Occam’s Razor

Real Life 101, Lesson 7: Fitness and Health Basics

This is the seventh in an indeterminate series of entries that provides my “real world” lessons to young adults. It is my conviction that these lessons are rarely taught either at home or in the schools. For those who did not get them growing up you can get them from me for free. This is part of my way of giving back to the universe on the occasion of my 50th birthday.

Young man (or woman), look at this site. It should sober you up. It is not exactly news that obesity is a “growing” problem among Americans. Nonetheless, as you delve into the details you should feel aghast. Today a shocking 8 out of 10 Americans over age 25 are either overweight or obese. A quarter of us lead completely sedentary lifestyles. In less than twenty years, there has been a 76% increase in the number of adult Americans with Type II diabetes. This is the type of diabetes does not develop until adulthood. 85% of those who develop Type II diabetes are overweight or obese.

Maybe by comparing yourself to others at your school or college, you do not feel out of the norm. This may be because so many teens and young adults are following these unfortunate national trends. If you go back just sixteen years though, the number of obese young adults age 18-29 has doubled. It does not take a Texas Instruments calculator to figure out that if you are not already obese or overweight, the chances are you will get there one day. If you grew up eating pizza, drinking colas and your idea of exercise is keyboard calisthenics, project your current lifestyle ten, twenty and forty years in the future. What do you think is going to happen if you do not change some habits? (Hint: look at your parents, but most likely your situation will be worse.)

If you are overweight or obese, it is not necessarily all your fault. Placing blame does not solve the problem of course, but it is helpful to know that modern society will encourage you to be obese. Unlike hundreds of generations before you, your career is not likely to be hunter or farmhand. Your future will look a lot more like Dilbert’s. Our modern world needs knowledge workers, not farmhands, and encourages us to be knowledge workers by tempting us with higher salaries. You will likely spend your days in either a cubicle or its equivalent. Even if you aspire to be a truck driver, you are unlikely to escape the trend. Truck drivers sit on their butts all day too. These days we have machines to do our hard labor. Unfortunately, you inhabit a body that was designed to be a hunter-gatherer. Perhaps fifty generations hence our bodies will adapt to our new reality. Perhaps then, our livers will pass fats undigested instead of storing them. Little good that will do you now. Unless exercising is your passion, or you enjoy working outdoors with your hands, you have a big problem. You need regular exercise. You also need to eat better. If you do not, expect your lifespan to be shorter than your parents. Do not be surprised if the last third of your life is full of chronic health care issues. Is this how you envisioned your adult life?

Even if you are 18 and skinny as a rail, your body is going to throw you a curve ball. This is because about the time you graduate high school you should not just be grown up, but your body has finished growing up. All those extra calories will soon no longer be needed. If you never gained any weight during your adolescence and you continue your eating patterns, you are guaranteed to gain weight.

Not surprisingly, this was my dilemma as a young adult. One day in my early twenties, I weighed myself and was shocked that although I had never exceeded 180 pounds (I am 6′2″) all my life, I was suddenly 195 pounds. Now, at age 50, although not obese, I remain overweight. How do you know if you are not overweight? You need to have a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or less. In my case, given my height I need to be 190 pounds or less.

Being healthy as an adult though is a lot more than having a healthy weight. It also means you have to take care of your body’s other needs. You know, the boring stuff: eating healthy foods and getting regular exercise. If your weight is normal but you survive on pizza and you never exercise, you are leading an unhealthy lifestyle.

You already know what I am going to suggest: get regular exercise, maintain a healthy body weight and eat better foods. If you are overweight or obese though, none of these things is likely to be easy. Diet books will always be popular because we will always want to believe that by following one book that we will solve all these problems. What we really want is some sort of magical formula that will allow us to continue our sedentary lifestyles and eat like pigs yet stay in optimal health. You might as wish to win the lottery.

Obesity is going to be the challenge of your generation, just as smoking and drugs were the challenge for my generation. (Obesity though is affecting the baby boom generation too. We just started later.) You need to be very mindful of this. Staying healthy is likely to be a constant challenge for you throughout your adult life.

If you are at a healthy weight, then congratulations. You mission is now to stay this way. You need to start increasing your exercise without increasing your calorie intake. That does not mean you need to run marathons, unless you want to. This does mean that you need to work in regular sustained physical activities that hopefully you also enjoy. Since you are young and still have your joints, group sports like volleyball and basketball are excellent means toward accomplishing this goal. Pick activities you enjoy. Weigh yourself at least once a month. Once a week is ideal.

