Books for the buff 
Tom Venuto: Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle
Detailed info on healthy nutrition, goal-setting and motivation, the basics of weight-training,
and cardio for fat loss. If you could
have just one volume on getting lean, this is it.
Ian
King, Lou Schuler: Men's Health The Book of Muscle
Terrific guide to weight training for
both sexes. High-quality photos, innovative exercises as well as standard
fare, good background in laymen's language.
Lou Schuler: The New Rules of Lifting for Women: Lift Like a Man, Look Like a Goddess
Tells women what they need to know about lifting weights: their workouts should be heavy and intense, just like a guy’s.
Barbara
J. Rolls: The Volumetrics Weight-Control Plan : Feel Full on Fewer Calories
The science of satiety. This book teaches real-world portion control and how
to make healthful, filling choices.
|
The February 2006 issue of O: The Oprah Magazine has an intriguing article about an obesity expert and physician who was once morbidly obese, weighing in at 290 pounds on a 5′ 2" frame.
Dr. Ward works with obese children, trying to help them learn behaviors that can reduce their weight and improve their health. The intriguing part–kudos to O–is that the interviewee pulls no punches when discussing the difficulty of maintaining weight loss and how easy it is to stray from good habits and regain the weight. She has lost 100 pounds and is working hard to lose more, and she discusses how essential it is for her to work out regularly.
Don’t believe anyone who suggests that weight loss can be maintained without exercise.
I gotta love Tom Venuto for introducing me to the zig-zag concept of caloric reduction. It really, really works, and as empirical evidence, I have two new fat-loss stories to tell you.
But first a little digression about counting calories. Why do people resist this idea so vigorously? Maybe part of it is that we’re so easily suckered by the latest bestselling diet book and the idea that there’s a secret, magical method for weight loss. Bottom line is, any plan that works does so because you’re taking in fewer calories and/or expending more calories through activity. End of story. Calorie counting may be dull, but it works, and once you get the hang of it, it’s easy.
So here are the success stories. Both involve women near my age (one’s 50, once’s in her mid-50s) who have been working on weight loss for more than a year. One had stalled out completely, one had actually gained back a few pounds. Broken record that I am, I keep preaching calorie counting and the zig-zag.
Part of my spiel: Unless you’re counting calories, you have no idea how much you’re actually taking in. And if you’re not losing weight (despite exercising and eating healthy foods), you’re eating exactly as much as you need to maintain rather than lose (barring a genetic or metabolic disorder).
Lo and behold: Both women recently started zig-zagging. Both started losing weight–including my good friend who honestly didn’t think she was eating more than 1,300 or 1,400 calories a day. Guess what? She was.
I have to crow a little because after needling her for nearly a year to try the zig-zag, her plateau (of more than a year) is a thing of the past, and she’s lost nearly 10 pounds in about six weeks.
As for me, I’m working out, maintaining my weight loss pretty effortlessly, and have lost another couple of inches over the past six months. Most my skirts and trousers are size 6 now, with an occasional size 4.
I was ruminating the other day that of all the people I know who have lost weight during the period of my weight-loss adventure (September 2003 through the present)–a not inconsiderable number–all but a handful have gained it back.
Those who haven’t regained (including myself) are the people who 1) exercise regularly and 2) have made permanent changes to their eating habits.
That’s boring, right? You know all this. I know all this. I just feel depressed about all the hard work these people have done and now need to do all over again.
A good friend–someone I’m training–was talking the other day about how she misses the bakery muffin she used to enjoy every morning from the shop across from her office. My advice was to let the muffin be a special treat that she enjoys maybe once a month while trying to lose weight and maybe once a week or twice a month when she’s in maintenance. Everything tastes better when it’s a special treat.
So boring as the concept of maintenance is (and the general idea of exercising self-control on a daily basis), the payoff is looking great every day and even better, feeling healthy and energetic.
True story.
This spring the sister-in-law of a woman I work with was using a treadmill at a local gym–the gym I belong to, as it happens. She suffered a brain aneurism and literally keeled over. She didn’t die right away, as people who have this sort of injury often do. The staff at the gym called an ambulance, but no one knew who the woman was, so she had to be taken to the hospital as a "Jane Doe." (Unfortunately, she did die a few days later.)
The staff figured out who she was eventually–by having all the women using the club go to the ladies’ locker room and put a hand on the lockers they were using. The locker without a member standing in front of it belonged to the woman who’d had the aneurism. So probably 15 minutes after the woman collapsed, her identity was known–and only then could her family be contacted.
I’m telling this story because it occurred to me that if (God forbid) I keel over at the gym, I want to make it easy for people to know who I am. I don’t expect that to happen, but neither did the woman described above. And she was my age–late 40s and in good shape.
So I had a dog tag made (at gotags.com) with my name and the home, work, and cell numbers of my husband so that he could be contacted in case of emergency. The tag also indicates that I’m a Roman Catholic, and if I had any medical conditions that needed to be identified right away, I would have listed them too.
I had a tag made for my husband too.
Now when we’re at the gym, we wear our tags.
Something to think about.
Forgot to mention in my last post that my next set of goals, after I drop the five pounds of avoirdupois, has to do with maintaining leanness while increasing muscle mass. Would like to see whether I can surpass the musculature of my late 20s.
OK, so I’m finally feeling a bit more motivated about dropping five more pounds of fat. It’s harder to be motivated because I’m pretty satisfied with where I am.
But I’ll be turning 49 in just short of three weeks, and it occurred to me, wouldn’t it be cool to turn 49 weighing the same as I did at 29? I know the potential logical flaw in the thinking. I was a gym rat then, and if I were a sedentary person now, I could weigh the same but still be much fatter because of lower lean body mass.
