No Weight Loss - Is It Muscle Gain?

Once I had settled into my fat loss plan I estimated that if I followed my plan carefully, I should be able to lose 1lb a week. In my first year on the plan I lost a total of 23lbs. Well, I lost a little more than that but I put a few back on too! It’s evident that I most certainly did not lose 1lb a week. I averaged 1lb every other week.

There were some weeks where I blatantly did not follow the plan; I had takeaway pizzas and curry, I ate out at restaurants and didn’t hold back, I skipped workouts and so on. On those weeks when I did my stats at the end of the week I was just glad if I hadn’t put any weight back on. But there were some weeks, quite a lot in fact, where I followed my plan pretty well and yet at the end of the week there was no change, or very little.

A “No Change” Week – So Common and so Demoralising

I know I am not alone in this situation. A few years ago I spent several months as a consultant for Slimming World and week after week I would have several members who would adamantly state how they had followed the plan to the letter and had not lost any weight. As a member this is terribly demoralising. You go along to some club who sells you a plan that promises to allow you to lose weight. You follow the plan and nothing happens. As a consultant I found this very hard to deal with as I just didn’t know what to say to these people.

The story is the same with slimmers all over the world on all sorts of fat loss plans. When one of these “No Change” weeks crops up, (or worse, weight is actually put on) most people will try to rationalise the results and come up with a comforting fact that could explain the results. The most common one I hear is this:

“I must have put on muscle which is cancelling out the fat loss on the scale” ... (or something to that effect)

Digging Into the Logic

Let’s take that statement and examine it for a while. On what logic is it based? Muscle is a much denser matter than fat. If you take a chunk of muscle and a chunk of body fat of the same size and weighed them you would find that the muscle weighs much more than the fat. This is the reason why two people can be exactly the same height, exactly the same weight but look completely different where one appears much fatter than the other. The slimmer person holds more muscle and less fat on their body but the muscle weighs more than the fat causing the person to weigh the same as the larger person who holds more fat.

These days it is widely accepted that building muscle is beneficial for fat loss so many slimmers will sensibly combine a healthy diet with exercise that includes some kind of strength training. Putting these two things together then and you can see where the conclusion comes from. If in any given week I am burning off fat and building muscle at the same time then won’t they cancel each other out on the scale?

Simultaneous Fat Loss and Muscle Gain

This is a topic that I am going to cover in it’s own post so I will keep it brief here. We all know that in order to lose fat, we must create a calorie deficit in our bodies. That means that the number of calories we supply in terms of the food and drink that we consume is less than the energy used up by our bodies. The extra energy required is then taken from our fat reserves (hopefully!) We also know that muscle is build through resistance training, not on cardio machines. But what many people don’t realise is that to gain significant amounts of muscle, a calorie surplus is required. Obviously the two goals are in conflict with one another.

Now there are some exceptions to this rule and there are some people who swear that it is all rubbish and that you can quite happily build muscle whilst losing fat. However, to do so would require extremely strict training and a very clean diet and I doubt that somebody who is being that strict with themselves would get on the scale at the end of the week, see no change and just rationalise about why.

So let’s move on...

Crunching the Numbers

Now for arguments sake, let’s assume that it is quite normal to lose fat and to build muscle at the same time. What kind of numbers are we talking about here? Well in my case I was planning to lose 1lb a week. I am quite a small person so my calorie allowance isn’t all that high and I simply hate dieting so I don’t have a very low deficit but many other people are more aggressive and are aiming for a loss of around 2lbs a week. So if we get on the scale at the end of the week, see that there is no change and then assume that we must have put on muscle instead, we are implicitly making the assumption that we did indeed lose that 1 or 2lbs of fat and that we also gained that same amount of weight in muscle.

There are 52 weeks in a year. 52 x 2 = 104. For us folk in the UK we need to think in stones, and there are 14lbs in one stone. 104 lbs is over 7stones! Wow that’s a lot. I don’t know many people who have lost 7 stones in one year. Taking my own example of a loss of 1lb a week, with a maximum of 52 lbs in the year that would equate to a total possible fat loss of 3st 10.

I know many people who have lost 3 stones in a year. I’m sure you do too even if not personally. There are many success stories to draw from. But let’s look at the other side. How many people do you know have put on 3 stones of pure lean muscle in a year? Hmmm not as many I would suspect. By saying that your lack of movement on the scale is down to muscle gain you are making the assumption that you can put on muscle just as fast as you can lose fat.

It is Simply HARD to Gain Muscle

Ask any body builder how fast the average person can put on muscle and they won’t tell you 1lb a week, maybe 1lb a month would be closer. The situation is worse for women; we simply lack the testosterone required to build muscle so it is much, much more difficult for us to increase our muscle mass.

Those bodybuilders that do put on large amounts of muscle in a short space of time work incredibly hard. My gym is a bit of a ‘muscle gym’ and there are at least two professional bodybuilders who workout there and let me tell you – they do not do gentle recreational lifting! The average member here comes in and works very seriously, squeezing out that last rep with every iota of energy in his body. This is in stark contrast to my previous gym that was a hotel guest gym also open to the public. Most of the members there were women and hardly any used weights at all. Those that did tended to have the same routine – they would move from machine to machine doing 10 reps of this, 10 reps of that and barely breaking a sweat. Which one are you?

