"Same Level of Thinking"

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them."

We attribute this quote to Albert Einstein, though it is unverified whether or not he actually said or penned those words.  It doesn't really matter though...the quote is powerful regardless of who originated it.

What got me thinking about this quote is the body's amazing ability to maintain status quo.  Have you ever been frustrated because you regained the weight you fought so hard to lose after having dieted for _____ days/weeks/months?  Have you ever looked at someone who is rail-thin, after watching them down an entire large pizza, and get jealous because they can eat whatever they want and never gain a pound?  Ironically, both examples are two sides of the same coin--homeostasis.

Homeostasis is the body's amazing ability to maintain a particular condition.  The best example is body temperature.  Everyone knows that body temperature is 98.6 degrees fahrenheit.  The body regulates other things and seeks to keep them at steady levels (glucose, pH, etc.), including body weight.  It should come as no surprise to people that different people have different, genetically-determined body types.  There are those who have a naturally slender frame (ectomorphs), people like linebackers (endomorphs), and the in-betweens (mesomorphs).  Research shows that we have limited ability to influence our body type to the next closest body type, but I'm a natural ectomorph...I'm never going to be on the cover of Muscle & Fitness magazine!

If our bodies work to maintain its natural body frame, then how do we get overweight and out of shape to begin with?  While I don't have a hard scientific explanation, I have done enough reading on health and nutrition to have a good hunch.  There are really only two aspects of our bodies that we can influence to change our body image--muscle and fat.  It takes work to improve our muscle structure, but it's easy to let our fat stores go out of control.

Here's where the hunch comes in.  Our fat cells are happy where they are.  When we overeat, our fat stores will temporarily accommodate by expanding to absorb excess fat in the blood stream, but they then look to offload that excess fat to get back to "normal."  However, if we maintain a body environment flush with excess fat in our blood due to poor diet, our fat cell expansion will be more permanent.  Then, when we attempt to lose weight by reducing fat in our bloodstream, our fat cells start fighting our attempt by seeking ways to get back to their new, more expanded size.  This probably explains why we lose body weight first, then body fat follows.

The moral of the story is that you have a natural body type, and your body wants to keep you where you are at.  So, if you are overweight for your frame and want to get to a healthier weight, the problem your facing cannot be solved with the same level of behavior you were at when you created it.  This is why "lifestyle change" is such a common response to anyone who is trying to lose weight.

While there are hundreds of ways (diets) you can change your behavior to improve your health, the important thing is for you to find a change you can make and stick with.  If start a new diet seeing it as a temporary way to improve your health, and you sincerely believe that you can maintain a healthy weight if only you could just reach it, you're setting yourself up for failure.  You need a permanent change.

I encourage you to consider Responsible Eating as an option to achieve permanent change.  It is a way for you to enjoy eating the foods you are currently eating, but to eat in a different way to achieve the weight you want.  That's not to say it's easy; genuine change never is.  But if you don't want any restrictions on the food you eat but know you are overweight and out of shape, I think you will find my approach very helpful.










Responsible Eating: A Primer

Diet Dashboard

It's here!  I am excited to report that the Diet Dashboard app is now available on iTunes and Google Play!

Diet Dashboard (iTunes)

Diet Dashboard (Android)










Responsible Eating: A Primer










So, what is the Diet Dashboard?  Put simply, the Diet Dashboard is a new way of approaching calories.  After years of experimenting with calorie logging, I have come to a realization - the critical flaw in traditional calorie tracking methodologies is that, while they address the "how much" to eat, they provide no guidance on "when to eat."  The Diet Dashboard is my humble attempt to address this flaw.

The way Diet Dashboard works is, after you've entered your information under "user settings," you enter how many calories you ate and when you ate them, and the app will provided a recommended next meal time.  The principle behind the idea is the well known fact that everything we eat is either stored as fat or burned as calories - if you are constantly burning off all the food you eat, then your body can't store food as calories!  The Diet Dashboard app calculates your next meal time based on your daily caloric needs, so if you consistently wait till the recommended time to eat, then you can literally eat whatever you want, and your body won't store your food as fat.

