That got your attention, eh? No worries, though. My dogs are actually fine. What's been lost is the weight of two working terriers off of my never-too-well-toned body. I am down 24 pounds since September 10. My goal is to lose 18 more pounds by Christmas or, to be more precise, the weight of one over-large border terrier. Gonna do it too. The secret is ... wait for it ... less food. Apparently more exercise does not hurt either.
Someone should really write a book about these little weight-loss secrets. I mean, who knew?
For the record, I have never gone to a gym before in my life, so this is an entirely new experience for me.
Here's the good news: Everyone leaves everyone else the hell alone. You just go in, crank like hell for an hour or so, and then walk out a bit wobbly. Nothing to it and nobody bothers you. I never talk to anyone, which is how I like it.
And no matter what you look like, I guarantee there are a lot of folks at the gym who look even worse than you do or I do. Thankfully, no one cares.
In fact, the folks I admire most are not the young hard bodies (who I suspect are narcissistic), but three really fat guys who keep showing up day after day. They sweat it out in aerobics classes (they are often the only guys) and come out looking like they walked through a monsoon. And then they stretch some, and hit a few weights.
To be clear, these guys are enormous -- maybe 180 pounds overweight. But it is their sheer bulk that makes their effort and willingness so extraordinary and heroic in my book. I stand in awe of these guys.
Their initial size is so big that it's hard for me to tell if they are losing, or how much, but I do know one thing: they are doing something admirable. I do not know what got them into the shape they are currently in, but I do know that something has risen up inside of them, and it is that hard flinty spiritual thing called a willingness to go to any length. It is a force so powerful you could light your own lamp from the glow.
But, of course, this is not the kind of thing you can tell people to their face. It would sound condescending, creepy, or worse. After all, the subtext is still: "Dude, you are enormous." Which is not the message I want to convey. What I really want to say, is "Your willingness to change is so awesome." And the bigger they are, the more awesome that is.
These guys may be physical wrecks right now, but if they keep going for six or nine months (they are so big, it is going to take that long), they are going to look very different. The trick to change is time. If the pick up the wreckage every day, and do a little something every day to build something new, you will get a new construction in time. Going the distance is everything.
2 comments:
Good old diet and exercise.
I didn't catch much TV in Spain (for good reason, and no, not just because it was a rare hotel that had an English language channel) but I did catch a snippet of Larry King and the topic was diet. Joy Behar was filling in and they had all the usual TV Docs and the author of "Good Calories, Bad Calories" ... and they all pushed their books.
The one thing that I found interesting (and aren't all recycled and new diet ideas interesting) about the GC,BC author was that he made a good case for the conventional wisdom about obesity being pure BS.
What if excess weight isn't the disease, but a symptom of an underlying disease that isn't appreciated or well known, likely hormonal in nature?
I'm prone to agree with that view. Not only is it true that the legal drug industry is propelled to treat disease instead of cure it (chronic disease funding vs. any other area proves this. Little money for tried and true cures and orphan diseases are left ignored), the diet industry is built on the same ethic. Treat the symptoms, don't cure the disease. Milk it, milk it, milk it. The constant yo-yo of any given spokeswoman for Jenn Craig proves this.
A cheap and easy Cure for Cancer would be the single worst thing to happen to the medical industry, and a cure for obesity would be the worst thing to happen to the diet industry.
Diet and Exercise are not cures. They are palliative treatments. If obesity is simply a symptom of an underlying hormonal disorder, and if the propensity to store fat, eat in quantity, and behave lazily is not a cause, but co-symptoms of the underlying disorder, things start to make more sense.
Diet and Exercise have never cured one person from becoming obese. Of course they have prevented the exhibition of the symptoms, even reversed their effects, but a pure, 100% cure dictates that the disease is gone and shall not return. Diet and Exercise are treatments just like antifungals are treatments for Athlete's foot or AIDS cocktails are a treatment for the disease, not a cure.
