Getting Thinner After Yeasr

Now the author is pleased to report that some small changes in life have resulted in a major and stable weight loss over the last six or seven months.

I have gone down 12kg from my maks weight and around 7 kg from my best low weight - that is 30 llbs and almost 20 respectively in old money.

How have I done this?  Well firstly, why was I not achieving this when in fact I was training maybe five hours a week?


1) Training is not enough, Train, train some more and do other activities

2) Avoid the  Fat Gain / Maintain traps


1) Training was something I luckily did a lot of before. However I wasnt quite doing enough and I was falling into one of the traps of injesting compensating calories with high energy snacking.

Often too if I trained I would do little else that day. All my training for four years was conditioning Cardio too. So the three things I have done are:

i) Focus on being physically active IN ADDITION to cardio training
ii) Extend the duration and / or intensity of cardio vascular sessions
iii) Take up weight and stregnth training

Combined with dog walking and going the the shops, gardening and so on, together with training I am up around 8 to 12 hours a week movement. Weight training is also important, although I am not a full believer in muscle mass, it is maybe that the bodies' own steroid hormone production rises enough to burn fat. Regularity has been important and I have had tips on very effective body buuilding techniques which dont use large lifts. Rather you hold tension in the muscle in stead of locking out, come off the lift 4 time slower than you press or pull into it, and do some light lifts which use the muscle group in between your set and thus hold blood pressure in them without straining the muscles into injury.

I eased up from two session a week in the gym, where in addtion I must say I nearly always do some conditioning and work in leg sets or sit ups with upper body sets so my heart rate is higher than the usual gym lizard. I was conscious of then of being active in addition to these sessions as in dog walks etc and also take outdoors cardio on the bike, or earlier in the year it wa XC skis. Just grab the time, the kids are older and I found that I could nab an hour or two on sunday mornings, friday or saturday evenings, the odd afternoon or mid evening.

Regularity is important because it helps maintain muscle mass and grow it, and keeps your metabolism higher all the time, this all also meaning your hormonal switches are telling your fat cells to give up their content for use elsewhere!

Those hormones you will have heard of - adrenalin of course, plus noradrenalin and cortisol. All work to force the body to use burn sugar a little more and more importanly act directly on fat cells ( adipose cells) to release their fat content via hydrolisis. A heightened level of these then breaks down fat, and if you can maintain that from a good regular training programme with intensity which leads to their production, ie grunting and straining quite a bit, then you will magically burn off fat.

In relation to this, we mention that weight training is good and it releases other anabolic hormones too which divert energy to building the body. It can be that other sports get  your adrenalin going more than the usual condiitoning on the treadmill, for example an hours football where you take it a little too seriously and get the adrenalin going and the stress to win and not lose up!

I noticed it first on my face, then on my beer gut and now I have only my love handles and some loose fat on my thighs to work on!


2) The Fat Traps

One i have mentioned, so lets list them all anyway.

1) Peaking blood sugar
2) Snacking with high calorie, refined foods after training
3) Starving your body too long

Lets start with the last one first, because it is the big surprise to me and many others.

That you are in fact starving and getting fatter!

In western culture the most common form of "temporary starvation" is from dinner to breakfast, and people who miss breakfast may find they are slimming, but may well find they rebound back once they try to eat normally again. The body does not like being depleted of calories from digestion more than average 10 hours. From dinner at say 6 pm to breakfast at 7am there has gone 12 hours, a little less when you take digestion into account, but it is too long.

For care homes it is recommended residents eat four meals a day, which are quite small portions compared to what young people eat, but still make up 1500 - 2100 kcal a day. Supper is seen as important and some there is room too for fruit and bread inbetween those times, and higher calorie treats for those who struggle with their appetite too.

Here though we come into a slight dilema and that relates to the other two issues. Snacking is bad if we injest too many simple carbohydrate and oil/ fat content and carry on to eat the same ahem, generous portions for dinner.

Starvation though leads to a simple set or hormonal responses in the body. Lay down some of your calories as fat because you have experience a fast. You need to teach your body that it isnt going to starve!


2) Snacking - as said above we want to snack actually, but what we are doing is spreading our calorie intake out over the day and meeting our body's need for replenishment after in particular exercise or a long time between meals.

What we also want to snack on is not chips (crisps to you and me), nuts, chocolate and those dairy and other energy drinks high is maltodextrines and simpler sugars. We want to snack on fruit, especially bannanas and pears, bread slices with protein topping or small portions left over dinner with a protein content.

If we snack we can either then count our calories, or we can just be conscious and reduce the amount of main meal we eat.

3) Avoiding blood sugar peaking

Here we get into a major crux of being sporty yet fatty, when taken in combination with that self rewarding snacking or huge hunger pangs at 5 pm after work and / or training right after the jhob.

