So I'm 43 and have the same story as many other women. I've been overweight for virtually my entire life, and over the decades it's only gotten higher: I left high school weighing 180 pounds. A couple years later, work stress sent it to about 210. It was stable at that point for a few years, and in my mid-20s I lost a fair chunk of it over the course of one summer because I started running. Then I injured my foot and lost all motivation to exercise, although I've always been a hobby walker, as it were. (To clarify: for the better part of a decade - generally the entirety of my 20s, I walked all over creation - I literally would walk for a few hour every day. The caveat being that it was a leisure activity. Aside from that few months one summer, I was never seriously active). But even though I wasn't bothering to control my food intake, I think the walking actually provided me with real benefit as far as cardiovascular health, even though the weight itself never came off. Anyway, then I moved away from my hometown and took up residence on the other side of the country, and officially stopped walking at all for various reasons. Predictably, my weight went up to about 240. And it stayed there for the next several years. Then about 2016...things happened. Now I'm up to 270.
Going on, I did what we all do and tried various means of losing weight over the years. Some faddish, others more serious means of creating a CICO deficit, all with limited and temporary success.
Now, for all that I really do believe those years of excessive walking did actually provide real benefit in staving off the worst effects of considerable obesity...now that I'm 43 I can see and feel tangible problems finally catching up with me in middle-age. A few weeks ago, I stumbled across one of the many "no added sugar" challenges on Youtube. I don't go in for woowoo dietary science claims, but when multiple people report similar positive outcomes, and there's a few studies that at least suggest some corroboration - I pay attention. So I decided to try taking myself completely off added sugar (again, I want to be clear: I didn't eliminate natural sugars - didn't stop eating fruit, or high-sugar vegetables, like bananas or carrots, etc. I focused exclusively on added sugars), to see what happened. Three weeks later, after being forced to basically prepare and cook my own food, I absolutely noticed a significant change in my daily energy levels, and quality of sleep. I don't know if it's truly the result of going totally off added, refined sugars, or just the net consequences of doing so: being forced to be more conscientious about food effectively cuts out all processed, prepackaged food that contains high levels of sodium, fat, sugar, etc, beyond just avoiding junk food and fast food, which tends to naturally result in a calorie deficit.
One of the biggest deterrents for me in really getting started back into serious effort at weight loss the past few years has been struggling to have the sheer energy for it. I've made a number of attempts to get back into the habit of daily exercise and I always burn out fast because I haven't had the capacity to sustain it more than a few days. So now that it's been several weeks since I completely changed my entire food prep routine, and my energy levels have been stable, I decided to get my butt back to the gym.
It's...working.
I'm not bothering with keeping any kind of record of my daily caloric intake, and I'm only doing the basics of weighing and measuring. All the false starts and stops over the years have taught me the core basics: that weight loss is ultimately a question of CICO over the long term, that "weight loss happens in the kitchen," but also that CICO deficit can be achieved in one of three ways: less food; more exercise; a combination of less food and more exercise, and that long term success requires a realistic, honest engagement with what you eat.
So. What I've been doing since last Sunday. I plugged in my numbers based on age/sex/height/current weight and a guesstimate of my activity levels. Having a rough idea of how many calories I need just to maintain my weight, I've aimed at keeping my food intake every day at some range between 1500-1800 calories. I'm still eating 80-90% home prepped food, but I'm also giving myself permission to eat some prepackaged food. The rule I've set for myself is that it can't ever be pure junk and it must always be add-sugar free, and should be single-serving sized.
Likewise, I'm getting on the treadmill every day. Every day. I've been plugging in my numbers on the gym treadmill at my university (I'm a nontrad student) and aiming to burn 300 calories. I know that these machines can only give you an estimate, but I'm making it work. The first day, I couldn't really sustain a walking pace sufficient to burn 300 calories in a reasonable timeframe, so I recalibrated my goals. Since then, I've decided to aim for 45 minutes on the treadmill. In one single block of time if I can, or two blocks if I have to. Also last week, I set a pace of 2.5 and decided to focus less on the treadmill's calculated calorie burn, just concentrating on getting my time quota for the day.
