Thoughts about Fitness. Part 2.

             Losing fifty pounds in a few months should require a major life change.  But it didn’t.  Looking back, although it wasn’t easy, it was much easier than I suspected it would be.   

The challenging bit was the group of preconceptions I had about fitness.   I had a lot of junk in my head.  Like the healthy necessity of having three square meals a day, shared in Part 1.  All of these little biases added up to my ridiculous fitness beliefs.  For instance, whenever I exercised I ate more food as a ‘reward’.  And if I exercised a lot, it meant I got to eat and drink a lot.  Especially beer. 

The key point is that once I changed my beliefs, I behaved differently.   Not out of rigor, but out of desire.  These changes in behavior impacted my fitness surprisingly quickly.  And because these changes in behavior were down to new beliefs, it’s been effortless to remain fit.  By effortless I don’t mean without industry.  By effortless I mean that it’s now part of the habit of being who I am, so I don’t think of any of the behaviors as an effort.  The discipline is effortless.

So my thinking had to change first.  No shit, Sherlock, I hear you say.  I make this point because previously I had interpreted a ‘change of thinking’ as idiomatic for ‘get motivated’.  I had been motivated to get fit before.  I once endured the misery that is the Atkins Diet for 8 weeks.   That takes motivation.  And I’ve played rugby through several English winters, never missing a single practice or match, in the effort to get fit.  That takes motivation.  So, I had presumed, I just wasn’t motivated enough.  Or maybe my biology was just hard-wired for lumpy bits.  Or perhaps I just didn’t have the requisite level of selfish vanity necessary to get fit, I had told myself.

It wasn’t my motivation that changed, and this blog probably won’t provide much help to someone looking for motivation.   It was my information that changed.   It was the stuff I didn’t know.   And of course, I didn’t know I didn’t know this stuff, so I was caught in a slightly vicious loop of thinking I knew stuff I didn’t and it was all really my destiny to be chubby. 

Now, the stuff I didn’t know won’t be the stuff you don’t know.  And you’ll know stuff I don’t know.  So I’ll just share the stuff I learned, and hopefully something in here will be useful to someone else, even if it just proves to them how much stuff they know compared to me.

Let’s go back to the impetus.   On my cycling trip I’d burned 12,000 calories a day for three days, and still gained five pounds.  Could this really be muscle?  This is one of the most commonly misunderstood facts about fitness out there.  Yes, muscle weighs more than fat.  But the process of creating muscle takes a lot of energy, and in doing so most people will burn off more fat.  An article I read in Men’s Fitness held that, unless you have less than 20% body fat, when you exercise and gain weight, it ain’t muscle.  

This was a truly eye-opening shocker to me.  To burn 12,000 calories in a day is friggin’ hard work.  To learn this was a waste actually made me angry.  What the hell was going on?

We all know the rules.  If you consume more calories than you burn you’ll gain weight.  I had simply consumed 12,000+ calories a day.  With that much effort, I gained muscle and fat, but with that much body fat, I gained more fat than muscle.  The truth hurt.   

The average man burns off about 2200 calories a day through normal activity, the average woman about 1800.  A friend taught me this when he lost about 40 pounds ten years ago (and kept it off).   He was an advocate of calorie counting.  I thought it sounded tedious.

Reeling from my cycling debacle, I surrendered and started counting calories.  A banana is about 100 calories.  A muffin about 400.  A glass of water has virtually none.  My latte has 300.  It’s fairly disturbing how many calories are in things.  Especially certain things.  Whilst begrudgingly modifying my drinking habits due to the ridiculous calories in a beer, it seemed patently unfair that orange juice had so many, too.

Nevertheless, an interesting thing happened fairly quickly.  I stopped counting.   It’s not that I’d quit.  You simply learn how many calories are in stuff.  I only counted calories for about a month, because by that time I knew how many were in just about everything I ate.  You just remember.  So it wasn’t nearly as tedious as I’d expected, and now I know the calories in my favorite things for the rest of my life.