Let us start with the low hanging ahem, fruit, or rather dessert. With a typical western lifestyle and main meal diet, you do not need to eat dessert. Nor do you need to have a starter. A decent portion of dinner will maks give you 800 kcal, and on average around half that. Dessert brings in additional, high sugar calories on top of a western high starch based dinner, and your blood sugar will peak beyond that which can sensibly be stored as glycogen in muscles and liver, and the body will lay this down as fat. Just a few micrograms maybe per dessert, but it is teaching itself to lay down fat fgor hard times because you are experiencing plenty now!

You need 2200 kcal -2500 kcal per day as a more active man, 10 -15% less for women by in large to keep up your energy level if you are physically active 8 or more hours a week. Otherwise you risk starvation mode.  The issue is then to spread out your calorie intake such that you avoid peaking over blood sugar.

Unfortunetly our modern wheats, white rice and use of potatoes have a draw back, in that they both have a lot of simple chain starches which are rapidly broken into blood sugar by enzymes like amylase. Spelt and other tubers like sweet potatoes have branched starches in higher amounts and this takes more time to digest, Also of course, higher fiber grains lock away this starch more so it takes longer to digest. This means we can peak over max sugar and lay down fat from too large a meal eaten quickly.

Another really good thing to slow down digestion then is to combine protein with those carbohydrates, which in the west we tend to do for lunch and dinner but not so much for breakfast. Breakfast is an absolutely key meal in dieting and good nutrition. I started eating a BIGGER breakfast than ever before, almost of bruch like proportions and was very decided about waht I really liked, Luckily I am up 0550 week days so my brain is not too fussy to demand variety. I went over to eating porridge AND an egg AND an open sandwich with protein content.

Protein when taken in reasonable quantities together with carbos does two things. Firstly it gives a quite quick signal to your brain that you are sated, you are satisfied, your hunger is abated. This may be in fact because of the second effect. Protein mixed in slows down the digestion of carbo in the gut because maybe there are more protealases needing to be made which gut cells then divert some energy and effort  from making carbo cracking amylase.

Protein has been a key in the (otherwise unhealthily practiced ) Atkins Diet. Atkins worked a little for me, but I rebounded quite quickly after. It did make me think of the carbo loads I need and how they might peak, but it wasnt until I came into BIG BREAKFASTING that I realised how effective protein is. I go from roughly 0650 to 1130 without feeling at all hungry most days at work or college.



Then I eat a bigger lunch that before, with three slices of bread (two protein, one sweet topping) and two or even three pieces of fruit. This is with wholemeal bread, low fat protein toppings and a moderate amount of jam.

I do then get hungry late afternoon and will try a banana on my commute BEFORE i reach the gym to avoid this hunger, eating it by the clock at 1515 to 1545 rather than waiting to be gymn, Also I then eat around 2030 to 2130 with a simple fruit or a single slice of bread and say small glass milk.

Refined sugar is also a key area to reduce, and that includes grapes, oranges and apples and juices of those fruits because they contain high levels of sucrose and fruktose which are easily digested. Sweets and especially sugar sweetened fizzy drinks, and those new energy drinks are definetly to be taken in very, very small quantitie or infrequently. You can have it all, but in much smaller quantuities and take them instead of your snack rather than just after a meal as is often tradition in the west.

Protein then helps slow down carbohydrate digestion and absorption and this reduces the chances that you go into peak blood sugar. Combined with whole grain carbos this makes for very healthy eating and is a bit part of the plan to diet effectively and stabily, by small changes in lifestyle which dont annoy or fatigue you!

Goals, Patience, Bad Habits

I have actually lost around a stone since i started my focus on 2 hour duration exercise sessions in january, ie almost 7kg. That is then above average loss compared to the big diet study i linked to in the last blog, almost double. My goal is then 18kg in one year, so I am about a third of the way in with almost two thirds of the time gone.

To make me feel guilty i have had three weekends of over-beer ration in a row and I have not been careful with extras and portion control the last week, with disrupted days. Some days are very good though with a low appetite compared to my previous gluttony for extras and high calorie travel meals.

Now i have to return to the slog as it seems sometimes, but already i can see the benefits on the scales and in the mirror. This time though i am not resting on my laurels and tightened stomach muscles. Muscle is heavier than fat, but also holds a good stone of fat around my middle in better in the mirror. So i mustnt kid myself on, it is all there as it was when I was ten years younger before i got really bloated. For a long time I looked like a sporty guy on either end with a couch potatoe in the middle, and I just held myself in. Then my weight stabalised miraculously at 118kg, 19 stone uk, given how many extras i considered were par for the course. 99 kg is my target btw. 112 was achieved, may have slipped back a little with the beers?

