It´s the beginning of the year again, and magazine stands are full of glossy magazines with title stories of "ultimate diets" promising losses of ten pounds or more in ten days.
If I were to bet on the outcomes of all the people who try out these, I´d probably come out on the side of a sure win were I to bet on them- not losing ten pounds to begin with, -regaining more than they had lost in the first place after going off those diets again.
Actually, the bogosity of those claims is pretty much self-evident if you do a little number-crunching first.
One pound of fat would be the equivalent of 3500 calories. Ten of them would be 35000 calories.
To lose one pound of fat a day, you would have to create a caloric deficit of 3500 calories.
Now the average daily caloric needs of us sedentary office workers are about 2200 calories a day. Less, even, if like myself you have botched your metabolism with long-term yo-yo dieting.
Which spells out plainly that in order to lose a pound of fat a day, you would have to eat nothing and expend an extra 1300 calories on top of that. Make that two hours of uninterrupted jogging.
Would you do that for ten consecutive days? Of course not, if you want to keep functioning. When you eat less than your basal metabolic rate, your body starts to digest, not the fat you want to get rid of, but instead the muscles you probably want to keep, and which you need for that two-hour run, too.
Besides, the body´s survival instincts would kick in quickly, making you think of nothing else but when you will be able to eat for the next time.
So, if those diet plans tell you you can eat anything at all and not exercise, what they will allow you to get off your body will, for the most part, be water. If you start out on an eating plan with highly diuretic properties, you may be able to see the scales go down some two or three kilos in a week. But guess what- as soon as you resume normal eating, your poor dehydrated body will quickly fill up its water stores again, bringing those same two or three kilos back within a mere matter of days. Fast loss, fast regain. That these kilos tend to bring along a couple of friends because your body is ravenous to fill its nutritient stores back up, and therefore keeps you eating until you have consumed enough of every nutritient you ran short of, is what keeps, after such a diet, the weight seesaw going in an upward direction. Not exactly what we want.
Still, those numbers on the glossies, impossible as they are, influence how we perceive our own success rates.
There was a study (I forgot where I read it, so no link, sorry) where they asked people about how much weight they expected to lose when on a diet. The average expectation, as far as I remember, was to lose at least two pounds a week.
What happens with that kind of expectations is that we believe to have failed as soon as we lose less than that. All too often, that´s what drives us to retire to the vicinity of the cookie jar and give up the hope of ever getting back to normal weight.
Been there, done that.
Now would you be satisfied to lose just seven tenths of a pound in a week?
Before you raise a wail of "but I´ll stay fat forever then", that´s exactly what I have been losing for one year and five months now, on average. And the most I ever lost in a single week was 2.46 pounds.
You still with me?
Are you ready for some more numbers?
You know what that adds up to, after 73 weeks? Fifty-five pounds, that´s what. Plus of course the nine pounds off my highest recorded weight I had already condensed before getting real serious about this.
Or, in other numbers, BMI going down from 40 to 30.4.
Morbid obesity stage three down to almost just overweight.
A paltry 0.7 pounds a week is what got me there.
And, of course, patience.
But it can be done.
When you read up in the net about weight loss methods that work, you will probably find a lot of articles that claim that at a BMI higher than 35, or at BMI 40 or more, the only chance to get that off will be bariatric surgery of one kind or another.
To me, that never was an option. First of all, these procedures are not done as often in Europe as in the USA. Besides, they are usually not covered by health insurance, unless the patient is already in a life-threatening condition or severely crippled by that weight. Even at BMI 40, I would, by that standard, not have qualified. And, on a very personal level, the thought of having my bowels cut up and maimed just to lose weight was so revolting that, in my humble opinion, that should always be a last-ditch option. I wasn´t yet in that last ditch when I started to recondense myself.
And I succeded.
The first thing I had to toss, of course, was all those unrealistic expectations about how and how much to lose. No, you don´t need to have your stomach banded or cut up to lose weight, and no, you won´t lose those two pounds a week, much less those ten pounds in ten days. Oh, and no, you don´t have to put in two hours of jogging a day, either. If I excercise, it´s rarely more than thirty minutes at a time, and I´m not even too regular about it. Of course, regular exercise might be helpful, but it´s not the most important part of losing. Watching what you put in your mouth is. And knowing that, if you want the extra pounds to stay off, you´ll have to watch that for the rest of your life, so, the menu plan you chose to lose better be one that you know you will be able to live with for the rest of your life, too.
Which pretty much nixes those "diet" suggestions in the glossies anyway- or would you want to eat cabbage soup only for the rest of your life? Nothing against cabbage soup there, it can be delicious when well seasoned, but I for one would refuse to make that my one and only meal if I could avoid it.
Sustainability is the buzzword here. In my experience, a way of eating where you are not allowed to eat your favorite foods isn´t sustainable. What if your favorite is pizza, or chocolate cake? I have had these too, during those one and a half years. In controlled portions. And that´s what kept me from going for the whole cake at once. Plus the knowledge that, if I do slip up, I can get back on the wagon the very next day. It´s the long-time results I´m after, after all, and, if I say so myself, my long-time results show that I must have been doing something right.
Yes, it´s just baby steps of 0.7 pounds a week. But they got me where I am today, to a place I had, to tell the truth, almost given up hope I could ever return to.
And baby steps can get you to the place you want to be. Just because one isn´t Usain Bolt doesn´t mean one won´t be able to walk, not run, those 100 meters, even if one has to use a walker to do so. For almost everybody, there is some kind of baby step you can do to deal with your biggest problem, be it weight or something else.
Just take that step, and remember that even a small step brings you closer to where you want to go.
Julia
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