Calories are, unfortunately, only part of the equation.  The other big factor is what type of food you eat.  There are whole books on this, and I’m just trying to get back in the habit of writing without making it a full-time job, so I’ll share an abbreviated version.

Carbohydrates give you long-term energy.  Protein gives you medium term energy and sugars give you short-term energy.  Most of us need long-term energy at the beginning of the day, and don’t need any at the end of the day.   Carbs in the evening easily turn in to fat while you’re sleeping.

So I started eating carbs at breakfast and lunch only, and in the evenings I had my lightest meal of the day, without carbs.  Often just a soup.  This was the hardest bit.  For the first 10-12 days, by hunger pangs were so bad in the evenings I had to take a sleeping pill to get to sleep.  I’m not an advocate of medicating your life, so I’m not suggesting anyone else do this.  I’m just sharing what I did.

Fortunately, as I’d hoped, within a couple of weeks my body got used to having really light meals in the evening and I stopped the sleeping pills.

The other corollary of this counting carbs malarkey is your daily total.  Previous to this regime, I would work out once or twice a week, for 1-3 hours, and make it a real sweat-fest.  With this new regime I worked out every day, with a goal of 30 minutes but for a minimum of 20 minutes.  I figured, you can always find 20 minutes in a day... and once I'd gotten my butt up and doing it, I was often able to find 30 or 40.  Within that goal, I wanted to burn 300 calories as a minimum. 

My plan was simple.  Eat 2000 calories a day and burn 2500 calories a day.  The weight began to fall off.

However, this was not the effortless part.  I hadn’t put all the pieces together yet.  I was often hungry.

Then I read an article in Rolling Stone about General Stanley McChrystal.  In order to avoid sluggishness, he eats one meal a day.  Now this was extreme, but I often felt sluggish in the afternoon.  And I hate feeling sluggish.  This reminded me of what Bill Bryson had shared about the Victorians inventing lunch.  It also reminded me of climbing Mt Kenya - the Kikuyu porters who carried the tents ate two meals a day, and laughed at us ‘fat westerners’ who ate three meals a day.  Gotcha.  So I decided to stop eating lunch for a month, and see what that was like.

In short, that was the easiest part of the whole thing.  Yes, I felt hungry a bit at first but, because I wasn’t consuming many calories in the middle of the day (I didn’t count a banana or apple as lunch – snacks are allowed), I was able to eat larger breakfasts and dinners that were more enjoyable.

I still avoided carbs in the evenings.   I just tried to eat whatever would sate my hunger, and leave the big meal of the day for breakfast.  And once your main meal of the day is breakfast, you start enjoying them a lot more.  I now make sure my breakfast has lovely fresh fruits, nuts and whole grain carbs.  It’s incredibly tasty.

Which is another point.  Personally, I think a banana and a snickers bar are equally good in taste.  I don’t actually prefer sprite or apple juice to a glass of water.  I like them equally.  But when I didn’t know the caloric difference in them, I treated them as similar decisions.  If I felt low in blood sugar, I was just as likely to go for a candy bar, even though I love fruit.  Now I just grab the fruit.  Which is not only better for you but costs less, too.

The best part was new ideas about hunger itself.  I noticed that I felt more effective in the afternoons.  Could hunger be a good thing?  I did some googling.  It turns out, hunger can be incredibly good for you.  Various research suggests it acts as a natural anti-depressant, increases alertness, and can be good for learning.  It also stands to reason from an evolutionary perspective.  Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have benefitted if hunger helped improve their vision, hearing and olfactory senses.  I wasn’t able to find any research to support this last idea, but I can attest to it empirically.

This idea, that hunger is good, proved to be the major lynchpin in the whole puzzle of my new fitness routine.  It sparked a review of my associations with hunger since childhood.  As children we’re often asked if we’re hungry and, if we are, immediately provided a remedy.  Hunger is a problem to be solved.  Further, whenever we’re upset or ill, well-meaning adults offer food as mollification. 

Just imagine if, instead, we were told that hunger makes you strong, hunger makes you alert, or hunger makes you smarter.  Which is apparently true.  So I decided to try.  Every time I felt hungry I tried to say to myself something like, ‘excellent, now I’ll be really effective today’.  It seemed to work!