If this post is making you feel a little uncomfortable, perhaps a bit defensive then I hope that you’ll also have realised that the reason you feel this way is because you have been kidding yourself all this time. You haven’t been secretly putting on muscle, perhaps you’ve just not been working hard enough or perhaps you’re suffering from a fluctuation, or any number of other reasons why the fat has not come off. Fluctuation is another subject that is to be covered in a future post but if your weight is fluctuating upwards then it must come down as well so that excuse will only work for so long.

Give the Excuse the Boot

There are two things that we must understand. Firstly we must know the difference between weight loss and fat loss. Our bodies are made of water, bones, muscle tissue, organs, blood, skin, fat and probably a whole host of other things that I don’t know about. When we lose ‘weight’ it can be coming from any number of areas. I’m sure many of us have suffered with ‘water weight’ at some time or other. What we really want is to lose fat, not just weight so that means that using the scale alone is not a sufficient stick to measure by.

We need something else. We need a way of measuring how much fat we have and that is what body fat testing is all about. In my post about the Different Types of Body Fat I talk about some different methods of measuring body fat and the ups and downs of those. Whichever method you use, although it may not be totally accurate it will give you a much better idea of how your body is composed. You will know how much is lean body mass and how much is fat. If you track these numbers from week to week then you don’t have to wonder whether or not you have gained muscle because your measurements will tell you.

So stop kidding yourself, get rid of the excuses, measure properly and if you don’t get the results you want take a close look at your behaviour and see if you can spot the real reasons for it.

As a final note on this topic, I am not suggesting that in all cases, the lack of fat loss is simply due to not trying hard enough. There are other isues such as food intolerances, water retention especially for women around menstruation etc, but in many cases we are just making excuses for ourselves. And if there is a proper medical condition underlying our symptoms then we should get them checked out by our doctor.

Internet Issues :-(

Just a quick note to say that I have had no internet connection at home for a week now which is a real nuisance as it means I cannot post at the weekend. On Saturday I did my weight and measurements but I use a website to do the calculations so I couldn't do those and couldn't post. As it is the end of the month in a couple of days I wont bother trying to do a belated weekly check-in.

Until I have internet back on at home all I can do is post from work during the week :-(

Training the Legs, Sampling the Squat

I don't really post much about my weight training but I probably should because its an integral part of my fat loss plan. Generally speaking, when I find something that works and I like it, I tend to stick to it. This is the case in exercise, diet, well anything really.

When it comes to weight training I've always done my own thing, and designed my own workouts. However when I joined my new gym a few months back I let one of the trainers design a routine for me and I decided to give it a good go. The one thing I didn't like too much was the leg workout. I had two major leg exercises - step ups and lunges. I hated them both :-)

The Big Three of Weight Training

I got rid of the step ups a few weeks back and replaced them with deadlifts and I felt okay about that as the deadlift is generally accepted as one of the big three of weight training. The big three are bench presses for the chest, squats for the leg and deadlifts for the back and legs. Even though the deadlift is more of a back exercise, as I use fairly light weight at the moment I feel it on my legs more than my back. If that changes I would move it to back day and try something else for legs. Being a rather short woman, I do the sumo style of deadlift which is described very well by Mistress Krista here.

I still had the lunges. I spoke to my trainer about them last week and she urged me to continue with them saying "but they're so good!" Yeah they are but I hate them, they hurt my ankles. Over the last two weeks I've been trying really hard and I've upped the weights but yesterday morning I found myself almost falling over; I was wobbling all over the place. Enough! They had to go!

Introducing the Squat

I had a chat with one of the other trainers, Peter, who used to be a power lifting champion (I must grab his surname so I can Google him!) and he pointed me at the Hack Squat. There's a lot one can say about the squat. In bodybuilding circles it is known as probably the best exercise you can do for the legs, and maybe even the whole body. However, in casual gyms almost nobody squats. It is difficult to squat correctly and it can be very dangerous if done incorrectly and there is always the danger of getting stuck if not performed inside of a rack.

However there are many versions of the squat and nowadays many can be performed inside machines that take away some of the danger. The Hack Squat is one such exercise. It is performed leaning slightly back, your lower back is fully protected and the machine provides brakes so you can stop and escape if you cannot push yourself back up. This is one of the advantages of belonging to a good gym; you just can't do these kinds of exercises at home unless you have some serious cash to spend on equipment.

I quite liked this machine as it protects the lower back and you are relatively safe because you can put the brakes on at any time. I just had a play with it to start with without using any weight and Peter suggested to get used to it for a while before piling on the weight. I've added that one to my routine.

Smith Squat

He also showed me a squat using a Smith's Machine. I didn't really want to try that as I've had horror stories about Smith's Machine but I had a quick go anyway. Hmm that was a mistake. I felt a twinge in my knee and it was playing me up all day until about 5pm. It hurt every time I went up or down the stairs at work. I wont be trying that again.

Holding onto the Treadmill for Dear Life!

In the gyms that I frequent I often see the following phenomenon… Somebody starts working on the treadmill and begins to jack up the incline but they put the incline so high that they can’t actually work at that level so they have to cling onto the bar just to stay on the treadmill.

Last week I saw a really extreme example of this behaviour. A man who often seems to do things very strangely in the gym set the incline level at what I can only assume to be the maximum. In order just to keep himself from flying off the thing, not only did he have to hold on tightly but he also leaned back so that the angle between his body and the base of the treadmill was the same as if he was standing normally with the incline flat.

