Weekly Weigh In 17: Ups And Downs

Weight after fourteen weeks of dieting and one week off the reservation:

21stones 11lbs/305lbs/138kg

Loss:

3lbs/1kg

As you can see my weight is kind of stalking around at the upper end of 22 stones at the moment. I think the reasons for this are many. For example, people are remarking now that I look significantly thinner, I am still doing exercise and finding myself able to do more. I am pegging this currently as a period of adjustment where my body is catching up to where I currently am weight wise. When it has caught up I imagine I will lose some more weight.  At least I sincerely hope so...

Diet Report 11: Easy Rider

This week I managed  to get into work and back twice on my new bicycle. The round trip distance to work and back according to Google is 14.2 miles. Once I had the full electric boost of the battery and that day was pretty good. The other occasion, my maiden voyage in "combat conditions" i.e. when I was actually going to work as opposed to just seeing if I could get there and back without dying, I was still testing out how far I could get on a single charge. The bike boasts a 20 mile approx charge so the answer, it will surprise no one to learn, is there and back and about there again. I learned the pain, that day, of trying to cycle 7 miles on a slightly clunky bike with about three kilos of lithium battery attached to the back of it. Not an experience I am keen to repeat.

The amount of calories you burn cycling 7 miles (even when you have electrical assistance and hence record the cycling as 10-11 mph moderate, when you're clocking an actual speed of more like 14 mph, hard) is quite remarkable. What's also remarkable is how you just naturally end up eating more to make up for it.

It has been a bit of a shock to my poor old metabolism which has lead to an interesting week weight recordings wise. I'm bearing down and getting a sweat on and then expecting my metabolism to replace all the stuff I've just burned and convert some protein to new muscle to help out in future endeavours. For this reason my weight has wobbled significantly. Overall, however, I feel terrific.

I would have got out and about more often this week were it not for buckets of torrential rain forcing me back to the car on three out of five working days. As such I got quite a schooling in the contrast between the two modes of transport. It turns out that the pros of cycling go far beyond the simple increase in exercise.

The main thing I would note is the feeling of liberation the cycle commute delivers. You are open, in the air breathing oxygen (well, most of the time you're not behind some diesel exhaust or other), liberated, clipping along at a fair old rate, completely in control. You never have to stop moving if worst comes to worst dismount and walk the cycle to a less busy location to resume cycling. You are always going forward the only thing you stop for is red lights when you are using the road, and even then in cycle friendly Nottingham they have a little area marked out at the front to be a cyclist in while you're waiting.

In a car there are times when you're just listening to the stereo, waiting for the traffic to move and feeling your life end one second at a time. No wonder most motorists are aggressive idiots (I have had my own moments). I think I must be doing one of the most unpleasant commutes possible on a bicycle, a couple of nasty hills, crossing a canal, railway lines and a river on my way to work. The electric bike gets me through.

I am actually looking forward to the day that petrol is £2.50 a thimbleful and everyone has to get on their bikes. There are a few jobs that I know require an actual motor vehicle but the people who do them should be looking forward to having less people on the roads. In fact electric cars are actually beginning to exist now which are ideal for the more lengthy commute. No doubt the charge and range of their battery packs can only increase in efficiency.

I can actually see a point coming up in which we won't miss the old cars, the big cars, the dirty cars or our old ways of getting about. We won't have just one vehicle we'll have a selection of electric wagons to take us which ever is the most appropriate range.

We'll be healthier too. Welcome to the future.

Anyhow the point is, and this is particularly true at home time, the feeling of being really in control is far accentuated on the bike. You can always get off and walk if you need to and there are a couple of junctions on the way home where I currently need to. Even so you're never just stuck in a long metallic queue watching the motor temperature climb with frustration and seeing people nose their own jalopies out of side roads shoving their way into already crowded lines of traffic.

There are sections of my new route home where there is grass and trees and long stretches of calm water. Much less cooped up.

Also, as the exercise is partly the point but mostly a by-product of needing to get back and forth to my place of employment I can think about it in different terms to a trip to the gym. It's much easier to pace yourself when you know you need to arrive at your destination in a reasonable condition to continue with your day. There will be no shower and lounging session afterwards so you don't tend to push yourself flat out. For this reason you get an unusual (or at least to me) fringe benefit you come off the bike feeling more alert and ready to deal with life.

It becomes plain that human beings were not designed to sit around on their rear end all day every day passively watching stuff or (heh) bashing a keyboard. You are meant to be doing things actively, if you don't you actually feel worse. Not saying that relaxation doesn't have its place but you need to be doing some activity to get the most out of the rest of life.

My stepfather is a builder and I have long marvelled at how he seems quite comfortable with rising at 6am and continuing on until 11pm at night (occasionally later). Previously if I rose at 7.30am I would be ready for bed by 10.45 that evening. The secret is a period of activity during the day. It's something I have done before in life without ever really noting it. When I was doing theatre things they always used to make us do a "warm up" session in the morning which was general keep fit stuff but nothing too taxing. Those days were always quite long as well.