Of course, I’m not talking about starving oneself or being unhealthy.   According to the research on hunger, it’s not even physiologically relevant until one hasn’t eaten for 12-24 hours.  And throughout history, mankind has often gone a few days without eating.  It’s part of our biological makeup.  And I was only skipping an invented meal that one clearly doesn’t need.

And when I was having a particularly hungry moment, I took someone’s advice (sorry but can’t remember who) and just had a glass of water.  It’s amazing how often this satisfied the urge.

The final piece of the puzzle was some ideas about dairy.  I’ve saved this till last as I’m not sure it had much to do with the weight loss.  I’d lost about 35 pounds by the time I started this stuff.  But it’s certainly part of my routine now.

I read an article in Men’s Health that suggested reducing dairy could improve your energy levels.  So just as an experiment I tried some goat’s milk, soya milk and almond milk.  I found all three to my liking.  They’re a bit different, but pretty good after the oddity of the first sip or two.  So I replaced dairy from my diet.

Here’s a question for you.  What kind of creature depends on another for its entire life?  A parasite, right?   A fair and considered answer, my friend.  It’s also a slightly-excessive-but-passable description of my previous use of dairy.  Consider this.  In the west, we spend the majority of our lives consuming dairy - milk, cheese, yoghurt, etc - that was intended for bovine development.  So what - I quite reasonably asked myself.  Perhaps you get it quicker than I did.  We spend our lives drinking the liquid nature spent millennia designing for mammals to grow to an average weight of 1200 lbs.  And quickly at that.  A newborn calf weighs about 80 lbs, and by six months old weighs about 500 lbs.  Mostly from milk.  Isn’t that impressive?  So milk is perfect for getting fat.

Aside from this are the health risks.  It wasn’t until recently I read this article about dairy.  In short, there is mounting scientific evidence that milk is not only actively bad for you, but also that most people, an astonishing 75%, cannot digest it properly past the age of five.  So why continue having it?  I mean, really, it isn’t that good, is it?

            So that’s the stuff I learned.  I’ve gone from thinking that fitness has more to do with exercise than diet (which it may have done a century ago) but in our plentiful society the opposite is true.  You cannot be healthy by exercising a lot and eating anything. But you can be fit by monitoring your diet with only light exercise.   Whilst this may not be particularly revolutionary or insightful, as a package of ideas it’s working for me.  And it’s left me with a mild curiosity about all things fitness.  If you have an article or idea that you think I might enjoy, let me know.

Thoughts about Fitness. Part 1.

Two years ago this week I rode a bicycle across Britain.  It was a modest undertaking by these sorts of treks – starting from the Lake District the journey spanned 200 miles over 3 days and finished in Edinburgh.  It is a beautifully scenic stretch of land with much to recommend it, but that’s not why I was there.  I was trying to get fit. 

My whole life I’d been a big boy.  At 6’1” and 235 lbs, I’d enjoyed an active life of rugby, volleyball and other exercise, but was still chubby.  It seemed to suit my frame.  Even as a kid I was a bit heavy.  I had plenty of girlfriends, though, so I guess it wasn’t too bad.

Only once had I been close to being slim.  In a two-week period I’d climbed Mt Kenya and Mt Kilimanjaro and lost about 35 lbs.  I was startled.  The lesson was clear.  The secret to getting fit was massive, sustained aerobic activity for many days. 

So there I was pedaling a bicycle across Britain.  After several days of riding, the log of which is its own blog account, I arrived in Edinburgh spiritually cleansed by the experience.  I knew from my Garmin bike computer I had burned over 12,000 calories a day.  It was tough as hell at times, but I felt confident about my trimming strategy.  So I stepped on the scale with confidence.  Followed by confusion.  I had gained 5 lbs over the previous 3 days. 

         At first, of course, this was a triumph.  As we all know, muscle is heavier than fat, so I had created a lot of muscle in the previous few days.  Aren’t I impressive, I thought.

