Lean On Me
DISCLAIMER: The author of this post does not claim to be an expert on anything, much less nutrition and/or weight loss. Although he occasionally remembers to wash whites separately and not wear his glasses in the shower. The reader is strongly urged to ignore his advice, or at least do the exact opposite.
The only people in the U.S. who don’t want to lose weight are (a) Barry Bonds and (b) people who are, technically, dead.
For the rest of us, a new year means once again thinking about dropping pounds. Since I decided to be early (for a change) and lost weight before January 1, maybe I can help (see disclaimer above).
I don’t want to fight. People are different, sometimes amazingly so, and I’m stranger than most. For example, I decided to lose weight by eating less and exercising more. How 1950s of me.
Still, I learned a few things along the way, which I thought you might be interested in, particularly if you have tomorrow off and nothing good is on TV, so here we go.
Know What You’re Doing. Ha ha. No, seriously. Losing weight is actually a bizarre thing to do, metabolically speaking; you’re trying to persuade your body to give up its Strategic Fat Reserves, something it really, really doesn’t want to do. So you might want to stop dancing around the food pyramid if you’re really serious. I knew going in that I wasn’t going to be eating particularly nutritiously, but since for most of my adult life my diet consisted of the food groups you usually find at an 8-year-old’s birthday party, I figured a few more months wouldn’t kill me.
This was, of course, just an educated guess. It might very well have killed me. Particularly since for at least two of the past 14 weeks, I ate nothing but canned tuna and chocolate chips (really).
Sure, you can probably lose weight by eating more fruits and vegetables. If you want to be boring. But whatever you do, know that it’s for a limited time, with a definite (if realistically laughable) goal.
Exercise Works. Lots of well-intentioned, good-hearted, sympathetic authors of diet books say that exercise, while theoretically a good idea, won’t get the weight off, because you can’t do enough of it. They point out, sometimes with cartoons, that it’s much easier to cut 500 calories from your diet than burn 500 calories with exercise.
Well, that depends upon what “easier” means, and also on the cartoon (sometimes). What they neglect to mention, or maybe don’t even know, is that overweight people have what I like to call a “metabolic advantage.”
Let me put it in a non-cartoon way. It’s true that a 130-pound woman, walking at a brisk pace for an hour, will typically burn off about 300 calories (i.e., one can of tuna and one large handful of chocolate chips). Not a lot. But let’s say (and, actually, a cartoon would be helpful here) this woman has to carry another 130-pound woman on her back for the entire hour, and still walk briskly. Are you thinking maybe she will burn more than 300 calories? Are you thinking that maybe she will, in fact, burn twice as many? Are you wondering who the other woman is?
Good for you. Actually, after lots of research, I found out that at my starting weight, I could burn approximately 600 calories an hour. Well, you say, still; 600 calories isn’t even an entire can of Pringles. True, but what if you walked two hours? Or four? It starts to add up to serious Pringles.
I know most people don’t have time to walk four hours a day, or maybe even the right shoes, but do you get my point? You can only cut so much food out of your diet before you get really cranky and start doing weird things like fainting, but you could always walk a bit more. I’m just saying.
And finally…
Know Your Scale. Getting on the scale in the middle of the day is like playing the lottery, except that you can’t do it at 7-11 (and you probably wouldn’t want to). The average person puts nearly 14 pounds of stuff into his or her body over the course of a day, including air, water, food, and cheese. This “stuff” all has “weight.”
If you’re going to use a scale to mark your progress (you could use a toaster but you’re on your own there), you must understand the scale. You must become one with the scale, learn its strategies and secrets, in order to defeat it.
I weighed myself every day, and here’s what I did: I tried to put at least 10 hours between my confrontation with this obnoxious piece of hardware and the last bit of food or water that crossed my lips. It’s not as hard as it sounds, at least if you weigh first thing in the morning and don’t eat in your sleep (which was my big weakness). Then take off all your clothes, step on it, make a note of the number, get dressed, and eat Pringles because really what the hell is the point?
Sorry. But no, really. First thing in the morning, as dry a weight as possible, no clothes. It’s as absolute as you can get, and it beats getting on a scale in the afternoon after a big lunch, fully dressed with a lot of loose change in your pockets. Trust me.
So there you go. Let me know how you do.
NOTE: No Pringles were harmed during the writing of this post.
ONE MORE NOTE: Tomorrow I’ll stop making jokes and try to make sense of what exactly has happened, although no promises.