I’ve worked out 8 times in the last 11 days (if you count walking 9-holes of golf as a workout). Unfortunately, I haven’t lost a pound in the last 14. In fact, I’ve gained a couple. It seems as if I can either count calories, or I can go to the gym. I’ve definitely slacked off on my calorie counting–but in my mind, I’m not eating any more than I was when I seeing great results on the scale. Tomorrow, it’s back to counting everything I put in my mouth on sparkpeople. Several of you say I should concentrate on my diet alone and any exercise I get is a bonus. But, I’ve already paid for my gym membership, so that’s not going to happen. I’ve got to find a way to make diet AND exercise peacefully coexist in my life. That’s my goal for the next couple of weeks (or should I say the rest of my life)
I Am Not A Multi-Tasker
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Diet first, then exercise later? Heh — no wonder most people never get this done.
We’re making lifestyle changes, which means that hitting it from whichever angle we’re ready for is good. In most aspects of life, when we start up something new, it tends to suck away focus from other things (remember baby #1?). Eventually, the new things become less hard, and we go back to wrestle with whatever broke when we were focused to the new thing.
I’m with you — eating will never be perfect, so why wait to toss in some exercise (8 of 11 — nice)? Then go back to thinking about eating, like you are. Exercise will never perfect either, so we’ll end up going back to tweak that now and again. Repeat. That’s how one maintains a “healthy lifestyle”, unless one is blessed to have avoided food issues and have an active-enough lifestyle built into life (some days I want to be mail carrier, just for the exercise).
I am a multi-tasker, and when I first started trying to make healthy lifestyle changes, I couldn’t do both, either.
One thing I learned was that while exercising might make me hungry sometimes, it curbed my appetite for junk food naturally (except salt, I sweat a lot). I tended to switch my focus back and forth between diet and exercise until, over time, I have gotten to the point where the changes I made have become habit, and, for example, avoiding junk food is no longer a task – I do it without thinking.
Unless you want to count calories for the rest of your life, you need to change your eating habits. Counting calories is like a diet – a good short-term solution. It’s not a lifestyle change.
Studies show that a combination of exercise and proper diet are required to lose weight and keep it off. Furthermore, exercise provides so many other health benefits that it would prove a detriment to your future to avoid it.
I’m glad to see you are including enjoyable activities, such as golf, into your exercise routine. It’s important to enjoy life, and it’s the best way to make exercise a lifelong habit.
I have to disagree with Eric regarding counting calories. Some people, especially those who are overweight, are not really aware of how much they are eating. Counting calories (and macronutrients) is one tool we can use to assess our current state. We can then make changes based on this information.
Eating habits encompass many things, but one of those is the number of calories you are consuming. No matter how “healthy” your diet, if you consume more calories than you burn you will gain weight.
They say it takes 30 days to establish a new habit. Keep up the good work!
~Anne Keckler
ACSM Certified Personal Trainer
http://www.annekeckler.com
I’m no expert, but I think you’re wise to continue doing both. If you’re eating healthily in your calorie range and exercising regularly, the weight loss will follow. Meanwhile, you’re doing good things for those health indicators not measured by a scale. Keep it up!
Mac, this totally described me, too. I used to tell Kris that I could only focus on two major things at one time. I had problems with my fitness, my finances, and a couple other aspects of my life. If I focused on my fitness and my finances, the other parts of my life went to ruin. If I focused on the other parts, my fitness and finances were neglected. It’s still this way to some extent.
I don’t know if I can do exercise and diet at the same time. I’ve done it a couple times before, but I’m not doing it now. For now, I’m pleased to focus only on diet. It’s working for me, getting the ball rolling. (I’ll add exercise in a few weeks.)
I’m confident, though, that your exercise program will help you, and I encourage you to stick with it. I think it’s going to make you feel awesome. I think you’re doing the right thing by trying to track calories at the same time…
I am dieting now and I do exercise, but not as often as I would like. Let’s say I exercised 3 times a week and burned 200 calories per session. That is hard work!
But cutting less than 100 calories per day is really easy. Use Splenda instead of sugar in your iced tea. Skip that fourth Coke. Get baked potato instead of fries with dinner. Get the salad dressing on the side. Don’t listen to your mom, leave something behind on your plate!
I know there are metabolism benefits with exercise too, but you can get some metabolism benefits with diet. Eat smaller meals and add a couple of healthy snacks. Have an apple with peanut butter or a handful of nuts and some yogurt.
I do believe exercise is important, but adjusting a typical American diet to be better for you is a huge deal.
Daily weighing can play havoc with your mind. So many factors affect your weight from day to day, and you can fluctuate several pounds just on water and when you last went to the bathroom. If you must weigh yourself every day, here’s the best advice I have found:
1. Be consistent – do it at the same time every day, wearing the same amount of clothing. If you do it first thing in the morning naked, always do it that way.
2. Make a spreadsheet and track a trailing average of at least 3 days. This will reduce the impact of small fluctuations and show you how you are trending. As long as the overall trend is down, you are good.