Nevertheless, the demands of logic began to gnaw at me.  If I had lost 10 or 15 pounds of fat, as I hoped, then I had created 15 or 20 pounds of muscle.  In three days.  Was this possible?  Think about a pound of beef at the grocery store.  It’s a lot of meat.  I should be able to see 15 pounds of new muscle, right?  Well, I couldn’t see any.  Even being conservative, let’s say after riding all those miles I had lost 5 pounds of fat and had created 10 pounds of muscle.  According to my grocery store calculations, this should still be a visibly palpable creation of muscle.  Only problem was, I couldn’t see it.

This deduction made me question what I understood about my body.  It made me stop and think.  I wanted to understand this stuff.  Over the next few months I learned some things that allowed me to get very fit and lose about 50 lbs (or nearly 4 stone for you Brits).  Two years on I am still 185 lbs with a 32-inch waist. The majority of the difference between then and now has been what I learned.  So I thought I’d share that journey for whoever might find it either entertaining or useful.

         That journey starts in the early 19th century.  Britain enjoyed an unprecedented onset of wealth.  As the sun rose in New Zealand each morning, spanned across its colonies in India and Africa, and set in the Americas, the coffers of British merchants filled with the lode of the British Empire.  It was a period of exploitation and invention.  The ever-resourceful British invented many things, but this blog’s introduction is about a particular invention that has come to permeate Western life.   Not only has this development become ubiquitous, almost everyone that enjoys this creation has no idea it was even invented.  In fact, most people think this discovery has been around for centuries… when it simply hasn’t.

         What had the British invented?  Lunch. 

         As ever, necessity was the mother of invention.  According to Bill Bryson in ‘At Home’, the expanding wealth of the British Empire expanded the role of society in everyday life; the rigors of social etiquette produced a bewildering array of new social graces.  When invited to a meal one must not only accept the invitation but also had to return it.  Which had to be returned.  And so on.   This created a social diary so packed that new occasions had to be created to deal with the overload.  This is why not only lunch was invented, which has been embraced by the majority of Western society, but also tea-time, which hasn’t.  

         To be completely clear, lunch as a midday meal wasn’t what was invented.  In 1750 if you were invited to “dinner” in Britain it was most likely held just after midday.  In much of the north of England, the midday meal is still called dinner.  People ate two meals a day, in the morning and early afternoon.  At the end of the day there was no ‘meal’, although some would enjoy a snack.  By 1850, however, dinner was a formal meal held in the evenings and had become the largest meal of the day, inculcated with Victorian ritual.  With such a long period between breakfast and dinner, and a flourishing social diary to satisfy, the invention of lunch as a third major meal of the day was almost inevitable.

         This was an extraordinary revelation to me.  My entire life, I was taught one should have ‘three square meals’ a day.  It was the healthy thing to do.  Here was evidence this was simply untrue.  Three meals a day weren’t a careful gastronomic strategy for humanity – they were a tool for social climbing in Victorian Britain.  It wasn’t something the adults who taught it to me had thought about.  It was a habit.  Their parents had simply told them the same thing.

         This got me to wondering.  How many other false assumptions lay deeply buried in my psyche?  How often had I tried to make a healthy choice, only to inadvertently fall prey to a habit carried on by generations of unsuspecting supplicants?  What did I actually know about being healthy?

         This multi-part blog is going to share some of the ideas I came across in trying to answer these questions.  Previous to this journey, I thought all the books and articles about this subject were tedious and slightly extremist.   Having spent the last two years exploring this arena I can relate that, essentially, I was right.    So part 2 of this blog will share some tedium and extremism.  I think the essential aspects of learning this stuff is part of why our cultural habits are so much easier to perpetuate.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to distill what I’ve learned in a way that’s enjoyable to read.  In return, I hope you'll share any interesting ideas about fitness you've come across with me, either via comments or email.  

Before and after.  The first was taken on day one of my cycle ride to Scotland.  Actually felt pretty fit at the time.  The second one is a few months later.  Slightly embarrassing to share it, but hey, these things need proof.  And not feeling too embarrassed at 40.