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!
Showing posts with label training. Show all posts
Showing posts with label training. Show all posts
Sunday, 9 June 2019
Tuesday, 12 August 2014
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.
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.
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