If you are already overweight or obese, you will have to change some habits. You can try Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and similar commercial solutions. These diets are often quite effective at taking weight off. The problem is that almost all diets are temporary. Pounds will come off but they will soon come back. You may find yourself all worn out after a long day of work and use this as an excuse to skip your evening exercise. You will find yourself taking an extra donut when you know you should not. Sadly, there are no free calories.

There are three proven solutions to losing weight and keeping it off. The sooner you start the easier it is to do as a lifetime habit. Here they are: count your calories, weigh yourself regularly, and use support groups. I have a friend who recently lost 65 pounds. I was impressed. How did he succeed where others have so often failed? His wife convinced him to enroll in the George Washington University Weight Management Program. Most diet programs have a long-term success rate of about 5%. This program, while not perfect, has a 40% success rate, which is phenomenally high. The essence of their secret is to follow the elements above. This program is based on the understanding that weight loss and healthy living is a lifelong journey, not a short-term destination. Taking the weight off is wonderful, but is meaningless if it goes back on. Therefore, it offers considerable therapy and support groups to help people work through these issues. (I will need to see if my friend is still at his weight in a year. His odds are 40%.)

I am not suggesting that the only way to become and stay healthy is to use a program like this one. The younger you are the more flexible you will be both mentally and bodily to develop your own weight loss solutions. Unless your job involves heavy physical demands though you are unlikely to burn off the calories you consume unless you change your practices.

There are a few other things that I discovered during my own journey that you might find useful. First, aerobics is probably not enough. Granted, marathoners as a class tend to look extremely lean, but you are unlikely to be a marathoner. Here is the problem with doing just aerobics: as you grow older your muscle mass tends to decrease. Ideally, just as you want to keep all your brain cells as you age, you want to keep the same muscle mass you had as a physically fit teenager. If you do not engage in regular weight training (which probably should be in addition to regular aerobics) your muscle mass will decrease over time. This means that even if your weight is stable your BMI will increase over time, so you will become overweight. Why is it that so many of our elderly have such a hard time getting around? It is because they never did regular weight training. Depending on which experts you ask you will get different answers, but most will suggest you need to be lifting weights at least three times a week. The general strategy involves rotating the muscles that you exercise. Ideally you will have enough spare cash to work out with a personal trainer, who can show you how to do it correctly. Essentially, proper weight training involves lifting weights a lot heavier than you think you can lift. To do it correctly, you have to be able to start by lifting a set of weights but at some point find it impossible to continue lifting them. For most weight machines, this is between ten and fifteen repetitions per set. (Note: before starting any exercise program like this, consult a physician.)

All this takes a lot of time. I do it after work and on weekends mostly at my local Gold’s Gym. Each trip takes a minimum of an hour and often consumes two hours of my precious free time. I should enjoy it but most of the time I do not. (Listening to podcasts on my MP3 player while I exercise helps a lot.) This is the price that I have to pay in order to be a healthy human and work a sedentary job. The good news is that by doing both, while I am technically still overweight, my BMI is improving. It is quite possible to be overweight yet be healthy. Look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, at least before he gave up the weight training. Notice what happened since: Arnold is now overweight, but he has replaced a lot of his muscle with fat.

Welcome to real life, young adult. I hope that you can find some combination of diet and exercise that works for you. I am afraid though this will mean tearing yourself away from Second Life and instead engaging in real life. If this sounds like you, it is time to back away from that PC and get moving instead.

August 22nd, 2007 at 09:23pm Posted by Mark | Advice | no comments

The virtues (and drawbacks) of flavored water

For us weight conscious people, drinking something with zero calories is preferred to drinking something loaded with calories. Dietitians will often suggest consuming plenty of water. Drinking water can help us feel full and thus may make us less inclined to eat. Staying fully hydrated is considered a healthy practice and good for the body. Therefore, I have been trying to drink more water, even if it has the side effect of having me run to the bathroom more often.

Is there a link between liberally drinking water and weight loss? I wondered about this. A shrink I used to see was a big proponent of drinking water. He told me he used to be overweight. Part of his strategy was to keep drinking water. He would constantly sip from bottled water during our therapy sessions.