I have been testing this concept on myself since at least April, and I can tell you that it works!  If you look back at my post on May 11th, you'll see what got me started down this path.  In the nearly six months that I've been testing the concept and beta testing the app, I have learned some interesting things about using this app.  What's more, I have been kicking around a concept I like to call "Responsible Eating."  This is a concept I came upon one day after eating a ridiculously large meal and thinking to myself, "wow, that was borderline irresponsible!"

In support of the app and this whole "Responsible Eating" thing, I have been working on a primer to describe the things I've learned about using the app and eating responsibly.  The app is free for all, but if you like the idea and would like to learn more about it, then I encourage you to visit Amazon and purchase the book.  It's a quick read at fifteen pages, but I think you will find value in it as it is intended to help you get on the fast track of using this app the way it was intended.

(Note: Version 1.0 has some noted spelling errors, and I am already in the process of submitting version 1.1 with corrections.)

If you would like to discuss the Diet Dashboard, how to use it, and ideas of how to improve it down the road, please feel free to start a discussion by leaving a comment.  I hope this app works as well for you as it has for me, and I am looking forward to learning user experiences with it!

Rule #1 of Weight Loss (part 2)

So, the one inescapable truth is "calories in < calories out = weight loss"?  Well, that's certainly not a controversial statement in the nutrition world, now is it?!

As I am surfing the web doing "research" on my idea, I have come across a number of entertaining ideas.  I decided to search "golden rule of nutrition" to see if calories in less than calories out came up.  The top results were divided - some said to track calories, and others said that you should focus on a balanced meal plan so that you don't have to count calories.  The problem with the latter idea is that, I feel, it is rather naive in modern America.  Sure, ideally, you would want to eat healthy enough such that you don't have to count calories.  The problem is that the people reading this advice got into the shape they are in specifically because they either don't know how to do this or simply can't.  Bottom line, if people were able to eat perfectly balanced and healthy meals, they wouldn't be looking for nutrition advice!

(In particular, I found this Men's Health (UK) article to be entertaining.  I could easily link you to dedicated, full-page articles on almost every one of their points arguing the opposite...by expert sources.  I've already shared some of those links in Part 1.)

If you want to see something really interesting, do an internet search for "calories in calories out."  If you do, you will see that the search results practically argue with themselves!

Look, I'm not writing this to debate the merits of maintaining a calorie deficit.  All I can tell you is that from my personal experience, it works.  What's more, this principle apparently works to varying degrees of success for the multitudes of people who subscribe to calorie tracking websites.  While so much in the nutritional world is either purely conjecture or conjecture backed up with questionable amounts of research, the one principle backed by hard science is energy balance is the key to controlling one's weight.

Now, there are various approaches to manipulating your energy balance, and I feel that I've come up with a unique way that is sustainable over the long-haul.  Stay tuned to find out more!

Rule #1 of Weight Loss (part 1)

I didn't get here on salads and kale smoothies alone!

I have been trying for a long, long time now to get to 165 lbs, and while I'm not there yet, my "plateau" has been set at a hard stop at 170 lbs.  Try as I might, I just couldn't seem to get below it.  The closest I've ever been in my adult life, aside from Marine Corps boot camp, was at the height of my P90X/INSANITY days.  On August 4th, 2011, I weighed in at 166 lbs.  I haven't been back since.

(Full disclosure - the 169.1 lbs was after a particularly cardio-heavy CrossFit workout.)


So what have I done different recently to change the direction of my weigh loss and break the plateau?  Start doing CrossFit every day?  Nope.  Fat burning supplements?  Nah.  Paleo?  Not even close!  I have one word that inspired me to lose weight and break the funk that I've been in for the last three-something years.

Twinkies.

Yes, Twinkies!  (Thank god they brought them back. ;-P)

Before I get there, allow me to take you on a quick trip to tell you how I arrived at Twinkies as an effective tool for weigh loss.

