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

Weighing in this week

Weigh in this morning on the flat line, and a kilo down in the last week.

A fair bit of hard training, 2 hour sessions three days in a row. I don't know if that has a large effect on rate of weight loss, but it would be interesting to find out. I was expecting two things with this diet and training regime, firstly slow steady loss over.time and secondly a peak rate of weight loss at some time into it. Finally i hope for long term appetite effect and self discipline after I move on.

Like the recent 5:2 starvation diet, my regime is based on scientific facts from other sources and is a common sense and logical approach to losing weight for those who are prepared to extend their training sessions to well over an hour three times a week.

Also I feel a very much reduced appetite and much better control of snacking. Some of which is allowed on the diet to keep you from complete boredom.

However as in the 5:2 and many other diets, in particular the calorie starvation type, is that they have not been proven conclusively - statistically that is to day. In diets you cannot compare to placebo in most regimes and so you lose quite a few of the neutralising effects of a double blind trial, where neither researcher nor patient know which group they are in until their alocation of medicine is decoded.  Also there is more variance in how people comply: so if you compared one diet, say taking a chrome salt tablet, to the 5:2 then there would be a lot of people following the simple take a pill a day ,while a significant number of 2 day starvers would be eating anyway. Worse for my regime which combines a strict 5 hour at over 110 bpm heart rate per week minimum plus a restriction in treats then it gets worse.

So there is an issue with finding out which diets are best for the public. You can of course take people into a hospital or the like and control their every bite and step, but then the diet is just as much about the artificial discipline as much as the content of the diet regime. Diets have to work in everyday life to be relevant to the western human condition.

What you need to smooth out the variances is firstly to just report those who dont comply as failures, and secondly to have a large enough group to make a meaningful average.  That means two things: we see a standard distribution in weight loss for the group, secondly when we compare to another group then we know that these two averages are comparable and the difference between them is large enough to have occured by effect of the different regimes, and not random chance. Look up clinical trials if you dont know about them, and a two tailed t-test for statistical significance.

That is why infact dieting is not like treating many of the diseases obesity and high calorie intake leads to. We can treat or as consultants like to say "manage heart disease" because you eventually die from it. They use pills, they use surgical procedures they even use clinically controlled exercise regimes. All are proven to work because they have to be by law. That is to say all those mentioned above have been subject to infact numerous clinical trials. We "cure" heart disease.

Propriety, branded diets by in large have not gone through the type of clinical trial that shows on average that they are effective enough to bother with. Most are based on controll of calorific intake which is scientifically proven to reduce fatness, in the short term at least. However the variations of people's long term response to the diet and actually the measure of how easy they are to comply to, are  usually not proven in a comparative way to other non branded diets.

There is as yet no magic pill for dieting which is both effective and first and foremost, safe to take.   Stomach stapling surgery of course is proven to be effective. But that is only afforded in morbidly obese people.  This is one reason why a new diet appears every couple of years as the next magic thing, because there are always people who have failed on other diets.

Atkins was a welcome departure because it was genuinely unique and novel, while being based on scientific observation.

Really though what all the low carb and calorie controlled diets should make we in the west aware of is that we take far too many additional sugar based calories which are surplus to our daily requirements, and are sometimes eaten and drunk in a short time span leading to fat deposition due to blood sugar overload.

On the calorie controlled diets i hear people speak and write of the hell week or fortnight. This is within a month of starting the diet usually and it is when you hit a wall of feeling low on energy while thus craving treats and gratification. For me when i last lot more than a stone on exercising and dieting a bit more drastically, hell week was every week. I was depressed by the diet.

This time I did find a bit of a hill to climb. Luckily or not as it prove to be, i had started my longer duration training in january before deciding to cut out beer and extras in june. So i was through the barrier to getting out three or four times a week was broken. The hell was mild when i came to stamp on extras.

There we have the grounds for at least five longtidunal and comparative studies, with varying control groups which could be conducted with some degree of statistical significance if the regime is actually effective for larger groups of sporty fatties.

Why Do Diets Fail ?

I must admit to have only 'been on a diet' four or maybe five times before in my life. Otherwise I have eaten what I wanted. However as like many of you readers I did not get any long term benefit from the diets. Statistics have been flouted about which show how many people either fail or rebound from diets, but of course the people who invent the diets or market them by in large are  not interested in a long term clinical trial. (It has to be mentioned that some diets have been tested in as near to a clinical trial, that is giving statistical proof of efficacy, as is possible ie single blind, compared to a base group and perhaps compared to a different regime in the same study). This rant on proof of not eating the pudding so to speak, put to one side, why do so many of us not continue with a diet or rebound after the diet is over?

Do we set out with good intentions and then just can't break through the 'peckish 9pm' barrier during or after a diet? Do we exit a diet with largerr cravings for food and especially calorie bomb luxuries? Or does our body not like being starved and develop a propensity to lay down more fatty tissue around our middles after being in a 'starvation' diet?

