For the last couple of months, we’ve been dieting and exercising. I’ve got a couple of presentations to make in mid-August, so I figured I’d try to fit into one of my suits by then. For the diet, we’ve been doing Atkins, as I’ve had some success with that in the past. It’s been a little slower-going for me this time though. In the past, I’ve dropped about 20lbs in the first month doing Atkins, which, anecdotally, at least, seems typical. So far this time, I’ve dropped 16 pounds in 2 months, though I may have added a pound or two of muscle over the same time frame, as we’ve been lifting weights this time and I’ve been going up in weights fairly steadily so far.
Cheryl’s dropped the same number of pounds, but since she’s a lot smaller, that represents a much larger loss on a percentage basis for her.
For the exercising, I borrowed a couple of ideas from this Tim Ferriss post from a while back, specifically, the ideas of doing one set of each exercise to failure, of lifting slowly on the way up and down, and of “less is more” with respect to lifting. We jog on the treadmill before we lift. We’re working up to an hour of that, but right now we’re at 50 minutes. One thing I’m doing differently with the jogging these days is not worrying about speed. I go slow, at a 2% incline, don’t cheat, and work on endurance. When I get up to an hour, then I’ll try to gradually increase the speed.
Instead of a whole body lifting session, as Ferriss blogged about, I’ve broken this up into two upper body workouts and one lower body workout, and we alternate them. I liked the idea of one set per exercise as doing multiple sets would be boring and tedious at this point in my life, and I’ve been happy to have made some progress with it. Granted, the weights I’m doing now are weights I’ve done in the past at some point, so some of this may be muscle memory, but I’ll take it. And I hope to push into uncharted territory in the next few months.
Related to this, The Last Psychiatrist has a new post, “How do you Lose Weight?”. The over-arching point of his post is that academic studies on weight loss are mostly worthless, for reasons he explicates at the link. But the Atkins (low carb) versus conventional diet study he mentions — and from which he includes this graph,
Suggests otherwise: participants lost more weight on Atkins, and tended to stay on it longer.
In the comments on TLP’s post, someone brings up the common anti-diet point, that diets don’t work because, after you get off of them, you gain the weight back. Obviously, if you go back to doing what got you fat, you’ll get fat again. I don’t know any diet guru who argues otherwise. Dr. Atkins positioned the final phase of his diet as a lifetime maintenance plan: essentially, you find out how many carbs you can eat every day without putting on weight, and that’s what you stick with.
I like eating carbs too much to ever stick with Atkins permanently, but my goal is to exercise enough that I can eat what I want in moderation. I estimate that will require 15-20 miles of running per week. We’ll see.
Another recent blog post related to this is Eric Falkenstein’s An Economic Slimming Algorithm. Falkenstein writes about how he lost 18 lbs recently using a site only an economist could have thought of:
I just lost 18 pounds via Stickk.com, a website that encourages weight loss and really any goal. It was founded by an economist based on the idea that incentives matter. I have wanted to lose some extra middle aged blubber for a while, but at the margin I had no real motivation (putting socks in the hamper would help my sex life more than buff abs). I knew I needed some outside force, so I created a contract at Stickk such that I had to lose 2lbs every week for 9 weeks or I would pay $50 for each violation to a charity that supported things I did not like (the anti-charity option).
Silliness aside, motivation is a key point. I suspect there’s a tie in between rates of obesity in America and the “Great Stagnation” mentioned in the last post. Ambition toward some sort of advancement is a fairly common motivator for getting in better shape. An example that comes to mind is perennial presidential candidate Bill Richardson deciding to drop a few pounds before a campaign. Other examples abound. But what if you feel you have no prospect for economic or professional advancement? What if you have little motivation to live a long life, as you don’t even have retirement to look forward to? In that case, there would be less incentive to deny yourself today.
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