I'm currently working on my MBA.  I recently finished a business planning residency where the focus was exploring the feasibility of a startup.  I pitched an idea to my classmates that gained traction - we decided to explore the possibility of doing a P90X-specific meal delivery service.  I've done P90X a number of times now and have coached numerous people through it, and the thing I learned that is most difficult about P90X is not the actual workouts, and it's not even the time commitment (though both of those things are difficult).  The most difficult thing about P90X is the nutrition plan.  I have yet to meet a single person who could abide by it 100%.  Most people just "eat clean" or they do their best.  It is a rare and special individual who can devote an hour a day, six days a week to working out and then tack on the additional time to prep the meals prescribed by the P90X meal plan.  It's just not practical.

We quickly realized, sadly, that no one was interested in paying for a P90X meal delivery service.  So our team pivoted and decided to look at developing an app based on the sound principles of Precision Nutrition.  The app would help users to find "anytime" and "post-workout" meals.  However, after a conversation with an executive at Precision Nutrition, I was directed to an article on how nutrient timing, i.e. meals that are better suited for after working out than others, might not be as important as was once thought.  This principle has been a fundamental principle of good nutrition in my book for years, and now it's just, poof, gone!  (In all fairness, it's not completely gone, it's just not as important or as scientifically beneficial as was once thought.)  I was knocked on my butt.  My nutrition world was stood on its head.

Enter the "Twinkie Diet."

The Twinkie Diet was a self-experiment performed by a nutrition professor at Kansas State University.  The man went on essentially a junk food diet for 10 weeks and lost 27 pounds.  What's more, he not only lost an impressive amount of weight, some of his blood chemistry markers improved.  His bad cholesterol went down, good cholesterol went up, and his triglycerides (blood-fat) decreased 39%!  How did he manage to accomplish this eating predominantly junk food?

Simple.  He ate about 1000 calories less per day than his daily requirement.

At the end of the day, it's not about low-carb meals, turkey burgers, and eating breakfast religiously.  To this day, it seems that all sound nutritional principles are up for debate.  Carbs are bad; no, high-protein, low-carb diets may be linked to cancer.  Egg yolks are bad; no, they're actually a source of good cholesterol.  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  Eh...maybe not so much.  It turns out, we might not know as much as we think we do about nutrition.  So, is there anything we can say for sure about nutrition.  Is there anything we do know about nutrition.  It turns out, we do.  As Twinkie Diet guy proved, theories about good nutrition come and go, but one thing holds constant:

Weight loss = calories in less than calories out

Frankly, I realized the power of calorie balance years ago.  That principle helped me to get to 166 pounds to begin with.  What changed recently to help me get back in the right direction?  Stay tuned and I'll tell you!

Finding My "Metabolic Zero"

For those of you who know me, you know that I am a former Marine.  Now that I'm almost 10 years removed from the Corps, for many it's kind of hard to imagine that I was ever a Marine, but however short my stint was, I am first and foremost USMC trained.

 

One of the things I remember from USMC boot camp was "grass week."  One of the mottos of the Corps is, "every Marine is a rifleman," and all Marines are indoctrinated into this motto with a week's worth of "snapping in" drills and classroom sessions on rifleman basics.  During this week, recruits learn how to BZO, or "battle zero" their rifles, which involves adjusting the windage and elevations settings on the M-16 so that the round will hit dead-center of the target.

This concept of zeroing is not something we do often, but it's not unique to marksmanship either.  One of the more recent things I found myself zeroing is my food scale.  It's convenient to place a bowl or a plate on a scale and then zero the scale so that the display only show the weight of the food that's added.  Recently I've been pursuing the zeroing of something else--my metabolic rate.