So dont kid yourself that this approach is quick nor that you can just stop the discipline when you can suck and pucker your stomach in : let it hang out, pinch those love handles, fondle those boobs.

In the long term the diet is a life diet, while the exercise is then reduced although i think i will keep up one long session a week.

By determination i got six and a little hours last week quality training before the surprise monsoon conditions sat it. Now I am looking at doing one three hour session, two two hour sessions and a one hour harder session before the autumn sets in with its dank mists and grey days come along.

I thought I had hit peak weight loss but that was a dip from doing sessions which stretched out more than 2 hours and from being very strict, surpassing my extras prohibition! However I do get that tank empty feeling at around 1 hr 45 on my bike so every minute after that is effectively fat burning, and if I avoid sugary replenishment then fat burning continues until the next meal.

Equivalence In Diets Which Lack Duration Exercise

All diets 'have similar results' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-29031985

This is an interesting study, a meta study of long term results, more because it should point to two of my own conclusions about dieting. Firstly, the weight loss takes a much longer time than people imagine or rather hope for. Just under 8kg for a year's atkins or weight-watchers. Secondly you have to comply of course, strictly to the diet, and this research actually excludes those who do not comply, which is actually useful to compare the real efficacy of diets versus each other.

The conclusion is as the title> there is  no actual huge difference over the long term if you manage to stay on the diet. These calorie counting diets and low carbo, high protein diets which achieve the same for glycogen, blood sugar and fat burning then, by in large do not have a component of exercise and those that have, there is a lack of prescription on duration.

Weeks update now is the interesting effects on my own appetite. I have started to get less satisfied by meals unfortunetly, so will need to work on chewing and distractions and water after dinner. I am also more often a wee bit hungry, a bit of a pit in the stomach, but I am less actually tempted to snack or use up my fruit allowance.

I have spread my exercise sessions this week a bit more and will try to get another extra session in the weekend, which may take me up to 7 or 8 hours. Weeks run monday to sunday if you remember, such that weekend allowances of extras are not split !

Hidden Calories

Today I came upon a trap which you should be aware of.

I train like I sai in my last blog, a little at the top end of the fat burning bpm zone and into the conditioning zone because I have the luxury of middle of the day hours to put in, while I spend evenings and weekends with the family. So the last two times I have been out on the longest cycle route I like to do, I have gone empty and hit the wall about 6km from finishing. Those last six kilometers are hard. The body has exhausted all its carbohydrate stores, and I probably have had the runner's wall, a big imbalance in salts.

After exercising I then allowed myself a small can of italien tuna and some nuts, with a quite low calorie sports drink before hand. I also bought a frappe cappucino. Last time I read the label of these rather delicisous little treats from our national dairy producer, Tine, I saw that they contained about 3 spoonfuls of sugar. Wrong, They are actually 62 kcal per 100g. That confuses it more: is coffee heavier or lighter than water?  So it now means this is nearly 200 kcal.

Thus you can be fooled into thinking a snack is a non event in the calorie count. It could be a drink or a small cake or a sports bar. Dont skim read to the calories. Remember to do this also when you are doing your cathartic calorie count of all your extras in life. Be honest about what you take as treats, luxuries, beer and larger or repeat portions of dinner. Weigh some items if you are not sure, and compare a few different calorie counting web sites to see what they mean by a portion.

Calories are difficult but also there is a really easy rule. Here's why:

Calorific value is calculated by literally burning the foodstuff in pure oxygen, and then measuring a volume of water around the glass bubble the burning happens in, to attain how many kilojoules it has used in rising the water temperature per gram of food. However the body does not digest all foods as well, nor does it metabolise some as effectively as burning in pure O2. Nuts and sweetcorn are notorious undigested left overs in your faeces. So is a lot of longer fibre carbohydrates or those bound up tightly in whole grain foods. You shit out calories. This muddies the waters a bit, but let us not follow that debate.

The easy part as the alternative  then is that anything with a high sugar content and particularily a high sugar and fat content  is going to be high on the hit list of cutting right back on, rationing down to say 150 kcal a couple of times a week. Also crisps and ground nuts which are high simple chain starch based and have a lot of oils and fats in them. Other nuts like hazel nuts are not so bad, but I would say limit total intake of nuts and crisps to between 50 g and 100g PER WEEK. That is not a lot, a small portion. Also then limit cakes or buns to ONE A WEEK, and check that it is under 400kcal. Alternatively cut it up or buy small sized cakes but be disiplined to 350 kcal per week.

