The Weight Solution- Limit your losses

When you really look at it, weight gain and loss is a long-term function. Due to problems with comparing one day to the next day, you cannot know if you actually gained/ lost/ maintained weight on a daily regime. Our scales cannot provide you with that data. But, when taking into account the numbers over a long period of time, the trend makes itself obvious. All too often, people fall into the rut of:
1. Finally recognizing they want to lose weight
2. Starting off their weight gain 'systems' with high motivation
3. Give up when the results aren't immediately obvious

No one ever explained to them that the whole weight thing takes a long time. To illustrate my point, let's suppose you put on 20 pounds in the past year. I would not hesitate to say that a +20 pound Banter is a significant change and would be obvious to just about anyone. I would be most displeased with myself and be well over the Bar. This is would be, what I call, a big deal. I might go to a bad place for a while as I deal with the gain.

However, when you crunch the numbers, it's not that much. An extra 20 pounds per year breaks down to a surplus of less than 200 daily calories from a Calories In: Calories Out perspective. Less than 200 additional calories in. This would not, under any circumstances, be considered over eating by anyone's standards.

~200 Calories
1 candy bar
1 serving of chips
2 slices of bread
2 slices of cheese
2 cans of soda
1 bowl of soup
1/2 a blueberry muffin
1/2 a donut
1/2 a bagel
1 english muffin with butter
1/2 PB&J sandwich
2 apples

Can you imagine that? Today at the staff meeting, you split your obligatory donut with a friend. You both are losing weight. Bam, there's your extra 200 calories. Or worse, you ate an extra apple at lunch and then again at dinner. You pig! Do that on a daily basis and the result is a 20 pound annual weight gain.

My point here is that when you get right down to it, putting on 20 pounds per year is incredibly easy because it doesn't take much. An extra 200 calories won't show up on your scale tomorrow. Or next week. It might show up next month as 1 measly pound. You would have a hard time knowing if you put on an extra pound of fat or retained one glass of water.  200 calories won't expand your stomach. Won't change your attitude. You'd be hard pressed to actually identify the source of 200 calories in the first place. If you had an additional 70 calories per meal, which is rather minuscule when you really think about it, you have more than exceeded your 200 additional calories per day and are well on your way to gaining 20 pounds this year.

Lucky for you, the converse is also true. Remove 200 calories from your daily life and you lose 20 pounds. That means that you need to shed only 70 calories from each of your meals. Again, 70 calories per meal is not much. It's like eating 2 Oreo cookies instead of 3. Drop one can of soda and you are more than half way there.

And, on the Calories Out side of the equation, it really doesn't matter if you drop those calories via eating or via exercising. 200 calories is an extra 4000 steps per day. 2 miles of running. It is removing 1 granola bar plus doing 10 minutes on the elliptical.

I feel like I am starting to sound like one of those info-mercials. "You can get long, lean muscles in just 10 minutes per day." An you know what, these idiots are right. Here's where most people fail: you have to have a calorie deficit EVERY DAY. Not every other day. Not once a week. You must take the calories off daily. Which requires constant vigilance.

If you are doing/ did your homework, you'd know by now if you are gaining weight or losing weight. Don't stop weighing yourself at the same time daily. Record your results. If you are holding steady, increase your activity or decrease you food. Up to you. You could do both. If you are losing weight, you can use your numbers to figure out how well you are doing.

The math is fairly easy. Figure out how many pounds you want to lose. Add a zero at the end of the number. Viola- you have your daily calorie deficit. A 10 pound drop this year is roughly 100 calories per day. If you are interested in losing 30 pounds, you have to cut 300 calories. It's that simple.

Again, simple does not mean easy. You and I both know that following a food routine is one of the most difficult challenges on the planet. There are going to be those times when you fall off the wagon. For example: holiday meals, or when you eat an entire birthday cake all by your lonesome because your exceptionally beautiful wife doesn't really eat cake, or a SuperBowl party, or... the list can go on forever. This is one of the big reasons that you are logging your weight, food, and exercise. Falling off the wagon today does not require that you stay there. Jump back on immediately.

Remember, weight loss is a long-term goal. You are looking to be less you several months from now. Be patient. Do your homework. Do your exercise.

The Weight Solution- Calories In

If you've been faithfully following along, I have to apologize for the lapses in content. Over the Christmas holiday season, I developed some sort of stomach bug. Not sure if it was chemical, viral, bacterial, or pansy-related, but I just didn't want to eat. My energy levels were fine. No fever or headaches. Solid food did not interest me. I was quite grumpy. Every time I thought about writing, the content was rather harsh. I put it off in exchange for renovating the new house. In the mean time, I lost 2 pounds. I do not suggest this sort of strategy (not eating) as a way to lose weight. The reason, it is not sustainable. You gotta eat sometime.

Plus, the BIL sent me a NY Times article which resulted in copious amounts of sulking. Those thieving bastards! I think someone from the NY Times hacked into my blogger account, perused through my weight loss drafts (I have several already started but underdeveloped). Then, the jerks went out and added some human interest stories. Now, it may look like I am borrowing material from them, which I am not! You can find the article here. It's a pretty good read, albeit long, but highlights the important concepts of the series.