I couldn’t find any pictures of anybody doing this so let me try to illustrate with some silly diagrams!

Diagram 1 - Running on flat treadmill

Ok diagram 1 here is pretty standard – the treadmill is flat and somebody is running (or walking) without holding onto the bar. Look at the dotted red line. This serves the highlight the angle between the runner and the running surface. Here it is clearly a right angle: 90 degrees.

[Edit] Oh bugger, there's no dotted red line in that picture! Well I could recreate the picture but it would be easier to ask you to scroll down at look at diagram 3 which has the red line in the same place! Oooopsie! :-)

Diagram 2 - Running on a high incline

Now in diagram two the runner has increased the incline of the treadmill but he is still running and not holding on. Because of gravity, humans need to be positioned at a right angle to the core of the earth. The treadmill provides an artificial ground for the runner and in order to stay on the treadmill and not fall off, the runner has to effectively learn forward to keep the centre of gravity positioned correctly through his body.

What the incline of the treadmill does here is increase the angle between the runner and the artificial surface beneath him. Notice how that angle is larger (or smaller depending on which of the two angles you are looking at! I’m looking at the one to the left of the red line.) That’s what gives him the extra resistance and thus makes the run harder. Basic principles at work here.

Diagram 3- Holding on to a treadmill on a high incline

So far so good but look what happens when the runner decides that he can’t actually run at the incline he has set so instead decides to hold on. What usually happens is that as he holds onto the bar he effectively hangs his bodyweight off it which changes the angle of his body – he is now positioned once again at a right angle to his artificial ground. This means that the resistance that he tried to increase by increasing the incline is effectively cancelled out by his need to hold on.

Now this diagram is an extreme example but this was exactly what I saw in my gym last week. The angle was so high that I couldn’t see how anyone could get up a hill like that without holding onto something. This man was literally holding on for dear life and as I watched him I could see the angle of his body positioned just like the one in my diagram above.

So What? What Does it Matter Anyway?

This guy is kidding himself. He thinks he is pushing himself to the max by setting the incline so high and yet he is defeating his own efforts by having to hold on. Of course I also see many people holding onto the bar even when the treadmill is flat. This carries health problems of its own and a quick Google search will reveal lots of informative pages about that. However what I would really like to get across is not so much the health problems of holding on exactly, but the fact that this man is sabotaging his own efforts and tricking himself into thinking that he is working much harder than he is.

This is a recurring theme in the fat loss and fitness arena. I have been guilty of kidding myself in so many ways over the years and it is only now that I am starting to see where many of us are going wrong. I think it’s important to highlight the ways in which we do this to ourselves because there is nothing worse than coming to the end of the week where you think you have eaten well and exercised well and you do your weighing and measuring and do not get the results you expect. You wonder why your plan doesn’t seem to be working when you are obviously doing everything right.

I’m going to start a new category for this post and I’ll be putting in quite a few more articles in it in the coming weeks.

Year 2, Week 2 Check-In

After my small weight gain at my last check in I made more of a concerted effort to work a little harder in the week gone past. I did still indudge more than I should have (especially at the weekend) but I much preferred my new exercise routine and the results have come out quite well:

Weight: 10st 10.75 lbs
Weight Change: -1.75lbs
Body Fat: 30.5%
Body Fat Change: -0.7

One thing that strikes me immediately is that a loss of 1.75 lbs is a lot for me in one week. I did not follow my plan perfectly and I highly doubt I actually burned that much fat. What I suspect is that the previous week on weigh day I was experiencing some fluctuation and I was just having a heavy day. It then dropped off and has showed up on the scales this week instead. I get a lot of fluctuation and it is something I am going to post about in more detail in the near future.

I seem to be back on track but I have still had some issues. I didn't go running this morning and I don't think I will tomorrow morning either. I really don't look forward to it; I dread it and that's not how I want exercise to be. This last week I replaced two of my runs with cardio sessions down the gym and I really enjoyed them and when I enjoy it I work hard and it pays off. I'm changing my routine again slightly to get rid of the running entirely. I still want to exercise daily so if I don't run the only proper exercise I have available to me at the weekends is weight training so that's what I'll do.

This is my new routine for next week:

Monday: Weights (morning), Karate (evening)
Tuesday: Cardio (morning)
Wednesday: Weights (morning), Karate (evening)
Thursday: Cardio (morning)
Friday: Cardio (morning)
Saturday: Weights (anytime)
Sunday: Weights (anytime)

One thing I was unable to do all last year is to break the 30% body fat barrier. I would really like to do that soon but I have to stop pigging out at weekends! Right now I am posting this from my friends house (my broadband box got fried yesterday when our house got hit by lightning!) and we've been pigging out on crisps, dips, donuts... yum :-)

The Different Types of Body Fat

I've recently been learning a little bit about the various different types of body fat and thinking about how that affects my health and my fat loss. There are three primary types of body fat:

• Subcutaneous - sits underneath the skin
• Visceral - deposits around the internal organs
• Intramuscular - is weaved throughout our muscle tissue

The subcutaneous fat is the stuff we see on the surface, it's what's makes us flabby and wobbly. Got bingo arms? That's the subcutaneous stuff! This is the kind of fat that I suspect most women are thinking about when they want to lose fat. Losing this kind of fat will make you look leaner.

The visceral fat is hidden away but this is what gives people that pot bellied look. Beware, this is the dangerous fat and makes you susceptible to obesity-related diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. Those of you who are more apple shaped than pear shaped have a tendency to store visceral fat.