Be aware that if you are exercising regularly, you will be burning fat and building muscle. This might show as a plateau or as weight gain. You should also be taking measurements at key places and track them.
Most of all, if you feel healthier with more energy, that is the biggest indicator. The numbers will fix themselves in time.
Hope that helps!
John
@Eric Nagel: I disagree. Counting calories will help train you to understand what a correct portion size looks like. So, for example, when you eat out and you get 6 servings of pasta on a plate, you know that eating it doesn’t count as one serving.
@Mac: I think its a very good idea to make sure you count calories first. We all fall into the trap of, “I exercised today, therefore I can eat whatever I want.” That excuse is really a bad idea, and leads to overeating. Count your calories. Get used to it, and then you get to add in your exercise calories too, and you can feel really good when you stay under your calorie goal.
I know how you feel..
The truth is that it’s only really possible (for me) to focus on one major change at a time. Excercise and diet are completely separate, even if they both are part of the “getting healthy” goal.
The limited success I’ve seen on fighting the 2-front war is to make one set of changes habitual (exercise is easier for me) while letting the other go. Then, as I shift to the other change, the momentum from the habit keeps me on track for a while.
Of course the key phrase here is “for me”. Good luck to you!
I’ve always noticed that once I start working out again, I actually gain 3-5 lbs. If I keep up with working out, this usually disappears after a week or so. My best guess is that I drink more fluids (water) when working out.
Needless to say, if you want this to be life altering, you’re going to need to get into shape! Exercise & watch what you eat!
If you have to ‘focus’ on it for more than a month or so you’ll eventually just gain the weight back after you get to your target weight and stop focusing on it conciously. Either you make good habits and it becomes a part of your lifestyle rather than a concious choice, or any results you see from dieting and going to the gym will be temporary.
Don’t get discouraged. It is typical for people to “gain” 3-5 pounds of water weight when starting to exercise. Most of this is due to the inflammation in your muscles and the retention of water. Some of this is due to physiological reactions like increased blood volume. This will equilibrate over time and the inflammation (and associated water weight) will go away as you become more fit and your muscles can handle such intense workouts.
I’ve lost most of my weight from eating well as opposed to exercise. My exercise is fairly simple too: 10k steps a day from walking. I’ve tried the other route, where I sweat it at the gym, only to lose 300 or so calories, which is so easy to eat.
Like others have mentioned, weight fluctuates a lot based on time, fluid retention, if you have a cold, etc.
Daily weighing can keep you focused, but it can also make you obsess.
Another thing is, be careful not to overtrain. 8 times at the gym in 11 days (okay 7 times if you skip the golf) could be a lot for your body depending on the sort of workout you are doing and how in shape you are at the moment. Your body can do a lots of funky things if you’ve overtrained.
Anne: what studies show is that people who have successfully lost weight and kept it off incorporate regular exercise into their lives. They don’t show that exercise is necessary. In statistics this is called “correlation without causation.” What’s necessary is to consume only as many calories as you expend. That’s what “causes” the maintenance of a healthy weight.
The body has an effective but flawed mechanism for controlling weight: appetite. It’s flawed because it’s first impulse is to consume calories when they are available to protect against not having enough energy when calories aren’t available. This is a mechanism that evolved during millions of years of food scarcity. Food has only been abundantly available in the last several hundred years. Our biochemistry is not adapted to a world of Shop-Rite supermarkets and 7-Elevens stocked with Hostess Snowballs, practically free for the taking.
To gain weight, most people have to do one simple thing: eat past the point of feeling “full”. When you practice this skill enough, you learn to eat in response to all kinds of stimuli other than appetite: time of day, stress, being faced with a super-gigantic portion of delicious restaurant food, being bored, being in an uncomfortable social situation, obeying what your Mom told you growing up, being frugal and not “wasting” food, and so on.
Dieting is Phase One of a two part process. Phase Two is learning to recognize when you’re full and train yourself to stop eating. That’s how you maintain your weight. Exercise or don’t exercise, but stop eating when your appetite is satisfied.
I’m a huge believer in calorie counting when it’s combined with a shift to a 6-meal day, because it’s such an effective way to teach people that an 8 oz chicken breast pan fried in a half-teaspoon of olive oil and drizzled with lemon juice, parsely and ground black pepper is a 400 calorie meal that will satisfy their appetite for 2-1/2 hours. The idea is not to count calories for the rest of your life: it’s to learn to recognize how much food you need to satisfy your appetite. Eventually you learn — and grow to believe — that a fist-sized portion of most whole foods constitute a meal. If you’ve guessed wrong, your appetite or lack-of-appetite is there to help restore the balance because you haven’t overwhelmed it on the one hand, and you’re listening more keenly to it on the other. This goes hand-in-hand with other tools that arm you against sabotaging your own healthy eating habits, or — equally important — arm you against a culture that undermines healthy eating habits at every turn.
