before swimming a mile!"  I mean, some of that stuff is really just minutiae.  I might put it up because it's on my mind.

But all the little pieces add up to a bigger picture.  

The ground rules are here as a kind of checklist for the construction of those little pieces, so they're all align-able with the sort of big picture I want to have.  At the same time, there are questions that feel very open to me, so that I'm constructing that picture as I go along without really knowing what it will look like.  What boundaries are essential?  If vocation is about self-gift, what is the type and extent of self-investment that is appropriate for each vocation?  How do we write sensitively about practices that are health-promoting for many but not for some?   How about writing about practices that are accessible only to a few but might be interesting  to many?  How does a family distribute resources (time, effort, assets) among its members with different needs?   Can self-discipline be taught or only discovered?  What are the signs that health, wellness, even discipline has become an idol, or an obsession, and how can a person get their priorities back in order?

+ + +

Well, this post has been many days in the making, so don't be surprised if it takes me a while to get around to the actual writing.  But it was a necessary step to unclog the  pipes, so to speak.  I hope to follow up on it soon.

Temptation at home.

It's been a long time since I was writing a great deal about weight loss and gluttony....

(believe me, I will probably need to write more about it sometime after I have this baby... maybe even sooner, because while trying to lose weight isn't appropriate right now, dealing with old impulses always is...)

... and it's been an even longer time since someone emailed me with a question inspired by those old posts!

(Excuse me for my enthusiasm.  I'm a little thrilled to have someone give me a reason to add a blog post.  Lately, what with the homeschooling, the pregnancy, and the head lice, it's been hard to get to the computer with enough energy left to write.)

So, anyway, reader Katherine emails:

I...  have been following for the last few months.  Since May when I read your semiannual maintenance post. I began reading more of your posts about weight loss.

A nice amount resonated with me. I'm a food addict and I've been trying to make lifestyle changes to improve that. But there is one area that does undermine me and I just wondered if you had any tips or suggestions on how to deal with it.

I struggle to not eat when I'm making meals for my kids, even if I'm not hungry. It can smell good, look good and sometimes I even need to taste it to make sure it is cooked or seasoned or the right temperature. And it can be hard for me then not to, "Oh I'll just have a little bit."

I know you said you chew gum cleaning up after meals, but what about when making meals for others? Do you chew gum then too? Is there a better snack you keep on hand for that? Some other trick I'm not thinking of? I enjoy a piece of gum now and then, but chewing all day would give me a headache. 

Chewing gum all day would give me a headache too.  I resort to the gum-after-meals because I personally have a bigger problem with cleaning up afterwards -- with ending my meals -- and because there's a plausible socially acceptable excuse to do it for other reasons: an after-meal stick of sugarless gum, especially kinds that contain xylitol, reduces cavities.  So, hey, good all around. 

So, what to do about eating during food preparation for others.   I guess it would depend on (a) why you perceive that it's a problem and (b) why you think you do it anyway.

I can think of at least two different published systems that are effective for many and that recommend going cold-turkey on eating outside times when you have deliberately chosen to have a "meal" (where we allow that some meals are small and happen between breakfast, lunch, and dinner).   One of these, quite simple, is No-S and the other, more complicated, is the Beck approach.  

No-S is summed up as "no snacks, no sweets, no seconds except on days that start with S."  It emphatically does NOT define liquids as snacks, even rich and caloric ones like milkshakes or beer, because it's a behavior modification technique rather than a calorie-counting one.  Chewing gum -- unless it tended to exacerbate cravings for sweets and is problematic for that reason -- would be compatible with that system.   But taking a bite of foods  you're cooking (except, I suppose, liquids like broths or sauces) would be incompatible with the system -- yes, even in order to find out if there's enough salt.   And it would also be incompatible with the system to eat other snacks while cooking, even something like celery sticks.  The whole point is to condition you not to eat when it isn't mealtime.

The Beck approach is based on cognitive-behavioral therapy.  It's quite different from No-S, as it's a controlled-calorie system that writes "snacks" and "sweets" into the budget, while teaching techniques to help people discontinue unhelpful behaviors.  One of the pieces of advice I remember about it -- a piece that I didn't end up following -- was not to rely on a crutch like gum or sugarless candy to keep your mouth busy so you wouldn't eat things.  Beck thought that in her system, it was preferable to learn to cope with cravings and temptations some other way besides putting something in your mouth.   

I mention these not as diet-book recommendations (though you could certainly investigate them) but to point out that each system hangs together in its own way, and what makes sense in one doesn't make sense in another.  Ultimately, of course, everyone who needs a system, needs a personalized one.  

One person can't touch chips without eating every chip in sight, so it makes more sense (at least temporarily) to expose herself to chps with caution; another person reacts to food restriction with binging, so it makes more sense for him (at least temporarily) to give himself permission to have some of whatever he wants, until "forbidden" foods lose their power over him.

+ + +

So, let's examine some of what you wrote.  Starting with this one.

...sometimes I even need to taste it to make sure it is cooked or seasoned or the right temperature. 

I challenge this assumption.  When you're ferreting out unnecessary eating, I have found it helpful to question every instance of "I need to put this in my mouth because..."   Often they aren't really "need tos."  And this one sounds like a false "need to."  

