Losing fat, getting strong

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Topics in this series:
1: Recovering Fat Person
2: Weight-loss saboteurs
2: Excuse File
3: Nutrition tips
4: Realistic Exericse

Weight Loss News
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Current topics: Fatty food addictive?; American Sugar Institute wants YOU; Whey protein & creatine; Fasting may be healthy; USDA food pyramid wrong? _

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Summary of January 2003 Scientific American article, “Rebuilding the Food Pyramid”

“Most thin people think they got that way by doing something right. And, by extension, that fat people are doing something wrong.”
- Discovery Channel special on obesity

Introduction:

Full disclosure: I’m no athlete. In fact, after losing 55 pounds, I’m still at least 20 pounds overweight. My body seems to hold on to every ounce as if a famine were expected any day now. And the ‘weight-loss’ industry is no help at all. The fact that there are so many ‘programs’ and ‘systems’ testifies that none of them work very well.

This section is a record of my struggle with obesity, and a summary of what I’ve learned and wish I had known 20 years ago.

To a thin person, losing weight would be simple - just eat less. This smug advice does more to fatten the thin person’s ego than help the fat person lose weight. Obesity turns out to be more complicated than that.

The issue isn’t looking slim, it’s avoiding disability! Fitting into smaller clothes is only a bonus to achieving fitness. Obesity is no joke - it is a series of steps on a short path to disability beginning in middle age. It isn’t a battle of the bulge, it’s a fight for “quality of life.”

What should you call the person who is making a serious effort to lose weight? Not ‘dieter,” because dieting alone is self-defeating. Certainly not ‘loser” - wrong connotation. How about RFP - “Recovering Fat Person.” Not a politically correct term, I know, but there is a good reason for borrowing the language of addiction and recovery.

I found five components to weight loss: metabolic, psychological, social, nutritional, and activity. I’ll explore them in more detail on other pages but here’s the gist:

Metabolic: The fundamental challenge is to keep your energy up while losing weight. Many of the foods we eat every day are guaranteed to cause peaks and valleys in blood sugar, making us feel desperately hungry and putting us at risk for type 2 diabetes.

Psychological: Most of us were raised on food-as-reward and on the idea that cleaning eating all the food on your plate makes you a good boy or girl. As adults, our food choices reflect a need for comfort (reward) and for approval (the parental voice that says “clean your plate.”) Awareness of this dynamic gives us a chance to change it.

Social: Eating with others reinforces a cultural connection that binds people together. This is important if we routinely eat with other people. When we change our eating habits, we’re violating their expectations and they may unconsciously feel we’re pushing them away. Awareness of this dynamic gives us a chance to change it, too.

Nutritional: The ‘traditional’ USDA food pyramid contains some very bad advice. It is based on oversimplified assumptions that have been demolished by later research - ‘all carbs are good’ (not true), ‘all fats are bad’ (again, not true), and the purely fictional ‘30%-of-calories-from-fat’ rule. A few simple changes to this pyramid make a big difference.

Activity: Most of us were taught to hate exercise - in school, by sports and military oriented Physical Education programs. This means (to be blunt) that we’re weak: we don’t have much muscle tissue, and what we do have doesn’t work very well. Muscle tissue is far more metabolically active than other kinds. When you’re strong, you can actually burn more calories in everyday activities - and you’re far more likely to take the stairs instead of the elevator.

This is worth repeating: if you don’t get strong, the weight will come back. Getting strong will help you feel better fast - even before the weight starts coming off. In fact, your first priority should be to get strong. Weight loss can follow, in fact most likely it will follow.

Disclaimer: A doctor has one thing I don’t have - malpractice insurance. Your goal is to get well, not to be disabled or killed by a heart attack or stroke. Get a thorough checkup before you start an exercise program. Push the doctor to do some real diagnostics, not just listen through a stethoscope. Get your blood pressure under control, with medication if necessary.

- GW