The intramuscular fat is also hidden away. If you look at a cut of beef that has fat marbled through it - that's the intramuscular fat. I couldn't find very much information about this fat in relation to humans.

Measuring Body Fat

This new found knowledge has now given me a greater understanding of why different methods of body fat measurement can give such different results. When I first started out I used skin fold calipers. As these literally measure the size of a fold of skin they can only measure subcutaneous fat and so visceral fat is ignored.

When I started on my current plan I tried using a tape measure to estimate body fat and measurements were taken from the waist and the hips. I was shocked to find a difference of 8% in the two readings! My tape measurement put me at 40% body fat and the calipers at 32%. What does this tell me? That I carry more visceral fat than subcutaneous fat and the mirror tells the same story - my belly pokes out like a football. A year ago I could make myself look six months pregnant by pushing out my belly!

My recent results are also correlating the conclusions that I have reached about my body fat. About a month ago I lamented the fact that I had not yet seen any grand transformations; that I seemed to be just a smaller version of my former self. This is also indicative of the loss of visceral fat - my belly has got smaller but I have not lost much of the outer fat. I've lost some of course but not as much as I would have hoped for.

What Does This Mean?

First of all everybody is different. Two people who weigh the same and have the same levels of body fat can still look quite different if their fat is made up differently. The person with high visceral and low subcutaneous may look quite lean but still have a sticky-outy-belly. A person with the opposite ratio can have a slim figure but still look flabby and soft.

Armed with this knowledge I can see an obvious question - how do I lose a particular type of fat? Answer: you don't get to choose the type of fat you lose any more than you can choose where you lose it from, so you can banish those illusions of losing the subcutaneous fat from your right kneecap on Saturday's workout! Fat is lost all over the body and of course Sod's law says that the fat you most want to lose will come off last.

We need to lose the visceral fat for health reasons and we want to lose the subcutaneous fat for vanity but we have no control over the precise mechanics of it. The advice then is simple - no matter how your body is composed, if you want to be healthy and look good then you just need to keep working at lowering your body fat until you have achieved both of those aims.

Year 2, Week 1 Check-In

This post is the first in a series of weekly progress that I am going to post as I go through my second year on my fat loss and fitness plan. Many weeks I see that I've made little or no progress and I think "damn, must try harder next week" but I don't really pinpoint specific issues I had or look at ways that I could do better. By blogging about it I hope that I will be a bit more diligent.

Weight GAIN: 0.25 lbs

Oh dear! Not a good start to my second year. I didn't just not lose but I gained weight! I didn't bother doing the measurements and bodyfat calculations this week as the results will not really change much with such a small weight change. I usually do that when there's been a change of around 1lb.

Changes in Exercise Routine

Last week I tried quite a different routine to the norm. For quite a few months I had a fairly regular routine of doing cardio weekday mornings, weights weekday lunchtimes, karate two evenings a week and nothing at all on the weekend. This routine had two drawbacks. Firstly it took 14 hours out of my week, phew! Secondly it was all concentrated into 5 days and then I did nothing on weekends and that is when I tend to overeat the most.

I've had a week of illness and then a week on holiday and around that time I also realised that I could no longer afford to spend 14 hours of my week on exercise so I've changed things around quite a lot. I now exercise daily, but no more than twice daily (cardio, weights AND karate in one day is just overkill) and I started replacing cardio at the gym for running near my house as that's something I want to improve.

Running Problems

My current routine has me running 4 times - both weekend days and also two mornings during the week. I had real issue with my mid-week runs as I was doing these straight after getting up at 6am. I don't like to exercise immediately after waking as I'm like a zombie for a while. Secondly, I am greatly dehydrated when I first wake up. Usually I'll have a big glass of water first thing but by running first I missed out on that. Lastly, I'm hungry and have no energy.

I was having a very hard time with the running, feeling terribly lethargic and I kept getting headaches. This week I'm changing the routine to overcome these problems. I'll still run on weekends but not straight away. I'll get up, have my water, have breakfast and wake up a bit before I go. I did that this morning and felt much better for it. During the week, I'm dropping the running and replacing it with two cardio sessions instead. I always workout very well doing cardio at the gym because I put in a solid 40 minutes and I monitor my heart rate the entire time and keep it pretty high.

Snacking

Last week I snacked quite a lot, mostly on sweets and chocolates but I also had peanut butter on toast in the evening twice. Snacking has always been a problem for me and I don't think I'll ever be able to completely give up sweets, chocolates, cakes biscuits etc. Well it's not so much that I can't give them up, as I don't want to. However, I need to do something about it so next week I'll try and compromise by allowing myself one unplanned treat daily. If I raid the receptionists sweetie bowl (she has toffees! how can I resist!!?) then no chocolate and no toast that day!

Those Indulgent Days

Unfortunately I've already got myself off to a bad start this morning by eating a cheese burger! I do my weekly shop on Saturday mornings (which I hate) and a few months ago they went and installed an in-store McDonalds! Usually it doesn't tempt me as I'm not actually a huge fan, I find their food pretty gross really but today I was just so hungry and I caved.

Not only that but in an hour or so I'm taking my son to Legoland where I will no doubt eat more crappy food like burgers. And we always have one of their scrumptious chocolate dipped waffles when we go there! Usually I take my own food with me but I'm just having one of those days today and I just can't be bothered! Lastly, I just know I'll be knackered tonight and I wont want to cook. I've already decided that we're having a Chinese takeaway - I even bought the crispy duck already as I can get it at the shops a lot cheaper!