There is one problem about drinking water: whether it comes from the tap or a bottle, it does not taste that interesting. A cold and refreshing glass of water can be invigorating, but it does not have much in the way of taste. Since we often feel fully hydrated even when we are not, it is easy to forget to drink water. That is what I noticed after a couple weeks of trying the full hydration strategy. There was too much going on to constantly remind myself to imbibe.

There are all sorts of zero or low calories drinks on the market. Each has some drawbacks. At home, I drink Crystal Light. While it is certainly less caloric than soda, it is hardly calorie free. While it has only 5 calories per serving, the manufacturer considers two ounces of water (a quarter of a cup) to be a serving, which is ridiculous. This means that one container of Crystal Light concentrate (which makes two quarts) actually contains 320 calories. On an active day, I can drink half a gallon of water without a problem, which means if I am drinking Crystal Light, I have also consumed 320 extra calories. There are plenty of zero calorie beverages out there, but even the zero calorie sodas are not necessarily good for you, considering that they are also acidic.

At a party a few years ago, I was introduced to flavored water. I found it to be a happy medium. Unlike ordinary water, it had some taste, but it did not have any calories nor the amount of acid that you find in sodas. It does have a number of sugar substitutes and depending on the brand, natural and/or artificial flavors. When our local superstore started offering flavored water in bulk, I picked up a case. Now I buy a case of flavored water every week or two. In addition to drinking flavored water at home, I usually take a bottle or two to work with me.

Flavored water is not for everyone. Sometimes the taste is a bit off or a bit too artificial. My wife handed them out to her friends at a party she hosted, and no one wanted a second. I have been drinking Fruit₂O, which like Crystal Light, is yet another brand from Kraft Foods. While I would probably not prefer these flavored waters to their calorie-laden equivalents, I do like that they do not have any calories.

I have also found that flavored water does a decent job of suppressing my appetite. I eat a light breakfast in the morning. A bottle of flavored water consumed over the morning can carry me over to lunch quite well. In fact, often I am not particularly hungry by lunchtime. Having the taste of something in my mouth all morning provides the illusion that I am consuming something of substance, even if it is only just water.

Mind you, aside from the water there is nothing healthful or nutritious in flavored water. They are not loaded with vitamins and minerals, which most of us do not need anyhow. Moreover, depending on how safe you think artificial sweeteners like sucralose (Splenda) are, there might be some small risk consuming a lot of flavored water. Nonetheless, I am finding that flavored water is part of an effective weight management strategy. I consider it one reason I have lost a few pounds over the last few weeks.

Water from your tap is probably the safest form of potable water since it is treated. Most forms of bottled water are just filtered. Some might consider any kind of bottled water to be anti-environmental. Tap water has one big environmental advantage: it does not have to be transported on carbon producing trucks. Instead, plain old water pressure moves it from the water treatment plant to your house. Nor does tap water come in clear plastic bottles that may or may not end up recycled. While I am mindful of these environmental consequences from any form of bottled water, nonetheless they are not enough to dissuade me from keeping up the flavored water habit. My plastic bottles always end up in the recycling bin anyhow, even if they are transported by trucks.

You might want to consider drinking lots of water as part of an overall weight management strategy. In addition, if you find that ordinary tap and bottled water a bit too boring, you might want to try flavored water.

April 30th, 2007 at 05:49pm Posted by Mark | Life 2007 | one comment

Adventures in Weight Loss and Healthy Living

Yesterday found me back in the office of my dietician Heather. As readers may recall, Heather is helping me change my diet so I can keep losing weight and lead a healthy second half of my life. Changing eating habits is not an easy task. Yesterday’s appointment was a chance to tell her how her suggestions were working. The truth was that I was having mixed success. I had managed to take off three or four pounds, but that was over two months. Habits are hard to change, and eating habits are some of the toughest ones.

I used to have three eggs for breakfast. They would easily carry me over to noon, but likely contributed to my cholesterol problem. Now I eat a cup of Kashi cereal with a cup of 1% milk for breakfast. Along with the breakfast, I consume the protein Heather wants me to eat at every meal, so I added two ounces of pressed ham. This carried me through lunch and is only 360 calories.

Drink more water, Heather told me. The only thing is I do not feel particularly thirsty. It is hard to remember to do things like this routinely while the email is streaming in and out and while I am editing web pages. So once again, I made it to noon forgetting to hydrate myself.

