I started a seven year period of futility and even worse, counter-productivity. It was frustrating and it was often painful. Whereas the Extra!Extra!Extra! Diet was a culinarily-rewarding time and I felt great day in, day out, the seven obese years did not have a lot of silver linings.
What Did Not Work:
1. The Food Pyramid. Whose idea was this? I know its genesis is the USDA but no one from that august body has stepped forward to exclaim, "This is my baby!" If paternity was declared, you can bet the accused would demand a DNA swab.
The USDA Food Pyramid was to dietetics what Rosemary's Baby was to obstetrics. Six servings a day of bread, cereal and potatoes will promote weight loss? Sure, if you smoke as much crack as the people who thought up this voodoo, you'll stay thin.
Oh you need to read the fine print that reminds the pilgrim that each serving is the size of a thimble. Kepp your daily caloric intake under 100 calories and you can indeed lose weight scarfing down six Murphys a day, blah blah blah.
Our government throws Kevin Trudeau in jail for dispensing dietaty advice and inventor of The Food Pyramid get a pension? When I was chomping down 10,000 calories/ day I bounded out of bed everyday and had plenty of energy. The evil pyramid made me feel weak and sad.
One feels the presence of our all-loving creator when one consumes a cheesesteak with extra mayo amd jumbo fries, cherry cheesecake with Haagen Dazs, washed down with a Paul Bunyan-sized Pepsi. The Food Pyramid, on the other hand, brings to mind the presence of an intrusive, unfeeling Cass Sunstein wannabe, who fondly recalls his days as a lunchroom monitor.
The Food Pyramid was never called the joie de vivre diet. There was no joie. There was no de vivre. Just a rapid weight gain without the guilty pleasure one might associate with corpulence.
I don't recall how fast The Food Pyramid packed on the tonnage but it did seem to be faster than the Extra!Extra!Extra Diet. This might not be humanity's worst idea but it certainly deserves an honorable mention.
2. Exercise. I lifted weights. I bought a Slam Man and a heavy bag. I punched the heavy bag more than I punched the Slam Man. I swam. I walked. I did the stationary bike and the treadmill. I joined health clubs, the YMCA and took advantage of my membership.
What I have learned since then is that unless you are a professional athlete, you will not lose weight by exercise alone. Unless you can devote at least twenty hours a week or three hours a day to working out, you will not lose any significant weight.
That is not to say that there are no advantages to physical exertion. There are numerous benefits. You can improve your circulation, strengthen your heart, improve glandular function, improve range of motion to muscles and joints, generate endorphins, stimulate the brain, calm one's mind, sleep deeply...too many pluses to list here.
For a multitude of reasons, physical exertion makes us feel better. We have heard of the runner's high. We feel refreshed after a swim. We lift weights and our muscles feel better for days. Physically active people have a bounce in their step and a better attitude about life.Of course, exercise can also be fun. There are plenty of reasons to exercise. Losing weight is not one of them.
Let me be briefly tangential and slightly editorial. Ebooks have the capacity to eliminate padding. Padding is the age old publishing technique of converting a pamphlet into a hard cover non-fiction book by adding a lot of superfluous information. Tables, indices, appendices, extra footnotes, irrelevant footnotes and so on. With electronic publishing we can just say, here's the link if you really want to delve into this matter.
With that stated, I am going to link you to a sight that provides some interesting albeit discouraging statistics concerning exercise and weight loss. These ares rules of thumb that will be addressed shortly. I'll put a yellow post-it note on the screen to remind me to revisit the 3500 calorie myth before concluding this discourse.
First, the link: http://www.fitnessforweightloss.com/how-long-do-i-have-to-walk-to-lose-1-pound-lb/
So at a 2 mph pace, it takes 20 hours of walking for a 150 lb. person to lose one pound. That's only 3 hours/day.
The only reason to walk at a 2 mph pace is if you can somehow find a way to treay walking as a fulltime job. You might not be able to run for 10 hours/day but most healthy people can walk 20 miles. So if you are serious about weight loss why not make it 3.5 mph?
It will still take 13 hours for that 150 lb. person to lose that dreaded pound. If you can walk at 3.5 mph for long periods, why not run?
From the same site, http://www.fitnessforweightloss.com/how-many-calories-do-i-burn-running/ we see that at a 7.5 mph pace (8 minute mile) the 150 person will burn 890 calories an hour. Just seconds under 3 hours and 56 minutes. At that pace, a runner will complete a marathon at 3:29:45. So, run that marathon, keep on trucking for another half hour past the finish line, and you will burn a pound. The people who sell athletic shoes might not be forthcoming with these statistics.