Here is what I noticed, in a breathtakingly short period of time (I started this Sunday of last week). Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday were hard. Fierce motivation is the only thing that kept me going on that damnable machine. And then I ended up not going on Friday because I felt fairly ill that day. But I know my pattern, and the risk of falling off the wagon before you've had time to develop a habit, so I made a special point of getting back to the gym on Saturday, and it occurred to me when I reached the 30-minute mark that I hadn't really felt the drag of all those minutes. I was able to keep going and get a full 45 minutes in without feeling like I was having to hold myself at gun point. Sunday went largely the same way - suddenly, 45 minutes on the treadmill just didn't feel so onerous.
Note on the 2.5 pace. What I tried to do last week was give myself 3-5 minutes of warmup at 2.0-2.3 mph, and then kick it up to 2.5 mph for the 30-45 minute block (or 15-22 minute block), and then knock it back down to 2.0 for another 5 minutes. I'm specifically excluding the warmup and cooldown periods from the exercise duration so that I don't give myself an excuse to get lazy and fudge the numbers). When I noticed at the end of the week that the activity no longer felt like a chore I had to force myself through, I decided to implement some goals. Since I used to walk so much, all day, every day, at one point in my life I was a fast walker, even though I was nonetheless obese. But I lost that somewhere along the way, and now I'm embarrassed by how slow my pace is. I'd really like to reclaim that, so at the beginning of this week (Sunday, again, although I think I'm going to alter things so that my week starts on Monday, and I let myself have Sunday 'off' from cardio), I set 2.5 as my warmup pace and tried to sustain an exercise pace of 2.8 for as long as possible. What I've also done is occasionally kick it up to 3.0 or 3.2 mph for anywhere from one to four minutes, and then back down to 2.8. On Monday when I tried that, I overdid it and had to cut the pace back down to 2.5 for a while. But the last couple days, if I warmup at 2.5, I can maintain 2.8 for the next 30-45 minutes, with the odd one-minute burst of 3.0 here and there, and then drop down to between 2.2 and 2.5 for a 5 minute cooldown.
That is also working. After three or four more days of this I'm going to see if I can go for longer bursts of 3.0mph, alternated with a minimum of 2.8. That might be too ambitious, but I'm really encouraged by how quickly I noticed an improvement. Note: I'm also aware that even if I might notice sudden upticks of improvement here and there, I know better than to expect a continuous upward trend of progress, but I like to believe that if I'm careful, and realistic about daily and weekly goals, I could get myself to a sustained pace of 3.5 for a duration of 45 minutes by the end of October.
Back to the main point (sorry for the excessive detail and long-windedness, really!), I'm not tracking calories or foods. I have a general idea of the calorie load of my most frequent meals. For instance, I nearly always have eggs and bread for breakfast. (Sometimes it's an actual sandwich; other times I just used the bread to sop up my runny yolks). Typically it's two eggs and two slices of bread. Sometimes I have a banana, in which case I only eat one piece of bread. Sometimes it's three eggs and one bread slice with a smear of mayonnaise, or a thin spread of jam or peanut butter. I know the general calorie count of everything, so no matter the specifics, I know that 350 is a reasonable estimate of my breakfast calories. My other meals go the same way: my general rule of thumb is to generally keep each meal within 500 calories (the idea being that breakfast, lunch, and dinner = 1500 calories maximum), which allows me to have a snack here and there, regardless of whether it's a banana, a small package of beef jerky, or a package of flavored popcorn, without stressing it.
Oh! I almost forgot to mention this. The main reason I know that I'm at a CICO deficit is because up until recently the overwhelming majority of my excess calories came exclusively from beverages. Soda, flavored/sweetened coffee, etc. Sure, I overate plenty of just plain ol' bad, high-calorie food, but the real culprit was all the damn soda and coffee. I knew starting out with the no-added-sugar challenge that the mere elimination of all those liquid calories would mean a drastic reduction in calories, and it definitely has. I still drink coffee, but I'm limiting it to one per day, and only using a small splash of milk, and stevia powder, to sweeten it. All sugary soda is completely off the table. Now, I basically buy one liter bottle of diet. Dr. Pepper and make that one bottle last me the entire week. For the most part, I use that one bottle as my supper "treat" (because for so many years I had a soda alongside my supper), take a swig whenever I have a craving (don't know about anyone else, but I'm actually more addicted to the carbonation in soda than the caffeine itself), or take a swig if I need help to wash down some ibuprofen in the event of a headache or whatever. Stupid, maybe, but I think this is what I'm most proud of, because this is coming down from a habit of drinking multiple bottles of soda each and every day. I know I've crossed a threshold of accountability and moderation when I've honestly cultivated the habit of treating soda as a treat to have in moderation instead of an addiction I freely indulge in.
