existence, refactored

Why Diets Make You Fatter — And What to Do About It via AlterNet

Stumbled upon this article yesterday. It pretty much sums up the current state of weight control science. TL;DR:

• Fad diets work. But most of the time, the weight goes back once you stop i.e. yo-yo dieting.
• Caloric restriction (eat less, exercise more) will make you lose weight. Duh. That’s why fad diets work: follow a regimen that takes away 3500 calories from your weekly calorie intake = lose one pound a week.
• “Eat less, exercise more” isn’t as simple as it seems. You have to take into account a lot of factors in order for you to manage your weight to healthy levels. (And yes, it’s not just about losing weight.)

So while stuff like Paleo Diets (gluten is evil!) might work, weight control (and personal fitness as a whole) is still very much trial and error. Don’t be excited about the latest fad, but at the same time, don’t be discouraged if the results don’t appear as fast as you expect it to show.

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Yoyo pic from XuliánConX via flickr

This will probably be the last in the series unless I figure out what to write for Training.

Figure out the reasons behind your eating habits.

I’m sure many of you have resolved to “correct” their diets this year, either by cutting down on some types of food or by eating more of “healthy” food. Unfortunately, unless you have an unusually high degree of discipline, you’ll find out that these diet resolutions are impossible to follow.

The key point here is that one’s eating habits, like talents, are rooted to our past. Our experiences in our childhood subconsciously affects what and how we eat. Unless we learn the reasons behind our eating habits, we’ll eventually revert back to them a few weeks or months into a new diet plan.

For example, I was born into a poor family so I had been trained from a young age not to waste any food on the dinner table. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), our family became less and less poor as the years went by and the food on the dinner table also increased. My problem of eating more than I need became worse when I started working because of the free dinners and Frappuccinos the company gave us whenever we went on OTs.

After some thinking, I figured out a simple way of dealing with this problem: avoid free food. Having little free food means I don’t gorge a lot. When I did my fitness regimen four years ago, I didn’t eat at home except on Sundays. I also limited myself to salt crackers when passing by the company pantry (which is stocked with free snacks). Limiting myself to paid food also allowed me to limit the portions of food that I eat every meal, as opposed to the virtual all-you-can-eat meals at the dinner table.

Another aspect of my poor past allowed me to pull this off with relative ease: I can get sated regardless of how little I eat as long as I clean up my plate. It’s psychological, yes, but if I didn’t have this, I probably would have had to use other tricks to make me feel full easier on every meal.

So before you decide to change your eating habits, take time to look back and see what are the things that influenced how you eat today. You might be surprised that some of your worst eating habits could easily be turned off (e.g. you eat ice cream often because as a kid you thought it was the greatest thing ever, but nowadays it’s just meh) and that you could steer yourself to a healthier lifestyle with just a few changes (like my example above).

A recent Time Magazine article explains why most people who go on exercise regimens don’t lose weight at all.

You’ve heard it for years: to lose weight, hit the gym. But while physical activity is crucial for good health, it doesn’t always melt pounds — in fact, it can add them. Here’s why.

It’s nothing new to someone who has taken fitness seriously. But given that a lot of people are not aware of the simple facts brought forward by the article, I think it’s still worth sharing.

Bottom line: if you want to lose weight, don’t feed yourself with more calories than you can handle, exercise or no exercise. When I was on the way to lose 20 pounds, not only did I perform regular cardio and strength training exercise, I also skipped the high-calorie snacks served at our company’s pantry and ate salt crackers (Skyflakes) instead.

Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin [via Time]

I hate BMI. It’s the reason why I was called “obese” in my 2008 annual HMO check-up even after going through six months of regular exercise and controlled dieting (which resulted in losing over 20 pounds of fat on my body).

I found a link yesterday about the flaws of using BMI as a gauge for a person’s fitness. While I have already mentioned why BMI is inferior to Body Fat Percentage in a past post, this article sheds light on why the former’s use is more prevalent than the latter.

Americans keep putting on the pounds — at least according to a report released this week from the Trust for America’s Health. The study found that nearly two-thirds of states now have adult obesity rates above 25 percent.