I guess the idea is that you do stuff that makes you move a bit more than usual but not so much that you're sweating buckets and want nothing more afterwards than to curl up in a corner and die. Unfortunately getting the balance right is tricky and exercise gurus since the era of "feel the burn" will tend to label you a weakling if you're not "pushing the limit".

The problem is that pushing the limit associates exercise with the pain of pushing yourself too far and the inconvenience of being pretty useless afterwards. The gentle sustainable activity, on the other hand, introduces you to the benefits of moving about and means you're more likely to notice the lethargy of sitting about for days on end doing nothing. All of this probably indicates why I always have such a cracking time at center parcs, where gentle activity throughout the day is the name of the game.

Anyhow. I have already done the weekly weigh in and it is a little disappointing for fans of constant weight reduction, but it is no disaster. So, you have been warned. Time to get on your bikes now and go to see the Cabin in the Woods, if you have not done so already.

Weekly Weigh In 14: Not So Bad

Weight after eleven weeks of dieting and one week off the reservation:


22stones 3lbs/311lbs/142kg

Loss:

1lbs/1kg


I have just spent two hours recording all the food I have eaten in the last week. Notable highs include 8 hours of walking and my birthday calorie count of 4000 (in one day!). If I had any advice for anyone planning a birthday during a diet it is this: Make sure you do a lot of walking or similar activities to balance out the blow out day. Hey, you might even lose a pound. (Disclaimer: The pound I lost is one of the same pounds I have previously lost. Your Mileage May Vary).


Anyway. I am computered out now so I will catch you all another time.

Diet Report 9: Food For Thought

He Diets, She Suffers

So Mrs Monkey has joined me in using the CRON-O-Meter for two weeks now. This has lead to the first major argument with its computerised wonder.

As you know I have been more than happy with the CRON-O-Meter's help in my own diet. I have found the daily goal a challenge but never a chore. I am happily able to manage my eating to work around the calculator's limits. My daily calorie limit is currently 2076 kcal, that's the setting for losing 1lb a week for someone of normal weight. The thing is, as we know, I wasn't at anything like what would be considered "normal" weight when I started all this.

In fact if you fed my original starting weight of 348lbs (I scrape 6 feet in height in case you want to deepen the simulation otherwise just use your own favourite height mine is twelve foot seven) into a readily available online calorie calculator. You will find that the projected needs of my diet at that time were much higher than 2076 calories a day. If you're uncertain about the veracity of using a random online calculator to issue such advice why not look at another one for comparison? There are dozens of the things littering the internet. I haven't checked extensively but I'll bet you they all do their maths slightly differently just like those two do.

The point I'm trying to make there is that how many calories an individual needs on a daily basis is way different to how many the average person needs. Why the average person would need to calorie restrict if they were at ideal average weight is never discussed, but ours is not to reason why ours is just to avoid the dessert trolley.

If I look back at my week one food diary I went over my limit about four days out of seven that week, and on two other occasions only came under because I did extra exercise to burn some calories. Fast forward to week two and I didn't even need the exercise (which I did anyhow) because I found it a breeze to restrict to the 2076 recommendation. I was still north of a distictly chubby 320lbs at that time but I could survive and even be jolly on less than the recommended average restriction for 1lb a week weight loss. Curiouser and curiouser...

Obviously your own mileage may vary. I find 2076 to be a small pinch in calories but not super onerous. I can have Mc-frickin'-D's once a week as long as I budget correctly. Don't get me wrong my salt intake is too high, I don't take in the recommended amount of Hydrogen Dioxide, my vitamins are never all filled in (although this is probably contributed to by not having vitamin breakdowns on my custom foods as I chow down on a shed ton of veg, fruit and wholefoods), but I can live with the calorie restriction. To a certain extent I relish it.

According to the online calculators I should be properly starving. Probably I am but in order to keep me going my body is, oh yes, digesting my excess fat. That's called dieting folks.

So far so much a recap up to date. Now we come to the bit that I'm not so enamoured with. This article most accurately condenses the problem area towards the bottom. It states:

"To lose 1lb per week you need to reduce your usual calorie intake by approximately 500 calories per day "

Okay, well, that's what I've done. And it works for me. Actually, I've gone beyond that according to all the calorie calculators and it's worked for me. But the article also recounts the popular wisdom that men need 2500 calories a day and women 2000. I'm not sure where these numbers were first decided but they are seen almost universally as the guideline, although some sources actually set the requirements lower for men and for women. Harvard university parrots advice for women but is more generous to men. Similarly vital health zone seems to be robbing 50 calories from women and bestows it upon the men.

So, everyone's in agreement about one thing. Women need fewer calories, on average, than men to make their way in the world. Where they differ is that whereas men are seemingly allowed to go over and still be okay women's requirements only ever go down from 2000.

Far be it from me to question all of this, no doubt, sound and thoroughly tested dietary advice but...

Oh no, wait, that's exactly what I'm doing.

Apparently we're all reducing our calorie intake by 500 calories. As I said for men this seems doable. By reducing my calorie intake to around that of the average woman I am living comfortably. Of course Mrs Monkey is a woman and so taking the average she must lose 500 to come to around 1500. Now, in my case I have sliced a not insignificant 20% off the intake of an average fella on a day-to-day basis. Mrs Monkey is being asked to cut 25% of the average for a lady to lose the same amount of weight.