Today I was only mildly hungry for lunch, until I actually started eating. I skipped the salad topped with nuts that she recommended, since I knew there was plenty of salad at home that I could have with dinner. Therefore, I bought just a cup of chicken vegetable soup from the cafeteria. It was about 100 calories. I added a zero fat but very tasty Granny Smith apple. 80 calories. 180 calories for lunch so far, but I was still hungry. I reached above my desk for my handy supply of crackers. The six Cheddar Cheese crackers were 200 calories. 740 calories so far.

During the afternoon, I felt snackish. Heather had recommended a box of raisins. They are very sweet and very tasty, and have only 130 calories. Raisins are now my favorite snack, so down the hatch they went. Later, as I waded my way through another conference call the snack monster hit again. I reached for the low fat granola bar. 180 calories. Total calories so far today: 1040.

With work over, I headed to the Gold’s Gym. I exercised for thirty minutes on the elliptical machine which listening to NPR on my headset. Then it was off to use the weight machines. I pressed 90 pounds on the vertical press, 3 sets, and 15 repetitions with each set. On the Leg Extension, I pressed 115 pounds, same counts and repetition. 165 pounds on the Dip Machine. 130 pounds on the Ab Machine. 200 pounds on the Adductor. 80 pounds and 12 repetitions on the rowing machine. I can only guess how many calories I burned. Supposedly, I burned close to 500 calories on the elliptical machine, but I suspect the real amount is a lot lower than that. There is no way to measure calories on all those weight machines, but I can definitely say they were all challenging. I am guessing I burned about 500 calories at the health club today.

I went home and after a shower, I contemplated dinner. I was in a Boston Market mood tonight so I fetched one of their turkey dinners from our freezer. This is the tastiest 360 calories I can find in a prepared dinner, which is probably a sign they have too much fat per serving. I added a small salad, which cannot be more than 75 calories. Afterwards, a banana looks inviting: 105 calories. Time for dessert: three Special K bars (90 calories each) and a cup of 1% milk to wash them down. I am up to 1960 calories.

It was time to head upstairs and blog. At least I knew what to blog about today. I bring three sugar free (but alas, not calorie free) candies for a total of 50 calories. Total calorie intake for one day: 2010 calories.

Heather tells me a big man like me (six foot, two inches) needs about 2400 calories a day to maintain my weight. In addition I need 30 minutes a day of exercise to maintain my weight and more to actually lose weight. Between the exercise and the calories consumed. I think I lost weight today. The hardest part of weight loss is simply keeping it up, day after relentless day. Food ranks right up there with sex in life’s greatest pleasures. To diminish this pleasure is surprisingly hard.

Counting calories with every serving, (her latest suggestion) definitely helps. Trying to figure out if I am eating sensible portions is tougher. I started out well back in February. I wondered if I could have spaghetti with dinner and still not exceed the portions of protein and carbohydrates she wanted me to have with dinner. I had to weigh the whole grain pasta on a scale, and four servings was not a lot of pasta. Three ounces of protein (but no more) at every meal is very easy to get. It amounts to four frozen turkey balls that I threw into the spaghetti sauce. The result was tasty but underwhelming in quantity and I had already hit my carbohydrate quota for the meal.

The body, or at least my body, wants more. It likes my weight just fine. It does not understand my obsession with Body Mass Index. “Don’t you know I’m trying to store extra fat, just in case there is a famine?” it is yelling at me. I know all the strategies, but integrating them altogether is, frankly, just another damned chore in a day full of damnable chores. Knowing how many calories are in my “standard” breakfast and lunch help. I can then plan dinner accordingly. However, with dinner I also need to balance calories with standard portions. It all amounts to the same classic dieting advice: eat less and exercise more.

Ah, exercise. That has been a challenge of late. A couple weeks ago, I broke a toe in my left foot, which put the kibosh on exercise. It was not that I did not try to exercise. At the time, I did not know my toe was broken. I figured it was just “sprained”. In fact, I did the stupid male thing and exercised anyhow. It resulted in bruising which spread to my other toes. I tried carefully biking to work: same effect. Next, I spent a week in Denver on business. There I was up before 7 a.m. and rarely retired to my hotel room before 8 p.m. There was little opportunity to exercise but at this point, I had figured it out: do not even bother until the bruises disappeared.