Basically the upshot of it all is that while I'm not explicitly tracking my calories, I do have a generally accurate estimate of what I typically eat compared to what I used to a couple months ago (which actually comes from all the years that I did count calories - I just have a solid working knowledge of the the calorie content of a number of the foods I eat most often.) So I know that for the most part my calorie intake falls somewhere between 1500-1800 each day, in addition to the fact that I'm burning somewhere between 200-300 calories on the treadmill (plus, of course, the continued metabolic increase that burns calories at a higher rate for some length of time after the cardio is over!)
That's enough for me. I'm realistic enough and self-aware enough to know that there have been odd days when my calorie intake has probably exceeded 1800, but I'm not worrying about it because I've trained myself to be conscientious of what I'm eating to the point where daily exercise, healthy food choices and moderation has become my new normal, and so I'm unquestionably eating at a daily deficit toward my maintenance calories, regardless of what the exact end-day totals actually are.
And the reason that I know this? Because literally two weeks ago I could not pull my size 18 jeans up over my ass. My size 20 jeans were snug. Not really uncomfortably tight, but definitely snug. And today I pulled on my size 18 jeans, which are slightly snug! The thing is, two weeks ago I started weighing myself daily, or almost every day. I don't really want to get caught up in watching the scale for the same reason that I don't want to cultivate the habit of tracking all my calories, but I did figure that it would be a good idea to track the scale daily as part of building a foundation of better habits (by which I mean, if I watched the scale daily for a week or two, it would help me get a good rough idea of whether I was actually being careful with food and exercise). But what actually happened is that the scale either didn't budge at all, or crept *up! Now, I know that weight fluctuates daily, and all the other tips and tricks we learn when we study up on the science. I also know that when you're truly morbidly obese as I am, that the initial weight will come off fairly quickly (although it eventually levels off). I also knew that I was being careful enough in watching my food intake and making sure to get a minimum amount of cardio every day, that it just didn't make sense that I wasn't seeing any results on the damn scale at all. So I did some quick reading, and I read up on water weight, glycogen stores, and what people here call the "whoooosh" effect. And then I started paying attention and did notice that my 20 jeans didn't fit quite right anymore, so I pulled out the 18s, and voila! That's all the proof I need, because I know that it's literally impossible to not be losing weight in my situation, and obviously I wouldn't be able to fit into the 18s if I weren't losing.
SO IN TWO WEEKS, EVEN THOUGH THE SCALE HASN'T REFLECTED A SINGLE POUND OF WEIGHT LOSS, I'VE LITERALLY GONE DOWN A JEANS SIZE. IN TWO WEEKS!
This is all the confirmation I need. I'm going to keep eating the way I've been eating, and concentrate on incremental improvements in my daily exercise routine. I've been focusing exclusively on the treadmill, because the great thing about it is that I'm in full control over when I start and stop (as opposed to, if I decided to go for a walk, or ride my bike somewhere, if I ended up injured, or overly tired, while I was, say, two miles from home, I'd kinda be screwed. The gym treadmill gives me the option to quit when I choose). But I think after one, maybe two more weeks of, hopefully, continued improvement in my baseline fitness, I'm going to start using different machines. Like, keep going with 30-40 minutes on the treadmill, but also 10 minutes on the stationary bike, 10 minutes on the arm-bike thingy, 10 minutes on the stair-climber, or some variation thereof.
Guys, I'm sorry that this got so long, and included such a huge minutiae of detail nobody wanted, needed, or asked for, lol. I'm just so excited, because I'm confident that I've set myself up for real weight loss and improved health on a long term basis. In literally the space of a month and a half, give or take, I've completely overhauled my lifestyle, and it has been easier than ever before, for no other reason than the fact that I made an honest commitment with myself to knock off the crap and get serious about my health.
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