But you may want to take those findings — and your next meal — with a grain of salt, because they’re based on a calculation called the body mass index, or BMI.

As the Weekend Edition math guy, I spoke to Scott Simon and told him the body mass index fails on 10 grounds:

Top 10 Reasons Why The BMI Is Bogus [from NPR]

Kicking bad habits are an essential part of every fitness regimen. Most of the time, these habits are the ones which caused you to be out of shape in the first place.

But what if you don’t have a bad habit like habitual drinking or smoking?

Try cutting refined sugar from your diet.

From your D-colon reactions, I can see that this is an impossible task for most of you. But have you checked how many (empty) calories you’re getting from sweetened drinks and processed food with refined sugar or HFCS?

You might be surprised how easy it is to shave hundreds of calories off your daily intake with just this mindset.

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Apologies for the short post. Spent the entire day enduring a bad migraine attack.

Here are three simple six-week training programs designed for people who don’t have time to go to the gym and/or don’t want to buy exercise equipment:

• One Hundred Push Ups
• Two Hundred Sit Ups
• Two Hundred Squats

I found the first one in a Lifehacker article last year. Since then, the site owner decided to expand (copy-paste ) the program to work on the abs and the thighs.

I’d like to give couple of comments about the programs. First off, always keep in mind that working out a body part will remove fat from it i.e. targeted fat loss doesn’t work. You’ll need to control your calorie intake for that. At most, these exercises will tighten/tone their respective body parts preventing the loose skin and fat from sagging.

The other thing about these programs is that the sit up and squat challenges are too easy compared to the push up challenge. This is because the muscle groups used in those exercises are large and as such, respond quickly to exercise. Heck, in my summer weight training class back in college, we were doing 4 sets of 500 crunches at the end of the 5th week.

On the other hand, push ups use both large muscle groups (chest, abs, and to a smaller degree, back) and small muscle groups (shoulders and triceps). Unless your push up stance is wide (which puts more effort on the chest) your progress will be hampered by the relatively slower responding shoulder muscles and triceps. Expect to repeat some weeks for 3 times or more.

I find it odd that I failed to mention the relationship between Finance and Fitness in last night’s update of About This Site. It’s odd in the sense that these two seemingly unrelated categories share the same basic principles.

The most basic principle for personal finance is Spend Less, Earn More. For physical fitness, it’s Eat Less, Exercise More.

The similarities don’t stop there. Both basic principles are simple yet difficult to apply in real life. This often results in people getting into get-rich-quick scams (for finance) or trying out fad diets (for fitness) in the hopes of skipping the hard parts. However, time and time again, these two principles are often the only reliable means for people to reach their goals in personal finance and physical fitness.

Speaking about goals, both categories also require you to define realistic goals. Not only does this prevent you from the inevitable disappointment you fail to reach your goal, this also forces you to assess your situation and your target. Maybe your situation is more dire than you expected, or maybe you really don’t need to worry about your situation; either way, finding your starting point and your goal in both personal finance and physical fitness will allow you to determine the correct steps needed to get you where you need to go.

Even on the micro-level, there are still similarities between the two categories. Logging of all expenses and calorie counting are both very tedious tasks and yet they are among the most reliable ways for you to determine where you can trim off excess expenses/calories. Heck, these two tasks are so similar that you could probably log your calorie intake in a personal expenses logging software and vice-versa!

Another similarity is the importance of changing the way you think. You should change your perception about yourself by taking reality into account e.g. ignore how the media portrays “fitness”, you really don’t need to buy that gadget no matter how shiny it looks, etc. You should also understand that being both fit and financially stable requires a long term change in your lifestyle and not just a temporary one.

Of course, there are differences between fitness and finance, but my goal for this post is just to relate the two. You can’t blame me for not pointing the differences out.

(picture source: The Simple Dollar)

Did a lot of stuff in the past 4 days. I’m tired, my body hurts like heck, and I still have to write a second Daily Entry.