There is or has been recently a lot of research going on about training on a very low carbo diet, and I am not an advocate of a high fat, high meat diet. In any case a lot of low carbo recipies in the books or web sites are actually very healthy, for example salmon with asparagus or broccoli. Ketosis, catabolising fat, is not a normal, sustainable form of energy provision in western humans. Ikinuits had a shorrt life expectancy before western medcine came to them. So I am a critic of the long term high fat, low carbo diet, while I can see that reducing starchy calories can help. Training on low carbo is a painful affair I found and due to this and the high colestrol intake, I fell off the Atkins wagon. 

I am proposing that we simply match what the human body is meant to do> go on a long hunting trip , burn up sugars and then wander back home with the kill while burning fat reserves. I say that you have to go out and hit the glycogen wall , sometimes like me today, consciously in order for the body to start catabolising its fat reserves. The low carbo diets make the short cut or starving your body of anything which can make glycogen and forcing the fat system on. I dont believe this is natural or sustainable in the long term, but could agree that sedentary candidates who are in a danger zone for obesity could benefit from this instead of exercise in the short term weight loss phase.

Some research seems contradictory, but the medical establishment knows that a low quality diet of sugars, refined starches and saturated fats is what is on the menu of the majority of western patients who have heart attacks, even if they arre not very overweight at all. It is most likely the combination of the western super carbo consumer life style which  is so dangerous, although I suspect that long term high fat low carbo diets are going to prove dangerous to mortality and later life morbidity. I stand to be proven wrong of course.

The consumer snack and soft drinks  industry stands in line at every retail food outlet to pump you with high sugar, high refined starch, high fat products and hides a good deal of deadly palm oil in innocious products like even raisins. The drinks industry has been better to respond to consumer demand for low calorie options of course since the 1970s dieting fad. However the snack industry is currently wrapping a whole load of quite unhealthy bars up as ' sports' oriented products and this not good. Read the label about the kcal inhold, and see how much it all weights.

I found the best snack trade off right now is the chocolate Alpen  bar, at 167kcal. less than half a comparable sized chocolate bar, and with mixed whole grains.

The mantra is limit snacks, subsitute in fruit, and avoid super sizing drinks and meal times.

Sporty and Little Thinner. Pre Weigh In Chat

I am a little excited about my weigh in but really I shouldnt be. For any sporty fatty who wants to lose maybe 2 stone tops, it is better to take it off two pounds at a time. In metric, that is 12kg and 1 kg per month, so that makes a nice round year.

I have been suddenly going down at a kilo a week, and in the holiday month I managed a kilo, so I am pretty anxious about the weekly weigh in tommorrow, but actually that is just going against my own philosophy ! Go slow , stay off for good, change for ever.

I have a little higher a figure 18kg which is around 3 stone to lose. Also I am being a house husband for a while so I can train a little harder during the day. This means that I am up in the top range on some of my cycling tours, pushing 75 / 85 % max bpm during a good proportion of my daytime tours between house work and picking up the kids. For people in full time jobs who feel quite fatigued, it is best to be in the lower segment of fat burning bpm, around 50% to 65% as this will tire you out less and require less concentration. It may seem like a lot of work, and sonme weeks  you may not make 7 hours, but if you can do 5 by stretching out sessions, and squeezing more time somewhere, then you will get the benefit of life changes. If you keep to 7 hours a week, then you will probably see a faster weight loss at some point  in your six months to a year programme.

light is at the end of the tunnel. Like a year out to do an MBA or become a firefighter, the investment in time and the discipline with extras should be very worth while in the long term. After the weight loss period the maintainance period means you can go back  to  a more typical varied training calender, but remember that you can never go back to all those extras again, 22 000 Kcal / month in my case.

I feel my appetite is under control, although you have to be weary.

queue next blog

Simple Arithmetic Deal Making for the Slimmer Sporty-Fatty

In my last blog i did some simple calorie counting arithmetic, adding up JUST the calories from high calorie treats, beer, snacking and extra normal food portions per week, and then multplied by four to get a short month's worth.

The pre amble here for you dear also Sporty-Fatty, is that I do not binge eat or snack frequently,  i just know like anyone that i have some beers some nights, some chocolate after meals, a cake or two here or there,  and so on and so on. All small offences, and anyway I train so I should get some freebies right?

Well that sum of lifes wee luxuries came to an astonishing 22,000 kcal per month. That is around 3kg ,half a stone of fat from what i considered a perfectly reasonable allowance of goodies. Put it another way:  It is almost ten extra days worth of eating per month.

However by in large when i was training short and often,  i wasnt putting on weight, but did put it on at xmas or on holiday. When i set out on  fat-burning longer duration sessions january this year, 2014, I very slowly then, over five months,  lost three kilos (half a stone)

Simple arithmetic: i was doing arround 24 hours training exercise a month  @ 600kcal per hour on average, so was burning off around 14 000 kcal per month in addition to just being alive.