I don't beat myself up about days like today even though they do tend to sabotage my progress for the whole week. It doesn't happen every week and I still get a life. The key point though is that I go straight back on plan the following day, I never lose sight of the big picture.

How I Developed Persistence

My last post talked about my progress after one year on my fat loss & fitness plan. One year is a long time, especially for me. I started gaining weight in my early twenties and I have been overweight for around 12 years. I don't know how many times I tried to lose some weight but it was many. I tried for a while, lost a few pounds, gave up, put a few pounds back on; the same old cycle repeated by a great many people I'm sure.

My progress over this last year wasn't as good as I would have liked but it was persistent, week after week and month after month. I never once "fell of the bandwagon", though I did jump off it a few times but with every intention to jump back on it once I was done doing whatever it was. A good example is my recent holiday. I ate a heck of a lot of food and I didn't do any exercise at all. I drank wine or beer with almost every meal, loaded up on french bread, pate, chocolate, cheese, everything and anything that was on offer! Yet never once did I think "oh well I've blown it now, may as well give up". I knew I would gain weight, and I did - five pounds, but when I got back holiday I just got straight back on plan. In fact the morning of my last day on holiday was spent doing my food plan for the following week.

So what was different this time? I've thought long and hard about it in the hope that I can figure out the key elements that led to this persistence so that I may apply it to other areas of my life, and maybe even help you do the same.

1) I Wanted it BAAAAAADDDDD!

What is really behind persistence of any kind? Motivation. And where does motivation come from? From wanting something. If you want something bad enough, you'll do whatever it takes to get it. Before starting Uni I lost some weight (I talk about that a little further down) and I dropped a clothes size, bought myself some new clothes and felt quite good about myself. As soon as I started feeling good about myself the desire to lose more fat dwindled so it gradually piled back on.

I figured that if I was going to keep this up I was going to have to want it badly so I put a lot of mental effort into making myself really want to lose that fat and get fit. I wrote down all the reasons why I wanted to get slimmer and thinner, I thought about all the things I would do if I felt better about myself and so on. I thought about this day in, day out. Sometimes I wanted it so badly that it hurt.

2) I Used Visualisations

Partly a spin-off from number one... As a tool to help kindle that burning desire I used visualisations to help me.

I developed scenarios, fantasies really, about situations in my future and saw myself as I wanted to be. For example, one of them was a day out at the beach with my family and some friends. I saw exactly how my body looked, exactly what I was wearing and so on. I had about five of these scenarios and I'd make a point of running through them in my mind over and over.

I don't really use them now as I simply don't need to - the habits have been formed now.

3) I Dumped the Excuses

For as long as I can remember I've had no shortage of excuses for my weight, my food habits, and my lack of exercise. When I started on my plan I dumped the lot of them. I made the decision that I would no longer tolerate excuses. And as it turns out, they were just excuses because over the year many of the circumstances that I used as excuses cropped up and I dealt with them this time. Here's a few examples:

"My schedule is too erratic, so there's no point trying to begin an exercise routine"

I'm a routine-aholic (yes, I just made that up!) I like routine because it allows me to plan the routine and planning allows me to tweak my plan to perfection. While I was at Uni my schedule would indeed change every few weeks so this became my biggest excuse. It was crap of course because I had exercise facilities available to me both at home and on campus.

"I don't have the time"

What a classic that one is! I've always used that one. The funny thing is, once I started work (which is when I started my plan) I found that I had a lot less time than before and I immediately regretted not spending my time more wisely while I had it. Yet despite this illusion of lack of time (everybody has exactly the same amount of time as anyone else - we make the time for something or we don't) I now exercise daily as well as spending many hours in the kitchen every week preparing food.

Those were my two biggest excuses. What are yours? Who are you trying to kid?

4) I Wanted to Start My Job Right

The beginning of my plan coincided with the start of my new job. When you go into a new job the people there know nothing about you so your behaviour in the first few days can make a lasting impression. I decided right away that from day one I would make it clear that I went to the gym every day at lunchtimes and I brought food into work. I felt very awkward at first because everybody else had a ritual of going together to the sandwich shop for lunch and they either stayed in the office or all went down the pub. I on the other hand brought in several meals and ate them at weird times. However, I did indeed establish this as a habit and now everybody knows me and I get people all the time at work coming to me for diet and exercise advice.

Now if I'm having a bad day and I'm seen eating a cake or chocolate or something they'll all pick up on it straight away. That's much better than feeling peer pressure from your work colleagues to eat unhealthily because they do. I don't get that.

5) I Believed I Could Lose the Fat Because I Had Lost Some Before

About 5 years ago I joined a slimming club and lost nearly two stones. In actual fact my lowest weight was the weight I am this week! However, that was done with diet alone. I did no exercise, I was still unfit and very flabby. I look better now than I did then. Still, I did lose the bulk of the fat and I became a consultant for the club, and ran my own class for a few months before going to Uni.

I figured if I could lose fat with no exercise and with a crappy diet (which it was), then I could certainly lose it with a proper exercise and nutrition plan.