The mumbled reason for this is that men naturally have more muscles so burn fat faster or better or something. That's fine to a degree but I have to ask if women are already eating less, why is it presumed they also have to restrict a greater proportion of their calories to make a loss? Let's not even start on why diet calculators use these average limits instead of one of the more generous calculation algorithms detailed at the start of this post.

I'm not trying to say that all accepted dietary advice is nonsense. Clearly in my case using one of the more generous algorithms would have been a waste of time as I'm quite happy on the relatively harsh regimen I have adopted. Somewhere in all that advice I am a winner.

Mrs Monkey, on the other hand, is starving hungry after a week on the equivalent recommended restriction for a woman and I'm not at all surprised. Out of curiosity when I started CRON-O-Meter I looked at the male's 2lbs a week settings and quickly forgot them as they put a restriction of just under 1750kcals a day on me which I felt was excessive for me. I was later proven to be right because I'm dropping weight above expectation with the normal restriction.

Even so, I am starting to think that between 1700 and 2200 is a sort of golden area of ideal consumption for an average man. Some days I am happier eating around 1700 calories others I feel the need to stuff a bit more down my gob hole. All the while I am happy and not missing the real gluttonous excesses of my former life.

I find it very suspicious that the dietary advice doled out to the more diet obsessed gender (I am bucking the trend being obsessed with mine, I understand most men just diet they don't think about it as well) seems to be of the more hair shirt and birch twigs variety. The world of dietary advice seems to tell men that if they fancy a bag of nuts or the odd cream bun it won't kill them but if a woman looks the wrong way at 40g of cheddar she'll burn in the fires of diet hell.

There could be all sorts of reasons for this and none of them seem particularly scientific. Even on the Horizon about exercise the other week scientists are more keen on testing rates of glucose exchange in muscle mass than wondering if the accepted daily intake recommendations pass the lab coat and slide rule thumbs up award for strict empirical veracity. Maybe the average recommendations haven't been made up but the way that we repeat them definitely seems to indicate that we like to tell the boys they're okay and the girls they're evil. It's like the financials of playing poker, apparently it doesn't work properly unless it hurts a bit when a woman diets.

I also can't imagine that there are all that many scientists who rock up to work in the morning and say "I'd like to perform a very dull study questioning something that most people seem quite happy to just accept and which seems to at least be in the ball park region of being correct." Especially when the next sentence out of their mouths would have to be: "Further I'd like it to be a study concerning a topic that will not dramatically affect the scientific community even if the results turn out to be a bit different to my expectations."

Basically, there would be no scientific kudos in establishing the theory that either women's average daily intake need should be raised (I don't believe this) or that the restriction on calories should be proportional not fixed i.e. restrict 20% of your calorie intake to lose a lb a week so men go from 2500ish to 2000ish and women go from 2000ish to 1600ish. That extra 100 calories makes all the difference in establishing a "comfort zone". I happen to believe, having weighed up all the conflicting advice, that a lot of it has more to do with undermining women in a moral way than actually helping them to feel comfortable dieting.

I guess that Weight Watchers actually agreed with me. Their whole system is designed togive dieters an alternative to calorie restriction by the book with their simple points based system. It allows a dieter to eat to live without having to turn into an ascetic diet monk. Weight Watchers wanted to sell dieting, and they have succeeded by, you know, selling dieting, as opposed to selling self-imposed suffering in the name of some vague dietary moral authority.

I know it's not the CRON-O-Meter's fault, the default settings are just taken from the various sources available to the makers. However, I am firmly of the opinion at the moment that's what is good for this gander-monkey is not necessarily so good for the goose-monkey.

Tightening Our Belts

My trousers have definitely started to become ill-fitting in the right direction at this time. I have reached the last hole in the two belts I bought five months ago. As my friend pointed out to me, at least things are becoming ill-fitting in the direction where a belt is helpful. I am forced to agree.

Progress has been good, as regular followers of this journal will know. To engage "sense of perspective mode" for a moment though we may have one the battle of the first two and a half stone but the war on ten stones continues. Now is not a time for complacence.

Now, is however, nearly time for the Monkey to step from the friendly world of the mid-thirties into the choppier waters of the late thirties. Overall that doesn't concern me. What concerns me is that I am about to have a birthday and everyone knows what goes with birthday. That's right. Cake.

I feel that I would be doing myself a disservice not to have a piece of cake on my birthday, but it is just one of a myriad of ill-disciplined dining decisions that are to accompany the event. Let's not forget that I am having not one but two birthday meals, one with my friends in Notts and then at home in Wales week after next.

I am accompanying my birthday week with my first time "off the reservation" as far as dieting goes. At some point the training wheels will have to come off and the great experiment will be over. What better place to practice than 25% through? In short, although I will continue to diarise my food consumption week after next I will not feed the foods into CRON-O-Meter till I return from Wales. Essentially, for a week, I will be calorie blind.

We'll see how I get on.

Following shortly, this week's weight milestone. In fact, if you've read all of this it's probably up by now.