From the same site, we learn that it will take over 15 hours of leisurely swimming for the 150 lb. person to lose a pound. Here's some good news. The heavier you are, the faster you can lose weight through physical exertion. So the 400 pounder only has to run for about an hour and a half at an eight mile rate to lose a pound. Walking leisurely, which is probably all such a person should attempt, a 400 pounder can lose a pound after just 8 hours. I refer you back to the above site to check your own weight range.
The 3500 Calorie Myth
Rules of thumb are helpful if not sometimes essential. When they are confused with science, however, they can cloud our judgment. I was a little skeptical of the 3500 cal = 1 lb. equation but as with so many other things, I put it on the back burner to focus on whatever happened to be on the front of the stovetop. Let's take an opportunity to poke a few holes in this tub of lard.
Per http://www.todaysdietitian.com/newarchives/111114p36.shtml the 3500 calorie equation is cited in at least 35,000 educational weight-loss sites. Not sure how loosely the term, educational, is defined here, but the maxim is widely accepted.
According to "Runner's World" http://www.runnersworld.com/weight-loss/biggest-weight-loss-myth-revealed "The 3,500-calorie rule dates from 1958, when Max Washnofsky, M.D., wrote a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition concluding “that 3,500 calories is the caloric value of one pound of body weight lost."
The article focuss on the work of mathematician Kevin Hall, Ph.D. (Caveat: This guy works for NIH, a division of USDA, the people who brought us The Food Pyramid.) Hall makes the valid point that the body is not a static machine that will respond in repeated fashion over time. In a bleaker pronouncement, Hall concludes that a better rule of thumb would be 7,000 cal = 1 lb. Ouch.
So referring to what was previously written, it will take that 150 pound person 2 marathons plus an hour to burn a pound of fat. The 400 pounder has to almost complete a marathon. The leisurely 250 pound stroller will have to step step for 24 hours instead of 12. Sorry to kill your buzz, gentle reader.
If you are interested in Dr. Hall and his NIH weight loss site, here is the link. https://www.niddk.nih.gov/research-funding/at-niddk/labs-branches/LBM/integrative-physiology-section/research-behind-body-weight-planner/Pages/default.aspx.
Other Problems With Calorie Counting
1. Huge variances as to how many calories are burned upon performance of an activity.
2. To a lesser degree, variances in how many calories each food item contains.
Enough tangential stuff. Let's return to what did not work as a weight loss method.
3. Caloric Restriction. Typically, I would sit in the kitchen and stare at the refrigerator for a week. At the end of the week, I would step on the scales and discover that I had gained a pound.
4. Growth Hormone Releasers: See if I can do justice to the theory. At about age 30, our bodies stop releasing human growth hormone. Your pituitary can still produce the stuff but it just won't let go of it. Fortunately, the miserly gland can be induced to cut loose with some its stash by the consumption of growth hormone releasers.
So, if you take certain amino acids--as well as more exotic supplements--on an empty stomach prior to an intense workout or immediately before sleep--Mr. or Mrs. Pit Gland will pulsate some hgh. You will lose fat and gain muscle. It did not work for me. Hgh releasers seem to work well for some people and not at all for others. Unfortunately, I am in the latter category.
Even though arginine and orithine and other nutrients did not improve my physique, they did give me more vim, vigor and vitality. Amino acids can make also make you significantly stronger. For those reasons, I plan to take arginine for the rest of my life.
5. Phenylalanine: Phenylalanine is a potent antidepressant, a mild stimulant and appetite suppressant and has been touted as a possible growth hormone releaser. It has a lot of good properties and I have taken it daily for over 25 years but it has never helped me lose weight.
6. Ephedrine: It is beyond the scope of this book to discuss the pros and cons of this nutritional supplement. Ephedrine has been maligned for largely political reasons. It is safer than most of the contents of your medicine cabinet and if it was a proprietary formula, it would not be so controversial. Other stories for other times. As a weight loss agent, it did not work for me.
7. Thermogenics: I guess this is theoretically sound but it did not work for me. Warm blooded animals burn calories to maintain body heat. If you turn down the thermostat gradually--say one degree Fahrenheit per week--your body will be acclimated to the cold as it burns fat to maintain thermal baseline. If you shiver or even feel discomfort, you are dropping the environmental temperature too fast and your body will take countermeasures to guard against fat loss.
As a New England transplant, I grew accustomed to cold winters, cold springs, cold autumns,even cold summers. I can remember swimming in the ocean when the water was 47 degrees Fahrenheit. I got comfortable at a thermostat set to the low 60's. Did it result in weight loss? No. I might have just eaten more. For whatever reason, this method failed.
8. Spicy Foods: Maybe if I hated spicy foods I would have consumed less than normal. Of course, I like curry and cayenne and a hot foods diet might have resulted in a greater consumption of calories. Nice sidetrack but no weight loss.