• If you're unsure whether something is cooked through, tasting it isn't safe.  Make sure it is cooked by cutting into meat and observing the color and texture, by using a thermometer to find out if it has come up to the prescribed doneness temperature, or by paying attention to how long it has been cooking.
• Whether something is correctly seasoned or not is subjective, especially if you're talking about salt or hot pepper.  Even if it tastes the right amount of "salty" to you, it might not to others.  So there's no need to taste food for that reason.  Follow the recipe for herbs and garlic, err on the side of under-salting and under-spicing food, and pass the salt and pepper at the table.
• Temperature can be tested with a thermometer or a fingertip, or you can touch a spoon to the outside of your lip.

If you are the sort of person who generally struggles with "just one taste" turning into "just one more bite" and then into a whole serving's worth of bites --- and let me say that I am one of those people too, so believe me, I get it --- it will help you avoid the second, third, and nth tastes if you steer clear of that first "just one taste."  That holds true even if you are tempted to think that this "just one taste" will be different somehow because you have a  "good" reason to take a bite of the food.  But it will not affect you any differently just because it can be defined as "good."

I struggle to not eat when I'm making meals for my kids, even if I'm not hungry.

I think to figure out what about your situation is especially tempting, you need to ask yourself... what's actually wrong with eating the food you are preparing for your children?   Is it because you've already had your own meal?  Is it because you think the kid food is not good for you and you should eat something better for you?  Is it the "I'm not hungry so I shouldn't eat" thing?  

Because what jumps out at me is the "when I'm making meals for my kids" part -- not "for me and for my kids," or "for my family," but "for my kids."  Are you eating at a different time from your children?  Different stuff, because of different tastes or dietary needs?  Or are you doing something like packing lunches for them for the future, or making things to go in the freezer?

Is part of the problem that you're making two sets of meals -- one for yourself and one for your kids -- and that gives you two opportunities to eat a meal?

In any case, you are unhappy with this situation and it is probably time to shake it up a bit -- experiment with trying different things.

Would it help if you made meals for your kids at the same time that you are typically making a meal or a snack for yourself?  So that you have in your pocket the ability to tell yourself:  "I deserve to have a real meal on a plate.  I'm not a dog who gets fed on table scraps.  I'm going to have my lunch in just a moment, when the children are eating their lunch, and my lunch will be just as good or better than what these guys are having."

Or... you could decide that you DO want to have the food you are making "for the children."  And then you could commit to it.  There's no shame in eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, with a glass of milk (or chocolate milk!) and an apple on the side.  Just commit to it!  Put it on a plate, say "This is my lunch," eat it, and be done with it.

After all, if the food you are making for your children looks good and smells good and you want to eat it, why not... plan on eating it?

I think if it were me, I might try an experiment of just eating the same food I'm making for my kids for a couple of weeks (but on a plate, not standing at the stove).   "After all," I would reason, "here I am eating bits these pepperoni pizzas and grilled cheese sandwiches day after day, even when I've already had a lunch.  Clearly I must WANT them on some level, and telling myself not to eat them isn't working.  So I'll just eat them.  Not in addition to my 'real' lunch, but AS my 'real' lunch."

If you know I am going to have a full serving of the meal I am preparing, on a plate, like a grownup, I find it is easier to tell myself, "hey, I don't want to eat this standing next to the stove.  I want to sit down and enjoy it like a human being. "  

A sociable person might say, "I want to sit down with my kids and reconnect with them over a meal!  Or with family and friends!"  

A person like me in the middle of the school day might say, "I can't wait to send the kids away for Break Time and take this grilled cheese sandwich and bowl of soup and sit down with it in front of the computer in peace and quiet and enjoy it while I check my email and then have a cup of coffee and really relax for half an hour before going back to work."

+ + +

As a side note, I admit that feel a little at sea when trying to answer reader questions.

The context in which I have chosen to interpret my food issues is "gluttony."   I had a great deal of personal success framing them in that way.  There were elements of addiction over which I had little control, but interacting with those were also elements over which I did have control.  I tried to tease them apart and, where appropriate, accuse myself.

I'm loath to tell anyone else where addiction (the disability) ends and gluttony (the weakness) begins.  That (besides lacking details) is why I didn't use the word "gluttony" while writing about Katherine's question.

But it is possible to step back and, without naming the cause as either addiction or gluttony-the-personal-weakness, identify acts that are objectively gluttonous.  There is no self-shaming to be implied in this.  Only "hey, here is something I do, and I am identifying it as a problem that I want to work on."  To see your activities with clear eyes.

Aquinas says that gluttony is the act of eating too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly, too daintily, not counting when you "think it necessary" for yourself.  One of the reasons I have found that definition less than useful is that it's shockingly easy for me to convince myself that eating some thing "is necessary."

 ("Needing" to taste food repeatedly to make sure it's seasoned properly is only one example.  I would tell myself things like "I only had pastries for breakfast, now I 'need' to eat my second breakfast which will provide me with protein and necessary minerals," or "I don't know if there will be food where I'm going and I might get hungry, so I 'need' to eat a full meal before I get there" followed by "I 'need' to eat because it's what everybody else is doing." Now I'm pregnant and I still struggle with what I "need" to eat because I'm pregnant and I "need" more food and better food.)

Dissatisfied with the way that this "necessary" loophole keeps undermining my resolve, plus the vagueness of the "too"'s in that discussion, I proposed an alternate categorization here.   I found it a lot more helpful in accusing myself and in changing my behavior.  

But that's me.  It's not necessarily you, or the reader, or anyone else.

+ + +

Anyone else have some ideas for experiments to try, in order to break the habit of eating while preparing children's meals?  My suggestion -- to plan on eating the apparently desirable children's meal as one's own meal -- can't be the only one.

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.  

+ + +

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.

+ + +

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."

+ + +

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.

+ + +

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? 

+ + +

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.