Cheating

I was talking to some people about weight loss the other day and they asked me what I was doing special to achieve such consistent results. As we talked, it became clear one reason I had consistent results was that I was behaving in a consistent way. It was clear that the others cheated a little or at least were not entirely honest with themselves about their caloric intake. So, this will be my message in future: I don’t cheat. I’ve kept meticulous records of my daily intake and I am brutally honest in assessing the likely intake. If I am unsure, I over-estimate. Finally, I’ve consistently kept my daily intake below my basal metabolic rate. In my view, this is all it takes to lose weight. By the way, I was 89.1 kilos, this morning. I started at 102 (or thereabouts). So, 89 is a great result.

New suit

One of the joys of losing weight is it’s an excuse for buying new clothes. I am not obsessed with new clothes – but there is something nice about buying some new, nice fitting clothes. There’s something postive and empowering about it. It certainly rewards the effort.

I’ve deliberately held off buying new suits for work because I thought I ought to wait until I had reached my target weight. I am still probably at least five but probably more like ten kilos off my ideal weight. But I couldn’t wait any longer. My old suits were getting quite tatty and disshevelled and they were hanging off my slighter frame. I haven’t gone mad and bought an entire new wardrobe. Just a new suit – and it’s not expensive – it’s priced to be expendable in case I lose a lot more weight. Still, it’s nice to be back into new gear that fits.

The sinking lid

A key component of using calorie reduction as a main means of losing weight is that you need to stay under your body’s Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Your BMR is a formula based on variables such as your age, height and weight and it essentially identifies the bare minimum caloric intake you need to service your body’s basic metabolic needs.

All things being equal, if you eat less than your BMR, your body will need to draw energy from fat reserves (and you will lose weight) and, if you eat more than your BMR, your body will try to lock the excess energy up in the form of body fat (and you will gain weight).

Because a BMR is based on variable factors such as your age and weight, it is not constant. Given I have lost more than ten kilos, my BMR is at present appreciably less than when I first started. In fact, it’s around 220 calories less. This means it is increasingly difficult to lose weight because the “overhead” between what my body needs and what I am ingesting through my diet is shrinking.

By the time I reach 80 kilos, for example, my BMR will have shrunk over 500 calories from where I first started. The awful reality really is that my current reduced caloric diet will cease being simply a diet intended to lose weight and may become closer to a permanent lifestyle.

What I mean by this is; under my current diet I eat about 1500-1600 calories a day. At 80 kilos my BMR drops down to about 1700 (without factoring exercise) and just over 2000 calories if you factor in the limited exercise of a sedentary person. So, at best, eating my caloric restricted diet will be just under my eventual core BMR.
I wonder whether this is why so many people regain weight after crash dieting. They cannot keep the caloric restriction up and don’t realise that, in losing weight, they’ve actually reduced their energy needs.

But I like pie…

All this calorie restriction thing is actually quite easy for me. I can switch off my gourmand mode reasonably easily. That doesn’t mean I will starve myself to death or ignore the pleasure food can bring.

I was reflecting on this theme tonight as I was chomping through a lovely (smallish) piece of bacon and egg pie prepared by my wife for our extended “family” meal with friends. A wonderful irony is my wife is a vegan and also happens to be one of the best pie makers I know – even though she doesn’t taste or even really smell (because it’s “gross”) the animal-rich food she prepares for her carnivore family. But somehow, without the usual feedback loops and with an extra helping of condescending disdain, her pies come out wonderful and tasty.

Anyway, I love pie – although now I need to take it in moderation. Not everyone takes food things in moderation, though. It’s a common source of obsession and weirdness. Heck, we often focus on those of us who can eat to excess – but it can also cut the other way too.

I was talking with a guy the other day about losing weight and he was commenting on his own (peculiar) diet. I think he felt I was a kindred spirit because I mentioned I was strictly monitoring my eating. Problem was, we were worlds apart. This guy was obsessed about his food in a bizarre, almost irrational way. He was worried about pesticides and trans-fats and…well, the list went on. Unless it was grown in an organic garden and was untouched by modern techniques, he wouldn’t eat it. It was a bit like talking to the wonderful Commander Jack D Ripper in the movie Dr Strangelove. You might recall, the barking mad Ripper was obsessed about his “precious bodily fluids” being disrupted by the Communist plot of fluridation.