But thanks to my return to the gym two years ago, I’ve regained my former muscle (and dropped the 30-plus pounds of fat I added between 35 and 46).
Maybe a bit of public accountability will help my campaign.
To help me keep track of what works, I keep daily records. On an Excel spreadsheet I track calories (three days of reduced calories, one maintenance day, and so on), and on a paper chart I note the date, whether I did my 30-minute dog walk, whether I worked out with weights, whether I did cardio, how many calories I consumed, my weight that day (I weigh probably once or twice a week), a skinfold measurement (I measure about once a week), and my lean body mass and bodyfat in pounds.
Tomorrow’s a maintenance day–what fun. On maintenance day I don’t usually count calories; I just eat pretty much whatever I want as long as it’s healthy and in reasonable portions. If I want something unhealthy (e.g., something sweet), I have a smallish portion. But usually all I want to do on maintenance day is enjoy regular food in slightly greater quantities.
I’ll keep you posted. I’d really like to celebrate my birthday in super shape.
This MSNBC.com story has me shocked, shocked.
Doctor in trouble for calling patient obese
As doctors warn more patients that they should lose weight, the advice has backfired on one doctor, with a woman filing a complaint with the state, saying he was hurtful, not helpful.
A patient should complain if a doc says "You’re a fat pig" or something similarly disrespectful. But the term "obese" is factual, quantitative, objective. You reach a certain level of bodyweight and the excess is adipose tissue rather than muscle, and bingo: you’re obese, end of story.
Here’s what the doc says he said:
“I told a fat woman she was obese,” Bennett says. “I tried to get her
attention. I told her, ‘You need to get on a program, join a group of
like-minded people and peel off the weight that is going to kill you.’"
Are we a nation of sniveling ninnies who can’t face reality? Is there anything wrong with what this doctor said? If I show up at a doctor’s office, isn’t it his or her job to tell me what my physical problems are and how I’m responsible for dealing with them?
MSNBC.com’s cover story, a few minutes ago, was "Obesity rates climbing in nearly all states."
Here’s the blurb:
The percentage of Americans with bulging waistlines is growing in just about every state, with residents of Alabama joining the obesity ranks the fastest. Only Oregon failed to fatten, according to a report.
The situation is particularly bad in the Southeast, my good ol’ region.
The interesting part is discussion of whether the government should be involved or not. Free-market groups don’t think so. Like it or not, the government is involved in agricultural policy and in many other areas that influence what we eat, from crop subsidies to oversight of school-lunch programs.
I think it’s clear the government should have some role as long as we taxpayers shoulder such a huge burden to provide medical care for the poor and the elderly. The public-health costs of obesity are staggering and not just in sheer dollars.
A companion article, "Farm subsidies not in sync with food pyramid," is also worth reading. Here’s the blurb:
Two-thirds of Americans are overweight, and the government tells them they should eat better. But it doesn’t put its money where their mouths are.
The point is that subsidies for foods we ought to eat more of (fruits, vegetables) would influence (that is, increase) our consumption of those foods. One of the side effects of grain subsidies is the plethora of worthless junk food available. Read the labels and see how many junk foods are produced without corn and soy products. Not many.
Here’s a quote from the story:
“Here we are as a society, talking constantly about obesity and diets,
and yet our farm policies are not structured to encourage the kind of
diet that the food pyramid suggests we should adopt,” said Ralph
Grossi, president of American Farmland Trust, a group that advocates
conservation on the farm.
I had breakfast with a good friend this morning, and the conversation turned to weight loss and exercise: specifically, why do people who know what they need to do not do it–and how can they motivate themselves to do it?
Well, it was a long conversation, and I recommended Tom Venuto’s e-book Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle (see a description under the heading Books for the buff in the left frame), as I’ve so often done. My friend and I talked about the importance of setting goals, how to carve out gym time, how often to eat, the importance of protein, the necessity of healthy carbs for people who exercise, how to cultivate satiety (see Barbara Rolls’s book Volumetrics, also briefly described in my book list), and so on.
My friend knows more or less what she needs to do; she just needs a little help in getting started again.
When we talked about calories, I was horrified to hear what she thought a low-calorie daily intake should be: about 700 calories. That’s terrific if your goal is to reduce your metabolism, slow your weight loss, burn off muscle tissue, and guarantee that the rebound weight gain that follows leaves you fatter than ever, with less lean body mass (and thus a reduced ability to burn calories).
Never, never, never reduce calories more than 20 to 25 percent from normal unless you’re doing a medically supervised fast.
Okay, I’m off the soapbox now.
Yesterday was chest/triceps/shoulders day at the gym. These days I’m doing less cardio after my weight workout and more total sets during the workout. At the moment am more desirous of increasing lean body mass than losing the five pounds I could lose (if I could get a bit more worked up about it).
In any case, I’ve added upright rows with dumbbells to my repertoire. Years ago I found that upright rows with a bar stressed my right shoulder, but I have no problem with dbs.
So I’m in the middle of my first set–about in the middle of my workout (post bench, post first couple sets of dips)–and suddenly I’m aware that this movement is, well, pure pleasure. It just feels terrific, delightful, satisfying, good. I enjoy most sets (on most days) to one degree or another, but this is the first time I remember thinking, literally, This is pure pleasure. Followed up with an immediate set of dips and had a foolish grin on my face . . . because it too felt so good.
Once upon a time, when I was a lass in my 20s, I used to run about 35 miles a week. Every now and then I’d experience "runner’s high"–fueled by a blast of endorphins, I suppose.
I don’t know if Friday’s experience was physiologically the same, but it felt the same psychologically–a "peak experience," one of those fleeting moments that arrives unbidden and lingers in memory.
|
|