Mac, don’t sell yourself short: all parents are multi-taskers. You can do this. I think you’re placing enormous obstacles in your own way, though.
If, instead of GetFitSlowly, you called this blog GetDiscouragedQuickly, here would be a list of things to do:
1) Make enormous changes in the habits you’re most comfortable with.
2) Make those changes quickly — overnight if possible. Quit cold turkey. Start without preparation.
3) Change several habits simultaneously to maximize the damage done to your comfort zone.
4) Keep the rest of your life fixed — try to fit all of your old activities in along with your new ones.
5) Don’t change the environment surrounding your new habits, however counterproductive the old environment is to your new way of living in it.
6) Introduce discomfort into vital physical functions: if you’re hungry, eat less; if you’re tired, don’t add sleep.
7) Up the ante: why lose 1 pound a week when you could lose 2?
Pay attention to the noise, not the signal: weight yourself twice a day, solicit lots of conflicting advice.
9) Don’t measure your progress: instead of eating 1800 calories, just try to eat “smaller portions”.
10) Be principled but vague: save more, spend less. Eat healthier. Exercise more. Call these “goals” and keep them ever in sight in the far, far distance.
11) Forgo a detailed plan: plans just make you feel more guilty when you fall off the wagon.
12) If something’s not working, for God’s sake don’t change it.
By following these 12 steps, I can undermine most any undertaking: learning French, overcoming my stutter, starting a business, reading Proust, writing my novel. Losing weight. Getting fit. Eating healthy.
Perhaps it is all just water weight. Perhaps it is a multi-tasking problem. Perhaps the solution is to do exactly what you’ve been doing, only try harder. Perhaps willpower is the key to this after all. What would that trainer tell you to do: toughen up! You’re too soft! Did I promise you this would be easy?! Give me 20, troop!
Let’s say that instead of losing those 40 lbs in 20 weeks, you allowed yourself 60 weeks. Would your approach be different? Let’s say that instead of exercising 9 days out of eleven, you exercised 3 out of 7? Let’s say that instead of working out till you nearly puke, you spend the next month simply walking 4 miles a day 3 days a week, and running 1 mile a day for the other 3 days a week, then stepping it up gradually in another one month unit. How about a 500 calorie a day deficit instead of a 1000 calorie a day deficit? What’s the harm in these — dare I use the word — “slow” steps? Are you afraid that gradual change isn’t sustainable? That you genetically require a shock to the system so severe that it will knock some sense into you?
You’re going at this hard and fast — exactly as you’ve done it in the past, exactly like they taught you to do it on the high school baseball team when you were 17. But this approach wasn’t sustainable then, as you’ve talked about in your introduction here. You’ve told me in past responses that this time you’re more motivated than you have been in the past. I’m suggesting that motivation isn’t the key to success in this endeavor, however important it obviously is. I’m suggesting here, in my long-winded way, that not making the task even one tiny bit harder than it needs to be will help you reach your goal more effectively than trying to overwhelm old habits with sheer willpower.
I lost a lot of weight last year and I did it mostly by controlling what I ate. I exercised some – mostly walking 3-4 days a week – but nothing heavy duty. Since I lost the weight I have joined a gym and I exercise fairly heavily 4-5 days a week. I feel that exercise is a very important component of my overall goal of fitness and health, I don’t think that it is the most important part of losing weight. I can certianly help and I believe it is vital in keeping weight off. However, I have found in my own life that controlling my eating plays a much, much bigger part in losing weight. I was very strict about what I ate when I was actively losing weight. Now that I am down where I want to be, exercise is allowing me to loosen up a bit on the eating thing without gaining everything back. Plus, I have muscles now that I haven’t seen in years!
I have to admit that I’m in the “don’t count calories” group with one caveat – you should do it to a point so you can get familiar with reading food labels and have a good idea of what type of foods carry the bigger consequences.
I think it’s also important to measure things for awhile. I remember the HUGE bowls of cereal I used to eat when I was a kid. It gets you use to what a portion should look like.
Ultimately, the easiest way I’ve found to figure out the best portion size is to use your hand – a piece of meat no bigger than the palm of your hand, no potato bigger than the size of your fist.
I’ve known people to do a water displacement test on their fist so they can determine it by cups for things like rice, couscous and the like.
One thing we should not lose sight of is that everyone is different and what works for one won’t necessarily work for someone else. Just keep in mind that if you keep doing what you are doing, you are going to keep getting what you got. If over time (and I mean longer than 14 days), you aren’t seeing results or you’re getting sick, getting injured , etc. you need to change something up.
I tend to find the only time I weigh myself is to make sure I replace any water I lose during exercise – weighing yourself to determine if you are “losing weight” can be counter productive in some cases. I found the best thing when I started exercising to lose weight is measuring your waist, arms and thighs to see if you are losing size rather than weight as muscle mass is actually heavier than fat mass. In other words, “the results are in the mirror”.
It may be that over the last 14 days you have lost fat and gained muscle, so your weight has remained the same, but your overall size has decreased.
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