Anyway, it turns out there’s a suitably arcane disorder to cover this kind of obsession with the “purity” of food. It’s called Orthorexia Nervosa. So, as I reflect on my nitrate-filled bacon and cholesterol-filled egg pie, I realised that, while I may be counting calories; I ain’t crazy.

Testing your hypothesis…

I will admit to being a bit of a nerd. I will also admit to using data monitoring to drive “performance”. I not only use regular weight measurements and estimates of caloric intake, I also put these measures into a framework of targets and projections based on weight-loss science.

But between you and I, I can admit to being a little bit sceptical about whether these targets and projections are reliable. The science behind them seems a little flimsy – but in the absence of anything more meaningful, I have opted to use them. Looking back over my results, though, it actually does look like I am tracking reasonably closely to what the “science” is suggesting.

On average, I have been losing about 100-115 grams of weight each day. According to the “science” this equates to a caloric deficit below my adjusted basal metabolic rate of around 700-750 calories a day. Looking back over the past six weeks, I realise this is pretty much on the money in terms of how much, on average, I have been managing. So, it looks like I have validated my basal metabolic rate calculation. It also looks like my caloric restriction of about 700 calories per day is delivering my targeted loss rate of just over 100 grams per day. It’s nice to have everything triangulate back and validate itself.

A cautionary note to myself, however: The basal metabolic rate is a product of an equation that not only includes my age and height, but it also includes my current weight. This means, every gram I lose affects the calculation. In effect, as I get skinnier, I have to eat even less to maintain the weight loss. There’s no room for complacency. But it is nice to know that all my graphs, charts and tables are actually useful.

Coming up to two months…

It’s almost two months since I started this weight loss thing. Almost sixty days in and I am wobbling somewhere between seven to eight kilos lighter than when I started. Not bad.

Weight loss is a slow process. Heck, I am probably losing it too fast as it stands, so I would not want to go too much faster – and yet it’s a slow process.

I guess the revelation is that it takes a lot of time and effort. More time and effort, maybe, than actually gaining the weight in the first place.

I wonder whether this glacial pace of loss is something people who opt for “quick fixes” realise. Even supposed quick fixes like bariatric surgery are not actually that swift in shifting weight. Bariatric surgery (banding the stomach) simply prevents you from eating a lot. Once you’ve had the surgery you still need to diet (i.e. eat less) to shed your bulk and just like my approach, the weight loss is slow.

Bariatric surgery is effective because you cannot physically ingest as much food as you could without it. That being said, you can still cheat by guzzling down high-fat or high-sugar liquids and pulp which slide past the band with ease. So, it’s not a certainty. Moreover, it’s risky. I hadn’t realised how risky until I watched a documentary the other day about the surgery and it recounted stories of people who had died from small pieces of meat getting lodged in the restricted opening created by the band in the stomach and turning toxic. If you don’t take care, these bands can be fatally dangerous. I can understand why they tend to reserve this intervention to only the most hopeless cases.

Perhaps the only real quick surgical fix is liposuction where fat is literally hoovered off your body. For my money, that’s a terrible way to lose weight. It might be a legitimate way of sculpting a body – fine tuning an otherwise fit body – but it’s a terrible way to lose weight and keep it off. I wonder if people realise when they hoover up their muffin top tummies that your body will deposit fat wherever the fat cells are and that any excess weight will be stored in wherever there’s sufficient fat cells left. This means your flabby belly might be spared now it’s sucked clean of those nasty fat cells but it also means all the areas where you have fat cells left balloon out.

Two months in and I am reasonably happy with my progress. I have to also accept I have months and months of slog ahead of me. More depressing than that, it gets progressively harder to shift weight as your body adapts to the regimen and your metabolism adjusts. Luckily, I didn’t think it would be easy.

Still, so far, so good.

Running down

One of the risks of weight loss is that you get a bit run down.  I’ve been trying to keep my calories reasonably high.  However, I am getting run down.  The first sign of being run down for me is the appearance of cold sores – and that’s precisely what’s happened.  So I am a bit disfigured at the moment.  But, in the long-run, I should be healthier even if it doesn’t feel like it now.