In net effect then compared to intake of just extras as the enemy, i should have been losing the battle by 8 000 kcal per month and therefore putting on a kilo. But I was slimming a bit, at about 650g per month. That is about 5000 kcal equivalent.

So then I thought, wait up here, the longer training sessions are switching my fat catabolism on at last, since coming off the atkins a year before and putting all that diet loss back on. But compared to my bad habit calorific intake , I am getting a net better net negative effect anyway (???)

The reasons for this discrepancy in my calculations could be several or a combination: Perhaps as a big bloke i burn more like 1000kcal per hour on skis or the mountain bike. Perhaps my treats actually in part constitute  say 500 kcal per day of my non training calorie needs. Perhaps my body has learnt to catabolise fat and does this after exercise when I am recovering,  or maybe at night ?

What ever the causes,  I was slimming ever so slowly without actually changing underlying diet : i was not going crazy in comparison to the excesses of Christmas 2013 and last years vacation in cheap beer and wine land, Denmark. However per month i was going mental in taking ten extra days total intake in treats and extras!

It seemed though a lot of training hours for 3kg and vulnerable to putting it back on if injured. I considered a back up plan of atkins again. Then i went back to my joke of comparing atkins to a diet with no beer and sweeties!

So here  I saw the opportunity to grasp my appetite and lifestyle while demands of work and family allow for 5-7 hours training per week in two to four sessions.

Basically i can eat a few treats to keep myself sane.

Here is what i decided to allow myself since  i was going down in weight a little anyway without limiting my extras well:

Two beers a week, 400kcal
100g chocolate.     450kcal
1 cake bit / muffin 400 kcal
50g nuts/ crisps.    250 kcal
Two extra portio.   600 kcal
                                ====
Total per week.      2100kcal
Per month c.         9000kcal

Versus calorie burn:
                              14 000kcal per month

Net effect.           - 5000 kcal per month

The last three months I have lost a kilo per month with fairly good levels of "compliance" say around 90% for the cut back on extras,  and reaching 7 training hours per week.

This is as noted above, a kcal net minus less than the theorised 7000 kcal /kg . This does not trouble me ! There can be some tissue fluid loss. More likely i am burning a training relating 20 000 kcal per month because i use more per hour and i go onto burn fat in particular upto an hour after training.

So in effect i have decided to ONLY count the extra calories on top of what I usually eat. I actually avoid desserts, but have a yoghurt twice a week and maybe an ice-cream dessert. As long as I train and avoid extra portions of these I can continue then. 

Also i take fruit and wine as "free" calories because I consume them in moderation. Exclude more than one banana a day or one 50g portion grapes though. Wine means a bottle per week of normal red or white. Avoiding doing it all in one night that is!

Another change I made was being careful not to snack before or after exercise by planning out meals to take, or planning to eat at a time where i avoid snacking in between. Alternatively,  the snack is healthy and replaces a meal. Or i count the snack as one of my two extra portions dinner allowance per week.

Also on the point of extending your fat burn after a two to three hour session, in recovery modus , avoid simple sugar sources like the plague for an hour. A banana gives quite slow blood sugar release as it is digested so is ideal for example, right after exercise. Two bannanas ,some nuts, and an apple would constitute a meal post session.

So it certainly isn't monastic at all, but the key is to keep the training to over two hours for at least two sessions a week, and then avoid snacking and adhere to the weekly quota.

Now into my fourth month and having had a mixed active /sedentary holiday, I am still on track 1kg per month but also i am starting to find it much easier to conform to the avoid-extras-dieting side, and my appetite is starting to go down.

In essenced what i present above is a target of 7 hours duration exercise per week and a limit to my extras to 2100 kcal.

By default i have counted the calories for you ! The fatty calories are all in our extras and luxuries, not from a 'staple, balanced diet' which includes usual single plate portions of protein, fats, green vegetables and carbos.

For your own sporty-fatty calculation, I bet you that you were like me and taking in currently a net surplus on paper of about 5000 to 10,000 kcal/month verus exercised hours at maybe 800kcal per hour but short duration.

For me the bug bear was beer, 10 to 12 a week before. Here I have totally decimated intake. Poor me? Well no, wine and clean spirits are free and i take a chilled fizzy water or diet cola as an alternative "cold one".  Everything else is ' halved' but more over to that, it is controlled while still being a nice treat to look forward to.

The other bug bear for me was what i once called my post exercise "snackette", which filled in during the time it took to arrange dinner. With planning I now avoid this unless the "snackette" replaces a meal, or if i downsize the meal ,or if I count one of my weekly extra meal portion allowance. Also a snackette should be healthy: a whole meal bread sandwich, a fruit bowl, 50g of nuts and raisins.