There has not been any really concrete research I can find at least, which has been done around the physiology of starving your body by a calorie controlled diet and then in the long term actually laying down more fat. There are studies from emaciated groups who are then fed and there have been studies on the effects of polar conditions where a net negative calorie result can be experienced : but I remain to find studies which show that a typical calorie controlled 'starvation diet' leads to the body actually laying down more fat when you come off the diet. It would seem to make sense, but let us lay this also to one side until I or one of the readers in the comments below, feel free, points to something conclusive that does not end with "further studies" or " a larger group of subjects would need to be studied " ie not actually proof, just some initial and interesting findings, as in fact 90% of scientific research consists of. (Hence I gave up a promising career boring myself to death as a scientist)

I think the clue to why nearly all diets have such a high long term failure rate is in the very term 'diet'. Calorie controlled diets are far too focused on food! That may sound like an oxymoron, but what I mean is that they focus the person going on the diet onto the food they put in front of themselve. Everything suddenly revolves around food, and denying oneself food, at every mealtime. It becomes a source for stress to anyone who has a large appetite for meals and whom snacks in between meals. We are creatures not only of habit but when there is a move to break habits, particularly core habits , down the Maslovian pyramid, then if we can, we fight back. In a famine or a concentration camp, you cannot fight back and the body burns all its fat and spirals downward into catabolising protein. In the modern world, you make a conscious effort to spite the diet and you either move slowly back to snacking or you just plainl;y pig out. I think in fact that calorie controlled 'starvation' diets work best for people who were not all that bothered about food in the first place, but had gone a long in fact with other people's habits and our general high carbo at point of sale  at every opportunity.

On Atkins dieting in particular I found that much MORE time was spent thinking about food in order to try and both keep to the super low carbo plan, while having some degree of variety. In fact I habituated on my second attempt to a very dull diet with a lot of eggs, salad leaves, asparagus and both fresh and smoked salmon. I did loose about 5 kg or maybe as much as 8kg, but put it all back on within a year. I think I could have continued with the diet without a huge problem, and titrated back in those carbo as you do, and drunk light beer and so on and so on. But I started training on skis and needed the energy and fell completely off the low carbo wagon, going the other way. I was snacking before and after exerciseing an hour to two outdoors. In fact that winter it was so damn cold that I may have actually put my body into storing more fat, which is a proven result of exposure to low temperatures. But the extras crept in, as if I was an athlete training 5-8 hours a day, the sports calorie boosters and replenishments and the sweets, and those salty nuts and chips to get my salt back in....Been there?

Electric Extra Land. Sports food and drink products were fringe stuff until the arrival of Lucozade Sport which was actually pretty healthy and much lower carbs than most other fizzy drinks. Then came things like the power-bar TM and the Cliff BarTM and then bananas got remarketed as a sports product and so on and so on, until now a milkshake with a bit of fancy ingredients and 160 Kcal is sold as an after sport essential before you go eat your dinner.  In fact for anyone just training for fitness and especially those wanting to lose fat, these calorie replenishment or extension products should only be used when doing real endurance exercise, like 3 or more hours cycling or over two hours running. Otherwise they can stand in as a meal substitute in part or whole. Milk race and Tour de france riders get bananas and fancy drinks because they cycle up to 8 hours a day at high rythm and have very little fat to burn in reserve.

What I propose is more successful for the sporty fatty is to forget stressing about main meals. As  I said in the last blog, if you think you maybe eat a lot for your core meals benchmark your calorie intake for them. If they are the 300 -450 -800 breakfast-lunch-dinner then you can forget about all these meals, just eat as you did, ration yourself to very few additional portions, and ration down OJ and sugary drinls. Be careful though that breakfast is not a super sugar bomb. "of Which Sugars" is a good guide for cerials and ready meals for example, and this means that you may be taking too much simple suigar in one go, more on that in a later blog where I will read som up to date. Anyway after a quick benchmark, you can forget your core meals as anything to stress about.

The focus instead for the sporty fatty is something else you have some habitual behaviour establihsed round" training and training quite hard. The target is then to midify established babits by training longer and less intensely, while having a killer insinct on extras. Extras become a focus as the only negativbe thing, and even then you have an allowance, so it is not a cycle of being depressed about all the denial. Instead you get the physiological benefits of longer duration training plus an easy discipline to follow with a logical focus on all that is extra.

I would say for the non sporty fatty., that many people get great benefit from the branded, calorie controlled dietts and some people have reversed their obesity on low carbo diets.Howeever since you are a sporty fatty if you have read this far, and not gone " sod this, 7 hours a week getting sweaty?!!" then the health and long term weight loss benefits coupled to hopefully a lasting self discipline and a physiologically/psychologicallly double hit on your appetite will help you and I keep it off even if we revert to shorter training sessions once we reach our target weight on this regime.