6) I Began to See Fat Loss as a Numbers Game

Calories in v calories out. Yes of course it's not that simple but that's the essence of it. Calculating the numbers is the easy bit, eating and exercising the right amount of numbers is the hard bit. However, once I re-read my Burn the Fat book (I really must write a review of that soon!) I started to realise that it all boiled down to three habits:

• Eating the right food
• Cardiovascular exercise
• Weight training

If I could get myself to form the habit of incorporating these three things into my life then I could tweak the numbers as I go and eventually I'd get it right. I've been tweaking all year and I think I always will. Many people start out and get the numbers wrong so they give up.

Conclusion

First and foremost, you have to want it. Whatever it is you need to be persistent with starts in the mind. You also have to believe in yourself - another mind game. Ask yourself the question "why can I do this?" and you'll come up with answers. If you are negative and start thinking about your past failures you'll just get more of the same. Focus on what you want, not what you don't want.

All this thinking is great but after that it's action that counts. Dreams and goals don't mean squat if they stay locked up in your mind and are never acted upon. Figure out what you have to do, boil it down to the essentials and in particular, look for habits. Speaker and author Jim Rohn says that "Failure is a few small errors in judgment, repeated every day. Success is a few small disciplines repeated every day." Find those disciplines and make them into habits.

When the going gets tough go back to the mind games. Re-evaluate why you want it and what it's going to give you. Make sure you feel the emotions and let them penetrate into your soul. If what you are doing isn't working for you, look at the numbers. Are you exercising enough? Eating too much? Tom Venuto who wrote the Burn the Fat book says that usually when it's not working you just have to work that bit harder. That isn't always the case but many times it is!

Think.
Act.
Repeat.

One Year On - How Have I Done and What's Next?

7th July - Funny Date to Start Something New

Two years ago today, a cyst on my ovary ruptured, requiring surgery. The surgery should have been routine but something went wrong and two days later I was in intensive care. I was in intensive care for a week, sedated for 2 days and had another major surgery whilst I was in there. The whole ordeal lasted 11 days and left me heavily scarred both physically and emotionally.

The experience stayed with me for a very long time. I even had some weird symptoms that lasted almost a year. The incident happened during the summer holiday between my 2nd and 3rd years at Uni so when I went back to Uni for my final year I was not long out and still recovering. I found it very hard to get around campus between lectures. I needed to get myself better and boost my health but instead I threw myself into my studies, put on a truckload of weight and did zero exercise.

Fast forward almost a year to 6th July 2006. On this day I graduated from University with a First Class Honors degree, an award for the Best Student, and a new job all lined up. It was time to make a change. The very next day, the anniversary of the day I went into hospital, I would clean up my diet, start exercising, build up my new career and change my life for the better.

One Year on the Plan

Now here I am a year later. How did I do? Well the first most obvious point is that I am here writing about it, I have worked my plan for an entire year. I had been overweight for about 12 years and I had tried tons of diets and been on and off countless exercise plans. Nothing usually lasted more than a few weeks. I had some brief success with a Simming World club, but I didn't really make any permanent changes with that. This time around I had stuck to my plan, and tweaked it constantly for an entire year. My life has changed for the better!

Lets See Some Stats!

I started out my measuring, weighing and seeing just where I was at. These were my starting stats:

Weight: 161 lbs
Bodyfat: 40.6%
Lean Body mass: 93.2 lbs

I was shocked at first. 40% body fat? Wow that seemed really high. Here's an important point I woud like to make about this. There are many different ways to measure body fat and none are all that effective but if you always use the same method to measure then you can at least ensure that the number is getting smaller. That is what I have done. I use a tape measure to take measurements of my waist and hips and plug them into this website to get the numbers. I know its flawed because my tummy often gets bloated, especially around period times but these are just blips. Over a long length of time, (especially a year!) you can see a trend.

Here's a couple of pictures from 2006 when I started:

Ugh! Check out the rolls of flab!

Graduation Day. I look fat & tired.

After figuring out where I was, I set about setting a goal. At first I wasn't too sure what I could achieve so I just plucked an arbitrary figure from out of the air - 25% body fat. That seemed like fairly average and figured that would be a good starting point. I plugged the number into my spreadsheet along with my lean body mass and figured I would need to lose about 28lbs to get there. In hindsight, I now know that spreadsheets don't always reflect reality as two weeks ago my loss had reached 27lbs and my lean body mass was higher than it started but still my body fat was over 30%.

My Current Stats

Ok where am I now? Well unfortunately I put on a whopping 5lbs on holiday so I have undone some of my progress but that is life. Here's the numbers:

Weight: 138 lbs (23 lbs lost)
Body Fat: 31.2% (9.4% lost)
Lean Body Mass: 95.2 lbs (2 lbs gained)

It's all positive but not as much as I would have liked. A few weeks after starting, I began to plan more carefully and figured I could lose 1lb a week. After a year I have lost only 23lbs so that's an average of about half a pound a week but it did not work out like that. I have plotted a little graph of my progress over the year:

I started off really well, for the first four months I actually lost more than I had planned. That took me to November when it all started to go horribly wrong. For me Christmas has always been a very bad time, but not just Christmas Day or even Christmas week. Oh no, for me Christmas starts when the shops get the Christmas stuff in. Now I dunno about the rest of the world but here in the UK that starts in October! Usually I could put on a stone over the whole of the winter period.

Looking at the chart I slowed right down in November then from December to January I had a sharp increase in weight. January I didn't do too badly and I lost most of what I had gained but I took another bad turn in February and put more back on. From November to March I had lost a net total of 1.5 lbs! That's a crappy four months. I got myself back on track in March and steadily lost all through the summer until my holiday when I had that massive jump back up!

