Occasionally you'll hear or know of a person who is actually underweight, maybe even very underweight and their goal is actually to gain weight as per doctor's orders. I am thinking of Michael Douglas who after all his chemo he's been through is severely under his ideal weight and is happily working on getting it back. Now this is really COOL that you are now officially sanctioned to pig out,
"pass me more bread please, and oh the butter"
if only for a brief period of time, a few weeks, a couple months like you just had a hearty meal and couple hours later you go oh let me hit a McDonald's. A Nirvanic window of opportunity, a quirk in the normal flow of Life. Enjoy!!!
Scales are weird. You'll have one day when you did everything exceptionally right. You really put in the exercise that day, not only that you ate purely for nutritional purposes, no going over, no overeating (it's actually amazing when you do this you see as if in stark relief how everyone else engages in totally unnecessary eating throughout the day) and so you do all this and step on the scale at night and you actually, what is that? gained a couple of pounds?!? Now here's the other thing and doctors never explain it, when they talk about your ideal weight should you weigh say X amount of pounds even after having a decent meal or what exactly is the definition here? The thing with losing the weight is maintaining your weight and you always, but always sense a little creepup. Had a nice cheesecake slice at work the other day, pondered it but said what the hell and so wouldn't you know it and this was at night and into the next day too probably plussed another pound. I don't obsess over it but I can see why this is such a frustrating area for so many people. Then there's the Inversion of Values by people who resent you for some reason like the guy delivering the meats yesterday who says to me "oh you lost weight, was it deliberate?" I like somebody who
Gets to the Point,
I can dig it but no dude I didn't put some bad dick in my mouth or finished off my round of chemo/radiation. So what part of "my weight was related to some blood pressure issues and so I decided to finally address that" don't you understand? People act like this dieting thing is some type of vast Mystery for the Ages but it's really all about discipline and since so many people fail at that, in fact the failure's expected that somebody who actually sticks to the Program is outside-the-mainstream I guess but talk about beating a subject to death! The horse wants to be buried already. Guy at work, I guess he's trying to lose the weight and so he always asks for Weight Watchers bread to be used on his sandwich every day but imo he got it all wrong. It ain't that, he just needs to get his boots on and climb up Mt. Spitzenberg in the middle of this wonderful winter we're having, that'd be a 545' summit in the middle of the Peekskill woods here and do this once or maybe twice a week. I guess it's easier to go with the special bread than the North Face and the frozen snot though:)
First of all, why are you weighing yourself at night? Weigh like they weigh dialysis patients (whose weight has to be accurate to the ounce to figure out dialysis formulae): in the morning, after you pee. That's called 'dry weight'.
ReplyDeleteSecond: if you eat stuff that's high carb or high salt (or God forbid both) you're going to retain water and that is going to show on the scale. When I'm salty I can see ridiculous variations in a matter of hours. This is part of the reason that low-carb diets drop weight off you fast; you're not retaining water like you would otherwise.
And think of this: what you eat does physically in and of itself have weight. If you drink a 32oz pepsi, isn't that 32oz? If you eat a 1/3lb burger, that's 1/3lb. See what I mean? So in the course of the day what does what you eat actually weigh? You're not living on angel food cake. It may seem nitpicky but it's a point to consider.
So don't stress over that stuff. It takes 3500 EXCESS calories (over and above the amount of calories you need to live and function) to add ONE pound of weight. Everything else is basically just fluid and that's going to come and go at will. When people have conditions like congestive heart failure they can put on unbelievable amounts of water weight. They'd come in and we'd diurese them and you'd see something like 25 pounds in 30 hours come off. That's not an exaggeration.
Point is, don't sweat the scale. Overall trends are what's important, not daily fluctuations.
Re your first point I get what you're saying but seems to me you'd be weighing yourself when your stomach is completely empty and the pipes are dry. Seems to me youd rather get a more realistic weight reading like when you go to the doctor's office you don't starve yourself all day just because he's gonna weigh you. "Dry weighing" yourself seems like sucking in your gut but my question to you is when a doctor gives you your ideal weight does he mean the dry weight only? I've weighed myself many times in the morning too and that's always the "best" reading of course but for me it's not the most true-to-life reading. IMO the night reading is more of kind of an average cumulative reading of all your high and low readings over the span of several days and for me it means more. When you say night btw I usually weigh myself in late afternoon or early evening not right before I go to bed.
ReplyDeleteRe your point about carbs when I was growing up carbs were a good thing, you needed them for energy now they're bad. You're talking about the Atkins Diet which has its share of detractors btw and I really don't read a whole lot of diet lit either. Folks act like if they have a Weight Watchers snack they're gonna magically lose weight. I wouldn't call it spazzin' out about all this just that you don't wanna pack the pounds back on and I'm just studying this scientifically if you will.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me the most accurate and realistic weight is when you're dry as opposed to dealing with a whole day's worth of influences and/or fluctuations. It's your call; it's your scale. But I'll be damned if I get on a scale any other time of day.
ReplyDeleteI'm not necessarily talking about Atikins; you can cut carbs somewhat without getting fanatic or eating 3 dozen eggs a day. It's just that if your diet happens to be like 80% carbs and then you decide to cut back a bit, you're going to drop water weight, because 'carbo HYDRATES' are called that for a reason.
OK so fun with numbers. 3500 excess calories will turn into one pound of body fat. I actually heard this on a program last night on Live Well and you can play around with this if you want. Actually then 1750 excess cals will mean an extra 1/2 pound, your basic Burger King value meal will take care of this and so 1+ pound every two days, two pounds every four days, three pounds every six days and so you have yourself here a geometric progression going on. Your formulation makes it sound like it's hard to get fat and one look around the country and we know this is not true.
ReplyDeleteOR 875 excess calories every day will add about a 1/4 pound of fat, 1 whole pound every 4 days, 2 pounds every 8 days and so you got yourself a similar but somewhat slower geometric progression. There's a meaning behind the original number of 3500 and that is to take the pain out of dieting but I'm Olde School, no pain no gain.
ReplyDeleteThe key here is cumulative, excess calories.
ReplyDeleteNow if you take in an excess of 350 calories on Monday and burn an excess of 350 calories on Tuesday that puts you back to square one, essentially, for the week.
Of course this doesn't count in water retention.
But the point is that in terms of pure metabolic truth is that every individual requires a certain amount of calories to function (the BMR) properly, which is modified by the current needs of the individual. For example, someone who's just had major surgery or has an infection requires considerably more calories than you'd imagine, because the body is working hard to heal. Someone who lifts weights all day requires more calories as well, or who runs 25 miles. It's pure math.
In the end, though, 3500 cumulative calories above and beyond what the body requires to function based on its current state will result in one pound gained.
& my point is that if you break that number down there are somewhat slower but still guaranteed ways to gain weight, just do the math. I think the tendency of much modern dieting is eat as much as you can in these kinds of abstract limits and you're good and the agenda here imo is to take the pain and suffering out of dieting, dieting the way it was done in the old days. In other words let's say the medical consensus is take in X amount of calories a day and you're safe well chances are the average person still likes food and so is gonna go right up to that threshold and my whole point is that's a great way to not lose weight that fast. I think Lista's point when she was with us is you have to do something a little more drastic than this strict concentration on hard numbers, say really eat lesser amounts of food and exercise more if you want and need the pounds to come off sooner rather than later. I tend to agree and in some cases later may be too late.
ReplyDelete