After a couple of hours of fruitless thinking about what to write about next all the while trying to ignore the fact that my back and abs hurt every time I move, I finally decided to write about the type of pain I’m having now.

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If you’re planning to undergo a full fitness regimen, you must be prepared for Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS), the muscle pain that occurs a day after performing an exercise.

The Wikipedia entry covers most of the stuff you need to know about DOMS. Heck, just the name alone should give you a good idea what to expect.

Some things you might want to take note about DOMS:

• Know the difference between injury and DOMS. Pain from injuries are usually more localized to an area and the swelling can be visible. It’s also much more painful than the latter. If you’re not confident about the risk of having injuries, I’d suggest you perform your exercises with supervision.
• I’m assuming that you have a job and not a bum like me. If that’s the case DOMS will kill your productivity at work so you must know how to deal with it. Know which painkillers work for your DOMS and keep a bunch of them within reach. You could also take note if stretching helps reduce DOMS in your current training regimen.
• Ab DOMS is IMHO the most annoying type of DOMS because a lot of body movement requires the abs. Sit up straight? ow. Laugh? ow. ow. ow. Lie down? Ouch! Cough or sneeze? aw, fuck. Just something to keep in mind before doing those crunches.
• Leg DOMS is also annoying but obviously it’s only a problem if you’re planning to walk a lot the day after you do your leg exercises.

In line with centralizing all serious stuff between my blogs, I’ll be continuing my series of posts on fitness on this blog. The other posts are still archived in LiveJournal because copy-pasting them here would be cheating.

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The most annoying TV commercial for me nowadays is the one for Lucky Me Sotanghon Lite. See if you can figure out why I don’t like this commercial:

continue reading…

(migrated from an old blog)

More basic concepts in this post. This time it’s about dieting.

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Before everything else, I’d like to make it clear that when I mention “calorie” below, I am referring to kilogram calories i.e. the one shown in the nutritional information labels at the back of food packages.

You don’t need to count your calories, but doing so will really help.

Counting calories is like meticulously noting every expense you make everyday to manage your finances. I think the latter is overkill; I personally just make sure I don’t spend too much on non-essential stuff.

Similarly, you can get away with some rules of thumb, like “Eat in moderation” or “Avoid food with a lot of refined sugar”. Combined with regular exercise, you will probably get results in a couple of weeks.

What calorie counting has over these simple rules of thumb is that you could see where you are failing in controlling your calorie intake. One common mistake is drinking a lot of juice or iced tea throughout the day: if you don’t count calories, you might not realize that four servings of those are equivalent to a single meal (480 calories). By determining these simple pitfalls, you could easily change your diet accordingly.

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It’s going to be technical from here on.

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One pound of fat is equal to 3,500 calories.

This is the simplest equation relating food intake to weight loss. Simply put, if you want to lose one pound, you’ll need to have a calorie deficit of 3,500 calories. Likewise, if you want to gain one pound, you’ll need to eat 3,500 more calories than you use.

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Estimating the amount of calories you burn everyday will help you determine how much you can eat and how much you need to exercise to lose weight.

In order to do this, you can calculate your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) using this link, then follow up by using the Harris Benedict Equation here.

As those sites will tell you, consuming less than the calculated value will cause weight loss and vice versa.

e.g. If the result is 2,000, by consuming only 1,500 calories per day, you can expect to lose one pound a week (7 * -500 = -3,500).

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A weight loss rate greater than 2 pounds per week is dangerous for most people. Anything greater than 2 pounds will most likely result in greater weight gain in the future

or in simpler terms:

Never starve yourself.

If you’re planning to lose 10 pounds in a month, forget it.

The problem with the calorie counting approach is that most people don’t know how the body works when it comes to calories. Having a naive approach on weight loss, one might consider getting a deficit of over 1,000 calories per day. For sedentary individuals, that’s basically fasting – just 1 full meal a day.