When I started P90X in April, I did what most people do--I consulted the Nutrition Guide to determine how much I should be eating to get the most from the program.  According to the number crunching, I was a "Level 2" eater, which put me at 2400 calories/day.  As I continued on in the program, I discovered myfitnesspal.com (MFP), which assessed me at some other caloric deficit.  I think it had me at 1800 cal/day, which became reasonable because I could eat more the harder I worked out.  I kept up this sort of dieting for months, so long that I lost sight of exactly what my RMR (resting metabolic rate) is.  I also realized that eating at a deficit for a significant period of time, while good for weight loss, is actually not optimal for long-term health.  So with this last round of P90X, I decided that I needed to determine exactly what my RMR is and learn to eat at that level.

I've been progressively increasing my daily caloric intake for weeks.  Starting at around 2000 cal/day, I've been increasing my caloric intake by about 250 cal/day every two weeks, and I feel that I've found my metabolic zero, that is the caloric intake that matches my daily burn, at around 2750 cal/day on exercise days.  Since I exercise six days per week, I haven't gone so far as to try to figure out my metabolic zero on non-workout days, but I figure it's somewhere around 2250-2500.  But when you're working out six days a week, it doesn't really matter if you lower your caloric intake on the non-workout day.  As long as you don't increase your caloric intake on your rest day, you'll likely be fine.  Still, it's an imperfect estimation, and I was hoping for something a little more concrete.

Cue the BodyMedia FIT Core (pictured above).  The BMF Core is this really cool device that measures skin temperature, heat flux, galvanic skin resistance (perspiration), and motion via 3-axis accelerometer.  The result is that you get info on how many calories you actually burn in a given day, how many steps you take per day, sleep information, and more.  You can use the BodyMedia website to track your caloric intake if you want, but I'm not using that feature.  I know roughly how many calories I consume per day; what I don't know is how many I burn.  The Calories Burned portion is pretty cool because it shows you a bar graphic of the day, with cal/min on the y-axis and time of day on the x-axis.  You can adjust a slider to whatever window size you want for that day to see how many calories you burned during a specific time frame, which is great for seeing how many calories you burned, say, during a workout.  Now, I'm not sure how accurate the data is, since it told me that I burned 431 calories during my Insanity Asylum Game Day & Overtime workout yesterday, which seems low to me, but I was workout out extremely early and I had to shorten my workout, so it could be pretty close.

Now, the stated accuracy is 10%.  This seems like a significant amount, since 10% of 2750 cal/day is 275--that's a 550 calorie window of accuracy!  However, one thing I've learned about statistics like this is that the error percentage should be between devices, so my device could be within 10% of what a different device would read given the same measurements.  Furthermore, a 10% error is better than the errors associated with various metabolic equations with the added benefit that baseline estimation is derived from sensor data than from height, weight, age, etc.

I think that the BMF Core will do for metabolic estimation what heart rate monitors do for exercise--it will give the user value data based on real-world inputs.  All things considered, I expect that the BMF Core will go a long way in helping me to determine my unique metabolic rate, and armed with that data, 2012 should be a very successful year!

Shakeology Cleanse, Day 3

So the first and most obvious downside to finishing the cleanse on the last day of the work week--you're not motivated to do a write-up of it on the weekend!  I've gotta get my thoughts down before I forget the experience though, so here goes.

The hunger on Day 3 was comparable to Day 2, but for whatever reason I wasn't as hungry when I woke up the third day than I was the second.  Sticking to the diet for the third day wasn't significantly challenging, but the guys at work don't offer the best social support.  They opened a box of Girl Scout cookies and insisted that I eat some.  I left the office for a little bit only to find that they saved one for me.  I tucked it away in my desk.  I recognize that one cookie wouldn't make that much of a difference, but that's not the point.  The point is that I can always find a way to justify the things that are easy or instantly gratifying.  Finding reasons to do the hard thing and sticking to one's commitment is the defining characteristic of success.

However, I agreed to meet up with some of the fellas from the office in the evening to say goodbye to our outgoing boss.  Everyone had beers and bar snacks, so I thought a fruit juice would be an acceptable compromise since fruit is not entirely off-limits during the cleanse.  All-in-all, I would say that I had a successful three days.