Here are some recent photos. I don't have any flesh revealing ones yet this year but on the closeup I can see a marked difference around my neck. I hated looking so fat around the face so I'm glad its come off from there.

Same baby as before, we both have more clothes on!

I've been snapped eating, hence the odd expression!

Plans for the Coming Year

Obviously I'm not done yet. I haven't reached my goal, and as I discovered recently, I don't think 25% is good enough anyway. They say that the closer you get to your goal, the harder it is to lose but I don't really buy that. After a year, I've learned a few things and I have found stuff that works for me and stuff that doesn't:

• I now have a very good idea of the ideal meal for me, how many calories, the macronutrient ratio etc and I have built a ton of recipes that match it for breakfasts, lunches and dinners. When I started out I had to largely wing the food and just make small adjustments along the way. Now I have it sorted pretty well.
• I have identified many things that sabotage my diet and I've come up with strategies for dealing with them when I want to.
• On the other hand, I also know that I can lose fat when I want to which allows me to go out an enjoy good food on occasion without worrying about it. Over the long haul, I'm making progress in the right direction whilst still having a social life.
• I've started running. This gives me a form of cardio that I can do anywhere so that I am not tied to a gym. I still have a long way to go with running but that's something I'm going to work on in the coming year.
• I now know that during the winter months I crave chocolate and comfort foods heavily, and I also hate getting up early! I can use this to my advantage. I have done a plan for the year but I am only planning to lose just 1 lb a month in the winter months.
  
• Exercise has become fundamentally ingrained into my lifestyle. I do some kind of exercise every single day - whether it's cardio down the gym, going for a run, karate, or weight training either at the gym or at home. This is a habit I intend to maintain for the rest of my life.
• Oh yes, how could I forget - I started karate this year. Not only is it something I have wanted to take up for years but its an excellent form of exercise.

These are all tools & knowledge that I did not have a year ago. So with that in mind, here is my new target for next year:

15% Body fat, 95lbs lean body mass by 7th July 2008.

Breaking it Down

One of the mistakes I made last year was that I set my one year goal but I never broke it down further. I knew I wanted to lose 1lb a week roughly but if I had a week where I didn't lose enough or I gained I just said "oh well, there's plenty of time yet, I'll lose next week". The time period was too long and I simply didn't notice how badly things were going during the winter.

So this time I have started to break down that goal and I have set myself goals for the next three months and I'll continue to re-evaluate those as the year progresses.

Conclusion

When I came out of hospital I said that I wanted to improve my lifestyle and become a fit and healthy person so that I would never have to go through that again. I somehow attributed my poor lifestyle to the first operation going wrong. Whether that's true or not doesn't matter. It took me a year to actually start doing something about it but at the back of my mind the whole time has been the overarching goal to be healthy - not just thin.

Sure I wanted to lose the flab, but I wanted to get fit too. I wanted to change my habits and make healthier choices the norm for me. Even though I have not lost as much body fat as I had wanted in this year I am way, way fitter than I was back then, and I am much healthier.

As I tell people in the Burn the Fat newsgroup that I subscribe to, it's not a matter of losing as much fat as quickly as possible thats important, it's imprinting the right habits onto your life that are going to make the difference long term. I will continue my plan for another year, and I get real excited when I think about what I can achieve in my second year at this.

To Plan Or Go With the Flow?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have a tendency to plan things in great detail. I do this with all things related to my fat loss goal such as planning of all of my food and my exercise routines. The main reason I do this is because it gives me a sense of certainty. For example, if I know that I need 2000 calories a day and I plan my food to exactly 1500 calories a day then I can be fairly sure that I'll lose 1lb of fat in a week as there are 3500 calories in 1lb of fat.

Planning Problems

However, there are problems when it comes to planning, especially when that plan relies on a certain amount of progress being made. Here's an example: when I first started running I had a goal in mind. I wanted to run 5k on the 22nd July for the Race for Life event. I also knew what my starting circumstances were so I took a logical approach and drew up a plan of how I could go from where I was to where I wanted to be (in running terms) in the time that I had available.

The plan went something like this... I started out running something like 10 minutes in blocks of two minutes at a time and walking for a minute in between. Each week I would increase the overall duration of the run and over time I would increase the length of each block. The aim was to get me to a point where I would be able to run for 40 minutes non-stop. I did this on a spreadsheet in a very linear fashion and it all looked fine but there was a fatal flaw in the plan - it did not take into account my physical and emotional states and capabilities.

Plans Have to be Executed by People

When I first started out I made progress quite quickly and looking back I think the reason for that is that my fitness has increased quite a bit from my other exercise so I started out being able to do more than I realised. However I soon hit a wall and then workouts became serious effort and this is where the problems started. I find running hard, really hard. And painful. There were times when my legs were screaming and I can't put myself through that kind of pain unless I'm in a certain emotional state. I have to be feeling highly motivated and fired up, and physically feeling fresh and strong. But of course I simply don't feel like that every day.

Many days I would drag myself down the gym early in the morning, I'd be yawning away not looking forward to another day in the office and just feeling generally low. On days like that I just didn't want any more pain. Yes I'd think about my goals and visualise the results I wanted but on some days I simply didn't care! I was happy to do a workout as long as I didn't have to push too hard and for me, running was always hard.