 

 

Psychology Behind the Sporty-Fatty Plan Training and Diet Regime

Maybe some diets have some hidden psychological tactic behind them. Perhaps those single food type diets, the pineapple diet for example, trick you into liking food less.

Also exercise programmes: perhaps some of those have hidden agendas to awake your inner sports beast. I don't know. I want to be open about why the sporty fatty regime works psychologically.

We are probably born all of us, to be amateur psychologists, working out what other people do and why they behave like they or we as a group do. Some of this sub consciously, we just get to know what is normal and accepted for us personnally, what is different and what is maybe some behaviour we dont like.

However we as individuals assert that we have much more free-will than we actually exercise in our lives. In truth people have two horrid psychological flaws which hinder free will and change in lifestyle.

Beer Bellied Creatures of Habit

Firstly the vast majority of people are creatures-of-habit. We get used to our own routines in life. Worse than that some of our routines are completely counter productive- presenteeism at work is one of the worst. Hopping around in a self imposed super hectic lifestyle is another. Sitting eating crisps on friday night is another bad habit. 

The body collaborates by having systems of homeostasis> this means that any sudden shock to the body like a crash diet is likely to be fought back by the body wanting to return to its status quo, which may have taken years to establish. In our case, it is simply that we have learned to eat too much and habituated our lifestyles to short exercise bursts rather than the very beneficial long moderate intensity sessions.

So when a crash or starvation diet comes along, we just dont like it. We want to return to our habits. I resented the Atkins diet despite it varying in fact what I eat for breakfast. I just found it a hassle and something I didnt want to do. Also the last time I had a strict regime of long duration exercise and self denial, I felt depressed despite losing a lot of weight. i felt I was denying myself and forcing myself.

The first thing about the sporty-fatty diet is that it does not give you wholly new patterns in which to behave. Rather it modifies patterns  you already have. You already exercise. You can continue to eat some treats. You do not alter your main meals at all if they are healthy and balanced.

Beer Sheep

Of less importance perhaps depending on your social life, people are also terrible for behaving by following the flock behaviour. So in the UK we buy rounds of drinks and end up drinking what everyone else is instead of abstaining or taking a water. This means that many of your weekends, or even mid week post sports "quick wee bevvy" with the lads /lassies become calorie cramming sessions where after  your overloaded blood sugar is deposited as fat while we sleep the alcohol off.

So we don't break all old habits and end up miserable and we dont stress the body out, we rather modify our exercise and moderate our eating.

Having said all this remember that this train and control your treats diet is aimed at sporty fatties,  who have already forged the good habit of going training rather than sitting on the couch or doing more work, or reading the paper, or staying in bed at the weekend. So I doubt that this will be a very succesful regime for the sedentary person, unless they find that they enjoy long leisurely walks, jogs, cycles, swims, canoeing or extended gymn sessions etc etc and are able to form the new habit quickly. For example though as for myself, it was a period of unemployment which I decided to stretch my sessions out to over two hours, and now I find it easier to do this each week as if it was no real time at all, just like doing my time sheet at work or running the kids to school. More on that in the next blog.

Keeping it Real : Be Real Simple

Another fact of life when learning new ways of doing things as an adult is KISS: keep it simple, stupid!  Many diets including the Atkins diet, have differing phases where you alter things or even titrate in new foods or more carbos. Others have all sorts of recipies to keep you interested in eating basically watery salad leaves and cucumber, with tiny amounts of what we actually like and what makes us feel satisfied (which is where the Atkins and low carbo diets score high, you get satisfied by high protein, fat filled food)

Also many exercise training programmes include at least three different types of exercise and at least three different strict durations, and then they alter this week by week towards some presumed event or 'goal'. Basically for anyone who is non training for competition or very focused on a better body, it is complete overkill.

What I say here is keep it all simple and easy to relate to, while also admitting to yourself that you must make some changes. So for the duration of the entire weight loss you will build up to and complete 5 - 7 hours per week of moderate level exercise. You will eat normal meals but you will have normal single portions. You will have some treats and snacks to enjoy or self reward, but these will be very limited with simple arithmetic per week.

Goals Goals  Goals

Simple. It is a game of two halves and it is all about scoring goals, as the cliche of the pretentiously philosophical football commentator goes. One half is exercise, the other half is cutting out extras. The goals are very simple
A goal for 7 hours training per week in three sessions.
A goal to keep control of extras
Individual goals for each type of extra control. You win, but you also have had a nice lilttle treat.
Goals for keeping your intensity and duration of exercise up. This gets a little harder actually as you get better trained
A Goal / Reward for each month that goes, a declining waist line and kg on the scales
A Goal to make your new weight your long term light, fighting weight
A Goal to Get Fit and Use Your Base to Use your lighter body.

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.