My final general black dog on the shoulder was justifying a lot of additional intake of calories by actually having exercised in forty minute to one hour sessionsp, two to five times a week. This plagued me for years and gave me a super-appetite. Also this was a hang over from old cycling days where carbo loading for a four or five hour training run, or a race, was a necessity: stuff yourself or go empty.

I think there are many sport forty somethings or even younger folk for whom this is hitting the nail right on the head. Also for the  onlh wee bit chubby sporty, who is maybe at a  competitive level but still carries a bit of unsightly lard.

My point of view is that if you are going to count calories then start with your sociable drinking in the pub ,then sweeties and cakes ,then salty snacks, then any more than two juices / 500ml sugary drinks per day, more than three desserts or starters per weekx, then also extra portions at meals. Your regular diet as the lay person and sporty type is likely to be a healthy balanced diet which you do not need to alter the core of. Also if you change your duration up to two hour sessions, two to three times a week you can live easily with some wee luxuries and loose weight in a sustainable and healthy way.

Sports diet supplements (which are over 200kcal per half litre or 250g)  are a trap: they are for endurance sports or if you train very regularly and hard, with a total of over 10 hours per week. Despite being healthier than sweets or cola, they are extras, to be considered as such in the 5-7 hour week plan.

Why We Are Sporty Fatties ?

The answer to why a person can train hard three to four times a week but still be fat is that on net, we in western countries are eating way too much.

Diets in the traditional starvation sense, are both counter productive and outright boring for many. I tried atkins amongst others and found it a bit dull, but more over it was really expensive and difficult to coordinate with family meals.

But I did loose a good few kilos on the atkins, putting them straight back on though after i got bored with it. And the Atkins diet got me thinking : okay all the naughty luxuries i eat and drink are high in simple carbohydrates. What if instead of atkins you just cut out the beer and the sweets?

Another reason i came off atkins was because i wanted to train cardiovascular condition and frankly i believe it is not a healthy combination.

So that got me thinking after i had put all the weight back on. I trained then five months in fat burning duration and intensity and lost maybe three kilos. This seemed pretty poor effect from 7 hours a week training in long sessions. It would take me several years to get down to 100kg. Also what if i couldnt train?

I went back to thinking about the atkins diet and cutting out sugary extras. What if I just cut them out and did nothing else (apart from my training)?

I decided then to count up my extras and got a shock which both explained why I wasnt losing weight and why back in the late 90s I had managed to put on an unwanted 3 stone despite being quite fit.

Take beer for starters of course. 150kcal per pint appx (c. Half liter) Beer is not so evil, in fact the sugars in beer are short chain starches and without the alcohol in it, beer would be a good endurance sportsdrink or liquid breakfast with medium to slow release carbo's. However many beers doth a beer belly consist of. So eight beers a week is 1000 kcal. Doesnt sound so much?

But then take the higher calorific nuts and crisps we take with said beer. That was about 200g at a wacking 500kcal per 100. Another 1000kcal per week. Hmmm.

Then take a regular "extra" - an additional glass of OJ in the morning and several glasses of squash with dinner. We can also round that off to 1000kcal per week.

Now chocolate and cakes or buns:  one 250g bar per week @ 450 kcal/100g per week and a couple of cakes @ 250kcal each. That is for point of arguement 1500kcal per week.

You start to see the sudden awakening I was having to my theory, which started in fact as a joke about atkins compared to just cutting out beer and sweets.

Now i could find the last culprit for luxuries or extras and that was simple: extra portions of dinner. This was happening three to five times a week because i was feeling hungry from training or the food was just there, in the bowl or pan on the table which is how we like to have a family dinner or candle light for two.  So that mysteriously enough I could approximate to 1000 kcal per week.

Now here comes the shock : i had been looking to train up condition gradually with long 2 hour sessions, and expecting weight loss to be best measurable  as per month.  So i then added up my weekly "extras and luxuries"  times four, and this is how it went:

1000 extra dinners
1500 choco/cakes
1000 exta juices
1000 crisps /nuts
1000 beers
====
5500 kcal per week: 

A staggering 22,000 kcal per Month!!!!

What was staggering was that I could easily allow myself all those extras without thinking much about being a candidate for obesity! Read again- they probably seem a reasonable set of little luxuries to you, and if you are from east coast usa, a paltry amount.

Now dieticians and physiologists disagree a little on aboslute quantity of calories per kilo of fat deposited (7000 to 9000 kcal per kilo) so let us bet on the high deposit side, and that means that i could be in theory larding up 3kg per month. (About a half a stone )

The fact is I wasnt laying on that much weight usually. However my weight probably did peak at 120 kg and was often around 118kg ( over 18 stone) and my waist line was pushing out of size forty trousers.  The fact was, as we will see in my next blogg, that I was exercising and trying to be "grey calorie burn" active, walking about and so on. The fact also was that as i exercised longer, so crept in more snacks and more extra portions of dinner and OJ to the level above, because i was hungrier and I was thinking i should keep my blood sugar up to avoid exhaustion ( fat chance!! Excuse the pun).