Now, there is an upside to waiting a few days to write about the last day.  Now I get to write about my post-cleanse experience.  Unfortunately this wasn't as good.

Friday I kept my diet somewhat under control...until dinner.  I really didn't go ridiculously overboard with like a whole pizza and a pint of ice cream or anything, but I did have 1 cup of chicken tikka masala over 2 cups of basmati rice with a side of Na'an bread.  Not the worst possible meal, but certainly not the healthiest way I could have ended the day.  My immediate post-cleanse weight was 171.x, but my weigh-in following my Friday meals jumped back to 174.x.  I did pretty good Saturday too, but I did treat myself to some hot-fresh-now Krispy Kreme original glazed donuts, which I don't get to do very often.  Unfortunately as of Sunday morning's weigh-in, I'm back to my pre-cleanse weight.

So here are my take-aways from this round of the Shakeology 3-Day Cleanse:
--The "cleanse" is really more of a fast, which I will call it from now on.  I didn't have any more frequent trips to the bathroom, nor do I feel any differently than before starting the regimen.
--Speaking of which, I'm dealing with a huge bout of constipation now.  I can't say for sure it's due to the fast or if the fast was contributing to the condition in any way, but no matter how you look at it, the Shakeology fast didn't do me any favors.  One of the alleged benefits of Shakeology in general is that it's supposed to help keep you regular.  In all fairness I understand that fasts in general tend to result in some form of constipation, and suffice it to say that a Shakeology fast seems to be no different.
--The fast is significantly more beneficial the more weight you have to lose.  This might seem like a no-brainer, but I can now confirm it with my own experience.  Last time I started the cleanse at 181.x, got down to around 175, and the subsequent return to normal eating didn't send me right back to my original weight.  That was not my experience this time around.  True, I could have controlled my diet restoration a little more tightly, but I don't assess that I did anything significantly different from the last time I did the cleanse.
--The Shakeology fast doesn't seem to be significantly different from other fasting protocols, or from consistently healthy eating.  I didn't seem to lose significantly more weight from one day to the next on this fast compared from the 24 hour weekend fasts I've done, and the rate of weight loss was only moderately more noticeable than when I'm eating a normal, healthy diet.

Conclusion:  The Shakeology 3-day fast can be an effective tool for enhancing weight loss, especially during an initial weight-loss phase where someone is achieving new standards in body comp.  It is less effective in people who are otherwise eating healthy and are already close to their body comp goals.  Additionally, the Shakeology fast is reasonable to maintain in terms of dealing with hunger; however, recognize that there is nothing significantly different or uniquely beneficial to doing a Shakeology fast vice other fasting protocols.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions about this fast, fasting protocols, or any other questions about nutrition.

Shakeology Cleanse, Day 2

Ugh...dealing with the hunger today was definitely a little more difficult.  I made some adjustments from yesterday.  I saved my first shake until 8a so that I could have my last meal at 8p.  I made more ice for today so that I could bulk up each shake a little, but the hunger was still gnawing at me.  It wasn't unbearable, but it was maybe a 3 on a 5-point scale and fairly constant.  When I did have a shake, it would subside the hunger for 45 min to an hour, but that was about it.


I had to leave the office today for lunch because two guys brought back A&W.  One guy had chicken strips, and the other guy...well, I don't know because I didn't stay long enough to find out.  It didn't help that there was absolutely NOTHING to do today in the office.  Boredom encourages snacking, which I think everyone knows.  I got a workout in around 2p, so that kept me at least a little distracted.

But you know what?  My morning weigh-in was 173.3 lbs.  I may or may not get below the 170 threshold this time around, and even if I do I'd be surprised if I kept it off.  After all, I know that some of this weight is due to water weight that comes along with carb restriction.  I know that how I come off of this regimen will be critical, so my weekend waffles will have to wait at the very least until Saturday.  Friday has got to be a PN compliant day.  That is if I can make it to Friday!