I was certainly mindful of the food temptations while in Denver. The Club Lite sandwich at the local deli near the Denver Federal Center tasted great. I am sure it was low fat, but it was hard to guess how many calories I was consuming. In the morning, the hotel put out a huge complementary breakfast bar billed with eggs, greasy sausages, hash browns, juices, waffles, donuts and muffins. If you looked for it, you could also find bran cereal, skim milk and fruits. I started out well but by the end of the week, I had succumbed to a muffin or two with breakfast. My dinners did not appear to be highly caloric, but their calorie content was impossible to ascertain. Because I was getting virtually no exercise because of my injury, I felt I would be lucky if I did not gain any weight during the trip.

I am home and back on my normal schedule. It is easier to follow a diet. In our modern world though it is not easy to constantly monitor a sensible diet, get the exercise your body requires, work a productive day in a sedentary job and pay attention to your significant others. Those four activities along with sleep can consume a whole day. No wonder losing weight is so hard in our culture. However, further weight loss will simply require both rigorous vigilance to my diet and upping my exercise. Now that spring is finally here and I can bike to work most days I can easily add additional exercise. After seeing the podiatrist about my toe today, I also know that I can exercise with my feet again. Exercises that hurt like running though are still out.

I wish I could be like Wendy. Wendy is a woman I traveled with last year. She is forty something, blonde, trim, in shape and consequently quite attractive. She is also a vegetarian. She has the sensible eating thing down to a science. At the hotel breakfast, she happily consumed just cup of oatmeal. She grabbed an apple and consumed it later in the morning. She staggers her eating during the day with snacks. She makes it all looks so effortless, which I suspect it actually is to her. In addition, she makes time for exercise every day no matter what. On that trip, it meant getting up at 6 a.m. and hitting the hotel’s exercise room. I figure if she can do it, so could I. The real question is can I do this relentlessly and for pretty much every day for the rest of my life? Why do I have to do it but the French do not? How do they stay so fit and trim, eat fatty foods, have so little heart disease, smoke, philander and yet live into their nineties?

I do not know these answers but I can see the appeal of living in France now. I have been getting regular exercise for a quarter of a century, but apparently it is not enough. My body is going to require a lot of persuasion. 49 years of eating habits are excruciatingly hard to change permanently.

The brownies my daughter unwisely baked were still on the kitchen counter this evening. I looked at that last brownie in the pan lustfully, then calculated that if I ate it, it would add close to 500 calories to my diet.

Reluctantly, I put it back in back the pan and reached for the Special K bars instead.

April 13th, 2006 at 09:41pm Posted by Mark | Life 2006 | no comments

My Eating and Exercise Strategies

In my last entry I decried how our culture seems to conspire to keep us fat. I suspect I won’t get too much sympathy. Our current culture poo poos victimization and emphasizes personal responsibility. Of course we control what we put into our mouths and how much we exercise. We make choices, for better or for worse, which determine our health. I chose to live in suburbia. As a consequence shopping is not convenient and generally I need to take a car. But I had other alternatives. I could have chosen to live in the city. Had I done this I would be doing a lot more walking. Perhaps as a consequence I would not even worry about gaining weight.

But if you are overweight or obese, or just want to not gain any more weight, what can you do that might actually work for you? I don’t claim to have all the answers. But I do have weight control strategies. You are welcome to take them for a test drive.

The formula for weight loss is pretty well known: eat less and exercise more. But how do you do this if you are a harried adult like myself stuck in the sandwich generation with lots of demands? How do you eat less when your body often craves more? How do you summon the willpower? My experience probably mirrors yours: willpower can be hard to come by. When it arrives it is not likely to hang around. I do not trust the Atkins Diet so have never tried it. I know people who have had great success with it but to me it seems dangerous. I’ve had better success with the South Beach Diet. I still use some of the strategies I learned when I was on the diet and they help. When starting out the diet emphasizes avoiding giving your body an insulin rush in the morning. It recommends eggs for breakfast. During the week that’s what I still do: scramble some eggs, add bacon bits or Canadian bacon. Just this carries me without hunger until lunch. Eggs have a fair amount of fat, but it’s a good kind of fat: and fat satiates the feeling of hunger very effectively. I do not add toast unless it is the weekend, when I often skip lunch. Usually the weekday morning finds me rushing to get my daughter to school and myself to work, so the lack of morning carbohydrates is not a hardship.