Four kilos down

I was 96.7 this morning. According to my (extensive) data tracking , I have lost over four kilos of weight so far.  I am quite pleased.  I started on 12 January and it’s not even a month yet and I have lost 4kgs.  It’s a good start, but then before feeling too smug about it, I remember my ultimate target is to lose over 15 kgs.  So, even if I have lost 4kgs, I still have to lose double figures in weight!

It’s not just me…we have a problem

I was looking at some health data today.  Depressingly, it seems my fat problem is an issue shared by many of my fellow (chubby) New Zealanders.  In fact, New Zealand ranks third in the OECD behind the USA and Mexico for obesity.  What’s that about?

With nearly a quarter of the adult population considered “obese”, New Zealand is one of the heavy weights of obesity (bad pun). And this is not one of those marginal things where the stats show statistically valid but pretty insignificant variances.  New Zealand’s rate of obesity is way, way, way out of step with the rest of the World.

There are nations you would kind of expect to be slightly beefy given their dietary traditions. Take, for example, the meat chomping, sausage loving Germans. What about the gastronomic French? And how about the home of Pizza and lasagne?  Turns out these nations have rates of obesity more than half of New Zealand.

The pasta munching Italians have an obese population of only 9.9 percent!  The Germans’ 13.6 percent is about half of New Zealand’s.  Most galling (Gaul-ing?), the French, a nation synonymous with eating and fine dining, has a rate of obesity of only 10.3 percent.

It’ not right. Something is out of whack.  I was watching a funny US video this evening which, among other things, parodied the American love of huge, fatty insane food.  Kind of like this website.  So, you can understand how the Americans got so tragically huge.  But New Zealand doesn’t seem to have that kind of problem.  Yet the data shows that quite clearly it does.

The thing is, though, we’re not too far off our fat American cousins.  Well, OK, at 34 percent the US is insanely fat.   But ten years ago, while the US stunned the World with nearly a third of its population being obese, New Zealand had a less shocking level of 18.8 percent.  OK, not great but not out of control.  In the intervening ten years, New Zealanders have managed to gobble their way into a position closer to the USA than our European cousins (well, except the UK which is rather on the plump side too).

There are some good data in these health stats.  New Zealand has reduced the level of tobacco consumption more spectacularly than other nations.  In fact, the proportion of the adult population smoking in New Zealand was in 2007 was 18.1 percent. In Italy, France and Germany, there were higher rates of smoking. What’s more, in 1997 our percentage of smokers was much higher – 26 percent.  We’ve managed to get the proportion of the population smoking below 20 percent.  In those three European countries I mentioned smoking has decreased by a few percentage points only.

The slow descent…

I have lost a smidgen short of four kilos since starting three weeks ago.  That’s not too bad.  In fact, it’s slightly faster than I had originally planned.  However, it is a descent that has been punctuated by an initial rush and now evened out into a painfully slow almost imperceptible downward movement – the dreaded plateau.

Understanding plateaus is important if you’re going to stay the course.  I know people who have given up on weight loss because they thought they stopped seeing results.  First, it’s important to realise plateaus are almost inevitable when losing weight.  Second, you eventually do breakthrough the plateau and there things you can do about it.

The main issue for dieters (and I am a classic case), being too aggressive with your diet. Why?  In short: Burning calories takes calories.  While you need to be short of your body’s requirement too much and you’ve got problems.

Shedding too many calories out of your daily intake diminishes your body’s ability to burn calories.  As counterintuitive as it seems, trimming too much out of your diet has a counterproductive effect.  With too little food coming in, instead of shedding weight, your body slows its metabolic rate.  I’ve noticed this too.  As I keep saying, I know (and worry) about eating too little.  I’ve also noticed an increase of tiredness and irritability – classic signs that somethings askew with your metabolism.  I’ve pushed up my caloric intake closer to my assumed BMR (basal metabolic rate).  Hopefully, this will allow my body to get out of stress mode and back into weight loss mode!

Still, let’s look at this positively. I may have spent a couple of weeks in the mid-98s.  But today I am in the high 97s.  OK, I will probably wobble back up into the 98s for a while, but at least for today, I plunged through the plateau.  When you’re in this game, you take whatever positives you can to stay focused.