On Excercise - Less is My More

I don't know exactly how many times now I have been told to keep up the "hard work" and other similar comments implying that I am struggling Biggest Loser style hours a night to lose all of the weight. However I do know that I have heard it enough to come to the conclusion that general public is convinced staying physically fit requires herculean effort and huge amounts of time...

I generally just nod and smile and take the encouragement. Every once in a while though I will decide to have some fun and say something along the line of "thanks, but I don't really work out all that much - maybe an hour a week total". Generally the person looks a little confused and nods politely - I haven't figured out if they just don't believe me or are straight up confused how I could lose almost 180 pounds now and not spend 24 hours a day in the gym. 

For a while I was also convinced of the necessity of logging as much gym time as possible - I went through at least a 3 month period of working out at least an hour a night for six days a week with free-weights in my basement. Then I re-evaluated my approach and gradually phased down to my current ~ 1 hour a week spread over 2-3 days. That hour is typically one short sprint session of ~5 minutes and two body weight workouts running 20-30 minutes each. My rate of weight loss has actually increased since going to short periodic body weight episodes and my strength still improves every week (I can actually do a pull-up now for the first time in 33 years).

Throwing out the standard approach to diet and excercise Part 2.

Part 1 of this post covered what I think almost all approaches overlook/do poorly - how to implement change regardless of what the change to should be. A lot of research on what type of diet is better, which macro nutrients, which exercises, etc... but in the end if you can't change permanently or effectively the right "formula" is pretty much useless or in my theory detrimental for certain people susceptible to the "failure penalty" spiral I have outlined.

After this initial analysis I needed a direction - something different from the standard approach. So I took a step back and looked at my profession - a professional change agent (continuous improvement engineer/six sigma black belt). I was responsible for making changes and transforming an entire organization - I was effective at this why not use some of the same principles on myself? Why not apply principles I had proven worked in other areas of my life?

Throwing out the standard approach to diet and excercise Part 1.

Diet and exercise, diet and exercise, diet and exercise...

That is all I can remember growing up as an obese kid and then into adulthood and still hear it today. Before even venturing into the subject of what the diet and exercise regimen should be (low fat/high fat, high carb/low carb, processed/organic, free weights/machines, cardio/strength, ad infinitum......) I believe from my experience and reading/observing  others there is a fundamental problem with the way almost all of the regimens are administered.

It came to me as I was examining how I got to my super-super obese state. I had a history of repeated attempts at diet and exercise (of differing varieties) with the same result time after time. An all out effort on the diet and exercise front with clean eating and regular exercise for some period of time - a real commitment because this time "had to be the last". The initial results and consistency were outstanding!

But you can only burn a candle so brightly for so long and eventually there would be a burn out - a special occasion that would lead to a poor food choice, or a business trip that precluded the normal workout, then after such intense effort up to that point it was the almost an immediate reaction to punish myself for throwing away the prior efforts I had so diligently exerted.

Losing it logically.....

Eat right and exercise - that's how you lose weight.

Simple, logical, and straight forward - add in the food pyramid, a 1500 calorie per day limit, the number of minutes to exercise, and the number of days and you have exactly what an engineer like myself loves.  A straight forward specification to follow.

Being an engineer I believed in this specification, backed by "science" and recommended by our well respected medical establishment and struggled to follow it for many years. Being an engineer graphs and charts are sometimes how I speak so below are the results of trying to follow this specification with weights taken from the 2001 through January 2009:

Obviously I gained weight pretty steadily until I found myself at 415 lbs in size 56 pants and 4XL shirts. I felt miserable and lost without a direction - my life should have been great, wife, kids, and job all the components of the American dream. Instead I was a physical mess with no end to the spiral in sight.