OnePhatMan

How’s life? Mine’s good. I’m spending a goodly chunk of my free time kayaking with Robyn and hiking alone. Things are wonderful.

Spring has sprung, and the trails are alive.

I talk pretty regularly with people who’re trying to lose weight. Lots of people, and most of them have one thing in common. And lest you think I’m looking down on them from my high horse, let me assure you, I’ve been guilty of doing the same thing in the past. There’s no condescension here, just the voice of experience.

The thing these people have in common is starvation.

Not the mental kind of starvation, where you spend all your time thinking about how hungry you are. That’s just obsession with something you feel you can’t have. I’m talking about literal starvation, where you’re not eating enough to keep yourself alive and full of energy. The absolute minimum energy a person needs to survive is (and before you email me to point out the folly of my generalization, I know there are many factors affecting these numbers, like age, weight, climate, and health; it’s called “generalizing” for a reason) 1200 calories a day for women and 1500 calories a day for men.

That’s what you need to stay alive. Barely. Problem is, when you cut yourself back to the bare minimum, several things happen: Your body’s survival mechanism kicks in, and you begin to cannibalize your lean mass. Your muscle. Because your body’s in starvation mode, it takes the path of least resistance, and muscle (protein) is easier to utilize than fat, because fat’s a more complex structure.

Say goodbye to a few pounds of muscle.

It’s not a set point, like some want you to think, it’s the point where your body - realizing you’re starving to death - starts conserving every little bit of energy you consume, because your system thinks there’s a famine.

Generally, people start to gain weight at this point, for a couple of reasons. First, your body’s conserving everything you ingest, because it’s a very efficient machine, and second, since you’ve lost some muscle mass, you need less energy to survive and therefore more energy can be stored as fat.

It’s a vicious cycle. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

You get disgusted with your crappy restrictive starvation diet, and start eating normally. You pick your water weight back up, and since your metabolic rate is slower right now, you probably pick up a little fat, too. Contrary to popular belief, however, that muscle mass will come back. No matter what the diet gurus who want your money tell you, you can’t yo-yo diet yourself into being permanently fat. The muscle comes back because your body needs it to support your new fat.

But you still end up a little fatter after your diet than you were before you started. The one other time I made a semi-serious attempt to lose weight I weighed 330 pounds at the beginning. I started eating between 1000-1200 calories a day, and dropped almost 50 pounds in about three months.

And stalled.

And gave up.

And weighed 371 pounds before I knew it.

What’s the point of all this, Fred? you’re thinking, Are you ever going to get to it?

The point is, most women need in the neighborhood of 1500-2000 calories a day to be healthy, and most men need somewhere around 2300-3000. Again, these numbers are generalized–active men in cold climates may need 7000 or more calories a day to be healthy–and there are always exceptions to my generalizations.

Don’t be stupid. Don’t starve yourself. If you simply start eating the foods you were designed to eat (hint: think natural) in reasonable quantities, and moving your butt in activities you enjoy, true miracles can–and will–happen. Fat will melt away. Blood pressure will go down. Chronic diseases–like diabetes in my case–may vanish. Your clothes get baggy, and people around you start to tell you how good you’re looking.

I’ve been there, I know.

Springtime also means the cats bring us presents.

From all this chatting with people who want to lose weight, I’ve noticed something peculiar. Without fail, those of us who’ve dropped semi-large amounts of weight all have something in common: we’ve all basically modified the quantity and quality of what we eat, and we’ve become more active than we once were. We’ve then proceeded to habitually do these things.

Interestingly enough, we’re the ones that most people are unwilling to listen to. They want to know about the cabbage soup diet, or the Atkins diet, or Meridia, or anything except the way to actually succeed.

Why is that?

We’re a sensible people for the most part, reasonable, except about one thing: our health. We abuse our bodies year after year, getting fatter and fatter and picking up complication after complication, until we reach some point where we feel like we have to change (note: this could be “finding your pain” that I talk about, but most often it isn’t).

And we lose our minds.

We try to undo years of unhealthy living by spending a few days having a “juice fast” to “remove the toxins” from our bodies. We buy a pill that makes us crap out excess fat or one that hypes up our heart rate so high it could possibly be dangerous. We drink our green tea, because we heard that it’s a “natural metabolism booster”, and we consume mass quantities of any supplement we think might help us get to some magical scale number.

Be sensible. It took time to get fat; take a little time to get not-fat. I remember how it felt to be that big (though the memories are fading, I must admit), but I also remember how it felt to fail at the fads time and time again. Take your time, enjoy the process, and watch the miracle unfold before your eyes.

You’re worth the wait.