At a level of five to seven hours training a week, averging maybe 24 hours per month, then my weight was creeping down a little but the trouble being that my appetite was creeping up! So the danger is when I get an injury or holidays and xmas come that bang, three weeks go and i eat 18000 kcal in extras and put almost half a stone on again.

I decided then upon a compromise as you will read in the next blog.

The Midlife Spare Tyre Road to Damascus

Now you have read the introduction you know you are in the target audience so to speak: You are the cyclist with the beer gut encapsulated in lycra like a defrosted turkey in plastic. You are the rugger-bugger who wears an XXXXL rugby shirt and has thighs as round as average women's waistlines.  You are the jogging soccer mum who has extra love handles where you really don't want them. You are the five-a-side veteran sitting eating chips over a beer every time you finish an hour or so on the pitch.

There are several big realistaions you are going to have to make on your road to Damascus:

1) I am too fat , I really am going to do something about it

2) I am eating too much

3) I am not exercising correctly to be thin

Do you want to lose weight?

Look at yourself in the mirror and look closely at photos of yourself when you were young, trained and slank. You are over weight and you may look a bit ridiculous in sports clothes. You can though get a much better body by slimming and training, it does not need to be perfect or as good as you were when you peaked in your twenties. For some semi sporty types, they may end up with a better level of health than they have ever had though on this regime!

Most of we the sporty-fatty would like to loose weight but basically we are eating and drinking in two ways which are keeping us fat. More on this later.

Now admit also that the beer gut or thunder thighs are at least 10kg , two and a quarter stone over weight. For an average formerly sporty woman that means you are around 75-85 kg, for a sporty man that means you are around 85-115 kg depending on your build. Your ideal weight by BMI is probably 20kg lighter, but muscle and bone mass is not well accounted for in the current system. You can refer to it and see if you are in the range if the graph has a range that is, some are just lines.

For me I was 18kg over weight and am now 14kg over weight: I have decided that. My goal is 100kg and to sustain a weight below 105 kg (unless I suddenly take up major body building for a 115 kg meat mountain!) That 14kg is almost forty pounds, like carrying a typical overnighting rucksack around. I enjoy mostly cycling and xc skiing with some swimming and other stuff, and that means I am lugging around extra weight and wind resistance which slows me down on the surfaces and in the water.

Here in lies a good thing about training : when you train from your  higher weight, having been sporty and with a base fitness, you burn more calories and build more muscles if you sustain that training, and the process becomes more self fulfilling (there can be a phase of peak weight loss where the rate of fat burning is highest because you have more muscle and a higher VO2 and therfore burn more off for a period)

Set yourself a goal then which is likely to be weight, but could as well be waist line : it could be you are a light, sporty, running woman and you want to really burn off about 5 kg of fat and maybe in fact the net muscle gain will just mean that you lose null weight but are thinner on the waist and thighs. Don't kid yourself, man of 125kg (20 stone) that muscle is heavier than fat: in this training regime you will gain only small amounts of muscle in the level of a few kilos over six months. Alternatively if you are moderately overwieght, 10 - 15 kilograms and a 40 minute three times a week gymn burster, then you want to actually check your resting heart rate which is probably infact over 60 for men, 70 for women. Your goal could be to reduce this by 30%.

Did I mention this was going to be slow?  Yes, we are talking about a regime which is six to nine months long followed by a life long regime and attitude to food. This would correspond to the period perhaps you had earlier in life when you trained up towards a goal such as a major athletic event, or when you first caught the bug for a sport and it was all consuming

Eating Errors!

 As I wrote above, most of we the sporty-fatty would like to loose weight but basically we are eating and drinking in two ways which are keeping us fat. More on this later. Firstly entertainment eating. I wouldn't call it comfort eating. We are eating for the pleasure of it. We are eating for the sociability. We are eating for the ethos of fine food and luxuries. Secondly we are over-compensating. We eat snacks or larger portions because we train, and after training or at the weekend we eat more treats than were actually 'earned' by our calorie burn.

The later version of Weight Watchers ( which is one of the best commercial systems for losing weight by 'starvation' dieting, or limiting your calories and is effective and sustainable for many) did include the fact above that you exercise at around 400-500 calories per hour, so an hours exercise can earn you a few glasses of wine on Friday. I think that is great for those who can also understand the discipline of total calorie intake PER DAY, but it can be counter productive for many.