It is often said in the diet and exercise circles that the simple equation must hold true.... that to lose wait you simply burn more calories than you consume. Sounds great, but it's way too simplistic and sets up false expectations.
For one, the human body is not a closed system and thus does not obey the rules of thermodynamics, being suggested in the formula, mainly that by expelling more heat than one absorbs you must lose mass. The problem is that food in and waste out make us a dynamic system and when you observe that calories in food are not measures of how much energy your body removes from the foods but rather how much energy they release when burned in a lab, it becomes more clear that the equation can't be linear or of only one variable.
The body can draw more or less energy from the exact same amount of food depending on the circumstance. Excrement is rich in calories, that's why we use it for fertilizer, fuel, and many exothermic reactions. We don't process nearly all of the calories we ingest. It is the body's ability to extract more or less of what we do ingest that leads to unpredictable and frustrating results.
This explains the plateau effect... when you get to a point where diet and exercise stop working and taking in less food and working out more don't result in weight loss. The body has changed the variables and is not playing by the old rules. Such variability leads many people to fall off the wagon and stop the diet and exercise altogether.
We now accept hormonal mood swings as commonplace and accepted excuses for abnormal behavior... once a month for most young women, chronically for the depressed, mid-life for many men, all puberty stricken youth, roid-raging dopers, menopausal and manopausal sufferers, pregnant women, angsty twenty somethings etc.
But what if hormones also play a similar annoying, powerful, and possibly destructive roll in making so many of us obese? What if the cure for obesity isn't diet and exercise any more than the cure for depression is thinking less negative and more positive thoughts. Sure, the "math" has to work that way, but you can either fight the symptoms and keep on fighting forever, or you can fight the cause and be done with it.
The diet and exercise message is out there, it just isn't working very well. Many people have altered their habits and used sheer will to apply diet and exercise to lose the weight, just like many people have found spiritual or positive thinking exercises effective treatments for the blues. But cures? I don't think so.
A recent study on rats was illuminating. It showed that blocking the receptors for Neuropeptide Y allowed fat rats to lose 90%+ of their excess body weight in a very short period of time, regardless of the diet.
Rats with faulty receptors for NPY never got fat, and rats that had low calories diets with normal receptors stayed thin too. The normal rats, though, would plump right up if given excess NPY.
That's good news, but only for future fat people. If you want to get thin now, there's only the treating the symptoms route.
And that's why you, me, and those two men have a hard road to hoe. The deck is stacked against us. Cliches abound. But the one advantage of fighting against a compounding problem like fat, where the more fat you have the more hormones the fat produces to keep itself there and add more, every pound you discard (it's not lost, I don't want to ever find it again!) the easier it becomes to work out longer and the smaller the enemy becomes.
So as long as we can survive the plateaus, where we aren't rewarded for the work until later, I think treating the symptoms is the best way to go.
BTW, I ate my way through Spain, Tapas and Pintxos a plenty, and still lost a stone. If I had to guess, it was small portions, fish instead of red meat, and the big meal for lunch and no corn syrup. I also wore out a brand new pair of shoes from walking so much. So that's my new goal, to wear out as many pairs of shoes as I can.
So until they produce the cure, happy trails.
Keep up the resolve.
I lost the equivalent of a small farmcollie last year, and have kept it off with little effort; had no idea where I was keeping it before, though my "friends" have been quick to supply opinions based on their views. (Something about Weebles wobbling.) Apparently weekend warfare and a moderately active job is insufficient past 35. I'm now back to my college weight, and in better shape than I was at 20.
I also followed the fad weight-loss plan of "eat less and exercise more." A Y membership helped, as did a nagging little program called Calorie King that I got for my Palm Pilot. I tell the box what I've eaten and what activities I've done, the box tells me how many more calories I can have that day, and I obey the box. Works, and has the effect of encouraging manual work and exercise -- it's like a token economy, where I trade exercise for food. I get no kickbacks from them.
The dogs have benefited, as one of the best ways to burn calories is to strap on a fairly heavy backpack and take everyone for a nice brisk packwalk somewhere hilly.
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