I also avoid juice. Juice may be healthy in many respects but it is full of sugar. The insulin rush will likely make me hungry. I see juice as empty calories. Instead, I drink light. Crystal Light, to be specific and lots of it. I prefer their lemonade. It has a tangy taste but has only five calories per serving. I drink it with every meal at home.

Lunch is tougher. I know I should bring a lunch to work with me but I make it my treat of the day, so I generally eat in the cafeteria at work. Usually I eat a bit heartier one day and less hearty the next. For light eating I choose a small Caesar salad (usually with honey mustard dressing, to avoid acid reflux) and the soup of the day. For a heavier lunch I go to the sandwich bar. I can choose lean meats but tuna salad is a low fat taste favorite, providing it is not mixed with much mayonnaise. However, eating too much tuna is risky so I limit it to once a week. I often substitute chicken salad but disclaim the extra mayonnaise the sandwich lady wants to add. Overall it is a decent blend of carbohydrates (assuming I ask for a hearty whole grain bread, which I always do), protein and not too much fat. Add the lettuce and tomatoes and vegetables become part of the meal too. No, it is clearly not an ideal lunch. Chicken salad is usually mixed with mayonnaise, but at least where I eat the mayonnaise is minimal. Of course I forgo the drinks and stick with plain water. I am not always successful in avoiding the snacks by the register however. Usually by lunch I am feeling hungry and want some glucose in my system. Particularly if I have afternoon meetings I find I need sufficient glucose in my system to keep me awake. I’ve been known to sleep with my eyes open in conference rooms.

Dinner is the challenge. If I made my own dinners it would be one thing, but we eat family dinners most nights. I usually insist on a large salad (even if I had one with lunch). Fortunately we don’t usually have a dessert. If I feel a sweet attack though I have a few strategies. One is sugarless candy. While they are certainly not calorie free, they avoid the insulin high that normally accompanies easily processed carbohydrates and consequently makes me want to eat more. Malt is used instead of sugar to give it a sweet taste. Special-K bars also work as an occasional treat.

With exercise more is almost always better. When weather permits I bike to work at a brisk pace: 6-7 miles a day. When it does not permit we have an elliptical machine in the basement and I spend at least half an hour on it when I get home from work. The ideal place for exercising is at a health club. In my last job I worked in Washington, D.C. and had a health club right across the street that I could join at a discount price. My boss at the time was liberal enough to allow long lunch hours so I could get sufficient exercise. The routine was pretty much the same: half an hour of aerobics and about half an hour of weight training. For the couple years it lasted it was great. I was buff. Exercising around lunch is great too because exercise usually leaves you less hungry than if you are sedentary.

But I don’t have the convenience of a gym at my new job. I do enjoy biking and can easily bike 20 miles or more on the weekend, when the weather permits. I know what I need to do up my exercise level: join a local Gold’s Gym and make the time 3-4 times a week to hang out there before and after work. But for the moment I haven’t resumed that habit. I have to figure out first what I will give up. As we all know there are only 24 hours in a day. Something has to give. I don’t know yet whether it will be my part time teaching, blogging, or one of my many other hobbies.

All this keeps my weight reasonably stable. There’s no question I put on a few pounds over the winter. (Biking was largely out and my running was destroying my joints.) With better weather now is the time to up the exercise level. But figuring what will work for my 48-year-old body is getting challenging.

You may want to try any of my strategies and see if they work for you.

April 23rd, 2005 at 08:23pm Posted by Mark | Life 2005 | no comments

South Beached

Last June I wrote about my adventures losing weight. Well they weren’t really adventures. Those who claim losing weight is fun are fooling themselves. It’s never fun to diet. I looked forward to the “adventure” as much as a root canal. Still I knew I was putting on more weight. It wasn’t anything dangerous but I was afraid to get near a scale and learn the awful truth. The awful truth turned out to be 198.8 pounds. For the record that’s 8.8 pounds more than I should weigh to avoid the stigma of being “overweight”.

Now I certainly didn’t look overweight. I get complements all the time about how trim I look. I’ve never been one to neglect exercise either. For two years my exercise has included not just aerobic, but weight training too. I’ve probably converted quite a bit of fat into muscle. I have been conscious for years about what I eat. I can’t eat anything anymore without thinking about the tradeoffs. Even so food is apparently an enormous pleasure to me. When opportunities present themselves (like Christmas cookies arrive from friends) I find it impossible to just say no. So mostly I try to keep these foods out of my house.