For the sporty-fatty who was super trained as a twenty something, then we have from that time learned a tendency to on the one side eat extra to perform higher, while on the other when we were used to being able to have quite a few beers, cakes etc and burn them off. In general back then we  probably did more training hours than we bothered to count. Also we  had more active lifestyles in general at the side of sport and we walked or cycled around the place, and we just went out to meet people at nights by foot, we maybe had a more physical job. For cyclists and other endurance athletes we learned something worse in compensation eating- we learned to stuff ourselves in 'carbo-loading' and to eat while out on long runs before we were hungry.

Eating when you are not actually hungry and eating beyond your actual satiation of appetite are the two major causes of a calorific intake which is higher than burning. Couple this rightly to Dr. Atkins assertion we live with super-sugar, carbo loaded, quick available, calorie marketed times. Refined sugars and carbohydrates make up not only a major part of our diet, but a major part of our western problem of obesity. Coupled to the salt-fat-sugar mega reinforcement loop in our lower brains then we have a perfect storm to become obese in a sedentary lifestyle, or if we hold on to some sportiness, then we just are a bit on the silly looking side of chubby.

In the next entry I will look specifically at the realisation of just how much extra we eat, how to approach this realisation and what way to look at doing something about it without having to go on a counter productive starvation diet or give up some small rewards, or replace them with other, healthier options.

It's Training Jim, But Not As We (Should) Know It....


This is the third realisation you will have to make if you are training now and want to loose weight. Basically you are training too short and too intensely. Simple as that: as said in the introduction you are actually never reaching fat metabolism and worse you are topping up with carbos (read blood sugar) as snacks soon after or before exercise. We are in effect never even using up our half kilo of glycogen reserves and not going into fat metabolism.

Sports physiologists assert that there is a best 'fat burning' heart rate which is 65-75% max heart rate, for most of us 120 -130 bpm a little lower as you get older. This is true only when we do sustained longer training sessions. What happens is that the body senses glycogen depletion over time and starts the fat metabolism / catabolism process up. Allegedly this does not happen through more intense exercise over 75% max heart rate, but really I think this is probably a function of sustainability of that intensity,  and glycogen bottom out rather than there being a magic bpm number: you can sustain a 65% level for very long periods if you build up to it.

From my own experience and that of others, the key is to be able to break free of the 40 minutes to one Hour effective aerobic gymn or quick run work out, and get over the hour barrier as soon as possible and up to two hour sessions. For a fit fatty, this means decreasing the tempo.

In fact when I decided to try and burn more fat through exercise I managed an two and a half hour session on xc skis first time out. Previously my sessions had been maybe upto an hour, or an hour and a half but with sociable breaks. When you do these longer sessions one thing you will notice to begin with is that your recovery to absolute base heart rate is longer than it is from the short intense burst sub one hour sessions.

Duration training is often used by various athletes as part of a wider plan and often in the early phase of the pre-season or after injury. The intensity is far lower than they will endure in competition, in the 50-65% max bpm for fit young athletes, so about 90 to 130 bpm. For cyclists traditionally this has meant long, slow runs in early spring or winter. For boxers it has been long hours out running in the fells.

Although there are more recent training regimes which concentrate on building up an intensity and being 'over-intense' in terms of actually having peak durations longer than in competition, low intensity duration training is proven over a wider range of humans to be beneficial to cardio vascular condition: VO2 max, resting heart rate, lower blood pressure, better insulin response: all the factors which make for a good base fitness for competition and a good quality of life in the long term.

In our modern, rushed lifestyles from one seat to the next seat, we think we can only squeeze in those short after work sessions. Also  people in less unionised western countries now work longer, often with little productivity. Finally we all find excuses or distractions,TV is the old one, now like facebook, twitter,  blogging for that matter to just waste time . However I have seen plenty 50 something business men or women and hard worked school teachers, who have endless time with a long term sick line ! It seems we think we can invest lots of time in impressing bosses or grinding our way through admin we could have maybe delegated or failed to do, showing the department is under resourced. Time exercising moderately is like meditation and requires little concentration compared to working more than eight hours when most people's productivity in a dull or hectic job falls completely off. This is where Scandinavians score highly - they don't believe in long working hours, and the corporate culture is often that long hours are associated to eventual down time and worse, mistakes which lead to accidents.

I advocate a target of two hour sessions three times a week. This is less than amateur atheetes put in when they are in their twenties, but 6 hours is a lot more than say a weekend warrior footballer achieves. If you have been going along with the three times half an hour effective burst training in the gymn or jogging, then it will be a major life change. At that level you are actually not sporty: you are just ticking over, raising your fitness above the heart attack cases.

More on all these points of where you are going wrong in subsequent blogs.