Last January I came to the conclusion that I had to lose some weight. At a basic level the process should be simple - simply decrease your energy intake to some level below your energy expenditure and maintain the process. In reality it is a complex and fascinating subject. I found I have to balance exercise with my diet and also learned some techniques to fight food cravings.
Much has been written on the subject and a lot of the information is folklore and poppycock with some being downright dangerous. Sorting through the science, even though I'm not a specialist, turned out to be very useful - at least I know where to find good review papers and have a firm understanding of statistics and the language of scientific papers and can judge which work stands up over time.
Designing the monitoring component is another challenge that many probably gloss over. How do you measure your energy needs, energy spent exercising and energy in food as well as how it is metabolized? All of these are subject to error, so what are your error bars and how do you adjust for them? And what is your information collection and processing system? Do you trust your own numbers and how do you check the results? This turned out to be critical as experts note successful weight loss that is healthy and maintainable should be done at a slow rate, so you are faced with a signal to noise problem.
In short it is an excellent example of a problem where a good deal of information is available, but it is generally too difficult to have perfect information. Lacking the monitoring facilities of an Olympic training camp how do you proceed?
I've spent a minimum of fifty hours reading medical and human physiology journals and have talked to a few of the experts along the way. Fascinating and an excellent by-product of the effort. You quickly learn why most fad diets work in the short term, but are rubbish over time.
My path is complicated a bit by the fact that I'm a lacto-vegetarian (I refuse to give up good chocolate and ice cream). Keeping track of protein intake where the type of protein is important is a big deal if you want to stay healthy.
Most of you probably are good at managing your weight or have your own system for weight loss. Here is what I'm doing if you are interested in this sort of thing. Understanding the information flow as well as getting motivation from people you respect are critical components. Oddly enough sms messaging turned out to be an important component.
I was able to accurately project my weight on the Fourth of July almost to the pound (well within my measurement error bar) by the time I was a month into my diet at the end of January. The information flow and how I deal with it at the physical level turned out to be good enough.
Currently I'm doing a series of small experiments looking at my protein intake as a function of the time of day. I'm testing a hypothesis that changing the protein content of my breakfast will leave me less hungry later in the day. I noticed that I seemed to be eating a lower amount of total calories when my breakfasts were protein rich, but needed to come up with a controlled experiment.
A nifty little project that has sparked a bit of learning. It is interesting to note that many of us carry pocket devices that might manage this sort of information flow a bit more seamlessly and I suspect a business or three lurks in doing it well. But that is all gimmickry without resolve on the part of the person who has to eat and exercise accordingly. Once someone has the resolve these tools can be very important, but until that point they are likely to fail.
I also feel it is a mistake to ignore the social component. In my case that is help and mentoring from an exercise expert friend and cheerleading from another friend. There was some serendipity and thought involved in these selections and I'm almost certain I wouldn't have had the success I've had without them.
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A side-note. There is quite of bit of talk about the process by which data is turned into information, information into knowledge, and finally knowledge into wisdom. I tend to ignore that - it can be a useful model if everyone is working in the same context and agrees on definitions, but in practice I find that rarely happens and it artificially elevates "data" in my mind. In physics it is all just information so you may notice that bias.
on the back of the container or you could drink alot of milk with egg white but you plbaobry wont be arsed breaking eggs after a workout. Then in the morning after the workout the night before i have another one with a good breakfast. Breakfast is your most important meal of the day and never have your meal before a workout, have your main meal after a workout. Get some dumbbells and use them slow and deliberate, prefably heavy enough to do say 15 repititions and struggling to complete the 15th on each workout. Do some bicep curls, you can also tie a string (decent size) to the dumbbell and the other end to the centre of rod through a hole. Grab each end and winde the string up with the dumbbell on the end for a wrist curl workout to get at the forearm muscles. Look up tricep workout and dumbbell Y press for your shoulders. All this will give you big arms and shoulders if you do it right over time. If your muscles feel like jelly then you got a good workout but most important of all stretching is very important so do stretchs as much as possible for the muscle your working out and move them about afterward. Workout a different muscle group each time you go to the gym etc i.e. upper, middle and lower workout. You have to give your muscles time to repairing after you rip them (its when you rip them they grow rather than toning) and repeat each muscle workout until you cant do any more (but dont over train and damage them) You will also have to eat well like a good steak or chicken and veges or tuna sandwiches etc.
Posted by: Caroline | 05/28/2012 at 03:33 PM