Unfortunately, after hundreds of thousands of years of wilderness survival, the human body has evolved to react to famine. Once the brain has noticed the sharp decrease in food intake, it will tell the body to go into starvation mode. This will result in two things: First, the body’s metabolic rate will go down in order to save energy; and second, the body will focus on storing energy in the fat tissues until the “famine” is over. Pretty much a nightmare scenario for a person who wants to lose weight, huh?

To avoid this, people new to dieting should take things slow at first. Cutting 200 calories won’t be noticeable, but it could still make you lose a pound in just two and a half weeks. I would suggest that you first reduce the amount of high calorie foods that don’t fill you up (e.g. candies, ice cream).

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Space your food intake such that you don’t feel famished. Never skip a meal.

These pieces of advice make you avoid going into starvation mode.

A good spacing for food intake is 3 hours. For average people, that would be “breakfast – snack – lunch – snack – dinner (- midnight snack)”. A four hour spacing is ok, but I doubt you could last for 5 hours without eating without causing your body to lower your metabolic rate.

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Fad diets might work, but don’t count on it. A balanced diet is still the way to go.

There are three major components/types of food: carbohydrates that provide energy, proteins that help build up the body, and fats that provide additional nutrition and energy. A balanced diet means eating a decent amount (not a lot) of carbohydrates, some protein, and a little fat.

Fad diets focus on removing one of those three components, or changing the allocation to a different ratio, or adding some other weird component into the mix. There are problems with these approaches, though.

Removing one component is dangerous. Removing carbohydrates would force you to take in more fat than what is advisable. Removing fat deprives you of the nutrients that are only available in fat (EFA, fat soluble vitamins). Removing protein… well… that’s too crazy if you ask me. Changing the ratio from high carb : medium protein : low fat is just as dangerous.

Adding some weird component should always be taken with a grain of salt. As of this writing, there is no extensive scientific evidence that a single food or drug that can safely and significantly reduce weight on its own. For example, food that increase metabolism (e.g. caffeine, other stimulants) often only increase the calorie usage by around 100-200 calories, and Orlistat (Xenical) has a lot of side effects.

In short, just stick to the normal ratio of carb/protein/fat. Body fat is a result of excess calories so it doesn’t matter what type of it comes from. Reducing the overall calorie intake will be enough for the diet part of controlling your weight.

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Forget glycemic index. Just make sure you include protein or fat in your snack so that you’ll feel sated longer.

Ever experienced being hungry in the afternoon and you decide to eat something full of sugar like some scoops of ice cream or maybe some chocolate chips? If you recall that day clearly, you would probably remember craving for food just an hour or two afterwards.

What happened here was an insulin spike. You ate something full of refined sugar and this quickly raised your blood glucose level. Your body noticed this so it released a lot of insulin to control the glucose level. Because of this, your blood glucose level plummeted. Then your body reacts to the very low blood glucose level by telling you that you are famished and you need to eat NAO!!!

This is a very common scenario. When people tell you this, they often follow it up with explaining the “glycemic index” of foods: food with high GI (mostly simple carbohydrates) quickly increase your blood glucose level, while food with low GI release the energy slowly and in turn avoids the insulin spike.

Ok, so I did just that.

Anyway, those people usually stop right after telling you to avoid eating food with high GI and vice versa. Unfortunately (or fortunately), that’s not the whole story. There is a way to avoid insulin spikes when eating high GI food: include low GI food in the mix. This could be in the form of protein or in the form of fat. Not only does this promote balanced diet, this also, as mentioned in the header above, makes you feel sated longer.

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Regardless of whether you are counting calories or not, you must be familiar with how many calories are contained in the food you eat everyday.

I’ve already mentioned one value above: a serving of juice or iced tea is 120 calories. Now take into account that a cup of rice is 250 calories. While the latter is still relatively high in calorie content, it is more filling (in the sense that you probably won’t eat rice as often as you could drink juice) and healthier. Deciding on which food to eat will be slightly easier if you knowing their relative calorie content.

Beyond calories, I suggest that you should also be familiar with the protein, fat, and fiber content of food. Fiber is often overlooked by people nowadays, which is sad considering its health benefits and the diseases related to lack of dietary fiber.