Clearly eating less and exercising more was a great weight loss strategy while it lasted. I lost weight regularly, but it was a hard thing to sustain indefinitely. The body resisted. My last attempt at a formal diet was The Carbohydrate Addicts Diet. It didn’t work for me. I stayed pretty much where I was. This was due to the fine print: you can have carbohydrates at one meal a day, but you have to limit them to about a third of your total calories for the meal. I went overboard. I found I couldn’t limit them that rigorously. But more importantly, the diet did nothing to solve my craving for carbohydrates. I still had thate underlying addiction.

So now it is about a year later and I’m trying the South Beach Diet. Much to my surprise here I am two weeks later and I’m still on it! And I was also surprised to find that I dropped four pounds in one week! I have never lost that much weight that quickly before. But I had never tried a carbohydrate free diet before either. The first two weeks of the South Beach Diet are a lot like any day on the Atkins Diet, except the meals are supposed to be low fat. Carbs: just avoid them. And I have. No bread. No milk. No jellies. No fruits. I really crave fruits at the moment.

No, it wasn’t always easy. The first couple days were the roughest. After a few days I found myself at the CVS buying sugar free candies and making a lot of sugar free Jello. The mornings and afternoons weren’t difficult. Substituting eggs for cereal in the morning was easy. For lunch I chose salads or lean meats. String cheese worked for my midmorning snack. A hand full of peanuts was often my afternoon snack. Dinners were heavy on low fat meats, and lots of steamed vegetables. My broccoli and cauliflower consumption has gone way up.

I found sugar free Crystal Lite hard candies and have been eating them as dessert. They taste good thanks to the Splenda in them, but eating more than four or five made my stomach upset. My indulgence lately has been these protein bars. Some of them are excellent. I may be cheating a bit because they while they have only 3g of impact carbohydrates (the type that make you crave more) they have more of the non-addictive type. But mostly they contain protein, so it is balanced. They taste really good, but they are expensive. They remind me of a Snickers bar.

The South Beach diet emphasizes restoring a good blood chemistry. It does this by turning off the craving for carbohydrates. I find my physiological craving is gone but it is still there on the mental level. Tomorrow I will begin phase two. I can’t wait to introduce some carbohydrates back into my diet. Perhaps that is not a good sign, but right now the taste of a fresh apple, or even a bowl of Raisin bran in low fat milk sounds delightful. During phase two of the diet I am supposed to reintroduce carbohydrates slowly. That will be a tough test for me. Even though it could have been much worse I feel like I have been suffering. But I can’t deny the results of this diet so far.

I have learned a lot from this diet. I didn’t understand how addictive processed carbohydrate foods were. I didn’t understand what it was about being “processed” that made them bad for me. Dr. Agatston’s clear writing was an eye opener. I never made the connection that a processed food was essentially a partially digested food. This means the carbohydrates in them are readily absorbed into the bloodstream as sugar. And this raises your insulin level quickly and makes you physically crave more processed carbohydrates. So now I am wiser at last. I will be more selective about not just how much carbohydrates I eat, but how likely they are to make me crave more of them. I am armed with my book giving the glycemic index for various foods. I think with care I can add to my diet decent tasting carbohydrate foods that won’t make me want more.

I have noticed what people on the Atkins diet have told me: they often feel lethargic. I get winded easily. I still maintained my exercise routine, but at the health club peddling away on the elliptical machines I found that it actually hurt to keep up the pace. The blood sugar that I normally would have had running around my blood stream was not there, so it had to be drawn from my fat. It was weird; it was like I could feel the fat actually being burned off!

The rest of this dieting is monitoring what I eat and regular exercise. I will check my weight once a week to measure how I am doing. I will do my best to adjust my eating habits accordingly based on what the scale is telling me. I don’t ever want to be overweight again. I hope this time I am armed with the right information and the right attitude to fully accomplish my goal. I figure if Bill Clinton can lose 25 pounds on this diet, I can do something similar. There are no sure things in this life. But as I look at the numerous obese people around me, I know I don’t want to spend my fifties with cardiac or adult diabetes problems. I have a lot of life ahead of me and I want my good health to last as long as possible.

January 18th, 2004 at 04:49pm Posted by Mark | Life 2004 | no comments