Plans Must be Able to Accommodate Change

I found myself getting stressed because the routine was not going according to the plans I had laid out. In my first plan I was trying to increase my overall duration by three minutes per week and at the time I ran three times per week so that equated to a minute more on every run. Once I began to hit that wall I couldn't find that extra minute in me and then of course the next day I'd need to run an extra two minutes if I wanted to stay on plan and that's the problem with a plan that relies on a linear progression - one slip and the whole plan falls apart.

Another problem is that if I push myself really hard it tends to have repercussions later on. Sometimes they are physical - I'll get such cramps in my legs that I wont want to run for a few days or they are emotional - I keep thinking about how much the last run hurt and I end up skipping gym sessions in the following few days. This is counter productive - two average workouts would be better than one great one and one skipped one!

Ditching the Plan

I've already decided to pull out of the race so I feel like the pressure has been lifted but I would still like to persevere with running simply because it's such a convenient form of exercise. I don't need a gym and I can run anywhere. A week off work doesn't have to mean a week of missed exercise.

After a holiday in France I wanted to get back into it but I didn't want to dive in and push too hard and just put myself off again so I started off very gently. I went right back to basics. I had plotted out a 3k route and my only objective was simply to complete that route on foot, be it walking, jogging or some mixture. I started out just walking and I didn't look at my watch at all. Of course after a while I was warmed up and I felt fine so I moved into a jog. When I got tired I just stopped and walked again. I didn't check my watch, I didn't try to 'reach the next milestone' - I simply did as much as I felt like without pushing too hard.

Of course it was not a fantastic workout. I would have burned more calories by doing a workout on one of the elliptical machines at the gym but that's not the point. What I am trying to do here is reintroduce myself to the idea of running as a form of regular exercise. I can supplement my routine with gym sessions to ensure I do enough real fitness but as far as running goes I just want to try and get comfortable with it.

Progress Still Needs to be Measurable

The question is, will I get any better? If I just go with the flow in this way and don't try to set myself any goals or time myself in any way then how will I know if I am getting any better? And if I don't get any better then what is the point? What I think I can do here is use a couple of methods of measurement that are much less formal than the plans I used to draw up.

Firstly, I can plot new routes that are longer. My 3k route took me 30 minutes and I walked most of it. Ideally I'd like to be doing a 30 minute workout that is mostly running but as I physically can't do that yet I'll settle for longer routes that I walk large chunks of. If I make the route longer then I know I am doing more without having to explicitly measure anything.

Secondly, I can time the overall route. Where as before I would have a strict schedule such as run 8 minutes, walk 2 minutes, and repeat three times, now I can just do a run/walk mixture as I feel able and time it on a regular basis to see if I am getting any faster. Plus, I can use my intuition. How do I know I walked most of the route if I didn't do any timings? Well I just know! I can use that same sense to give me an idea of whether or not I am running more than before. Every week or so I can time the run so I have a better idea. If after a few weeks the same route is taking me the same time to cover then I know I am not making any improvement. Perhaps then I could try and use more formal methods to step up the effort a little.

For now, I'm going to just go with the flow and see how that works out.
(01/07/2007 13:40 | delete)

Why do Plans Change so Quickly?

Just over a month ago I posted that I was going to start Slacking Off Before my Deadline. In that post I had decided that I was exercising far too much and I decided to trim it down to just one session per day. At that time my exercise consisted of cardio at the gym, weight training and karate. I had pretty much stopped running.

Then just a couple of weeks later I had another go at running after discovering that I had previously been Running Too Fast. After this post I decided to re-incorporate running into my regime so my routine changed again.

Then about a week ago, just two weeks after planning to start running again, I stopped all over again and pulled out of the Race I had signed up for! At the same time I decided to cut back my exercise further to give me more time for other areas of my life.

Now, just a week later I feel myself wanting to change once again! I've just got back from a holiday in the South of France. It was lovely out there but I did absolutely no exercise and I ate truckloads of food. I've come back 6 lbs heavier! I knew this would happen but that doesn't stop me feeling bad about it. My gut reaction is to get down that gym twice a day like I was before to try to shift the excess again as fast as possible and just sod everything else!

So why so many changes in such a short time? Am I the only one who goes through this? I think that one of the issues that I personally face is that I like to plan. I like to have a set routine that I follow - I don't like to just 'wing it' when it comes to exercise or food. I plan things in great detail and when anything changes in my circumstances I go and re-work my plans. So I guess that I notice these changes more than others.

Looking at the reasons behind the changes I see nothing out of the ordinary. I was getting a bit obsessive over exercise so I cut back a bit, I introduced running after trying something new, a week of illness and a holiday threw my plans out of whack. I'm sure these are things that happen to us all a lot of the time.

The same thing can be said of food. How many times have I planned food only to have those plans compromised because of a stay with family, a day out, a meal out, somebody's birthday etc etc etc. This happens all the time. Why?

Because LIFE happens!

This is just life isn't it? Stuff happens. Life happens, that's just the way things are. Things change, things get in the way, people get in the way. In my case I change my plans every time something changes and this gets very annoying when I spend a lot of time planing and have to keep changing it but at least I'm adapting. I fear it would be much worse to just ignore those changes and not deal with them.

I'm learning to accept it now. I find this problem cropping up in all areas of my life - not just my fat loss goals. Things always change and we need to be able to adapt if we want to keep up with the times and keep moving forward with our goals.