Hopefully, you've been taking advantage of the New Year's to get motivated and get to work on all of those resolutions you'll drop in 3 weeks. Good for you. If weight loss is on your list of desires, I've got good news and bad news. First, the Good News- I am going to show you how simple it is to achieve your weight loss goals. In fact, I guarantee results or your money back*.  Now, the Bad News- I am an idiot Losing weight, while simple, requires a lot of work.

Sounds conflicting, right? Don't get in the habit of confusing simple with easy. See, in the physiological arena, the Calories In: Calories Out formula rules the coop. Weight loss is as simple as burning more calories than you ate. In Part 1, I told you that you needed to weigh and record your weight. That's daily homework for you in the realm of data collecting. Whereas we cannot trust the daily weight to give us anything of real value, the scale will accurately show you the trend over time. If you cannot handle that assignment, then this next one is going to really piss you off.

You Need to Record Your Calories-In
Again, this seems to counter an attitude that I have given you in the past. I told you that there's no way to actually know how many calories are in the food you eat. I stand by that post. But, that doesn't mean you cannot take advantage of the information that is there. Currently, and I'm going out on a limb here, you do not write down everything that goes into your gullet, including the listed calorie information. That means, in essence, you have exactly 0 data on your food. Sure, you have an idea. But, until you start to record the numbers, you actually have nothing. Now, let's assume that the calorie thingy that you might use is +/-10% off. If you do the work, using their system, your data is 90% accurate, at worst. I have to tell you that, as a teacher, I'd be tickled if all of my students were at 90% or above.

Hopefully, you can see what's going on here. There are literally thousands of different ways to record your nutrition. There are websites, apps, food logs, journals, etc. that will allow you to input your food and it will give you a number of calories consumed over time. Even if the number is completely off, it is still better than the number you currently have (remember, you have nothing). Bad data is infinitely better than no data. Double better for you is that the data won't be completely off anyway. 90% right data is not what I would call bad. I just wouldn't call it accurate.

And, even more better for you (sometimes, I love it when bad grammar seems more better than gooder grammar), it doesn't even matter if the data is bad. What we are looking for is precision in the data. Just a quick lesson for you on the topic of accuracy versus precision. These are not really synonyms in the world of science, no matter how the common folk use them. Accuracy is getting the answer right. Precision is getting repeated results, even if the answer is wrong. An answer can be accurate, precise, neither, or both.

We are looking for trends over a long period of time. Any of the calorie systems that you pick is going to be 100% precise. I have no doubt in that. That means it will give you the same answer every time you plug in the same problem. According to your app-site-journal thing, a medium apple will always be 80 calories. The label on the Snickers bar will be the same today as 15 years from now. So, in essence, we are recording 90% accurate data with 100% precision. And with very precise data, we can take advantage of those numbers. How to do this will show up in a later post.

But, and here's the sucky part, you must do your part. Whereas my Garmin will record every step I take to the 0.01 of a mile with 99.9% accuracy and precision with just the press of a button, nothing in the world will record your food for you. With food, you are on your own. To record your gluttony precisely (see, as a teacher, I know that I have to give you more than 60 opportunities to see and use a word if you are going to get it into your brain. I'm going to fail in this post but you cannot blame me for trying to be accurate and precise in my writing), you must become extra anal about recording your food. The Wife will bust out her iPhone immediately after dinner and write down what she ate. I could be right in the middle of a sentence, and viola, out comes the phone and tapping. I find it, at times,  a conversation killer to see her face buried in her phone instead of lost in my eyes and hanging on every word that spews from my never-ending jabberjaw.  Sure, her habit bugs me at the time, but when I see her results, I really appreciate it. She's a drop-dead hottie.

So there you have it. If you are serious about losing and maintaining your weight loss, you need to have a precise record of what you are eating. It is a lot of hard work. But, if you do it (without lying to yourself), along with the other steps I will soon lay out,  I guarantee results*.

*The terms of the guarantee: you lose weight should you follow the regime. Should you fail, you have the right to... Okay, I don't want to go into it fully. There's a lot of fine print, red tape, and the lawyers have cautioned me not to say too much on the topic to non-paying customers. If you'd like a full copy of the guarantee, including terms, agreements, with all applicable taxes (offer not valid in Alaska, Hawaii, and for some reason, Montana), just let me know. There, um, may be a fee involved. Again, the lawyers asked me not to say too much.

The Weight Solution- Data

With Xmas officially over, the next annual benchmark in New Year's, or Resolution Season. The most popular New Year's Resolution? Start reading Tri-Banter more often. Lose Weight. If you read my weight loss series, you'd know that there are way too many unknowns for the average person to accurately know anything about their weight. But, you are not the average person. You read Tri-Banter. And with that literacy habit, I will now tell you how to drop the fat. Please note, this will take longer than the average infomercial.

Show Me the Data
One of the ladies that I coach, or used to as she has developed some sort of injury (which was not my fault, I swear), had just successfully finished her season. She was ready to move on to something new. I sat down with her, as I do all of my athletes, and discussed her schedule including what went well and what didn't. Then we talked about her next season and what she wanted to accomplish. She simply said, "I want to lose weight."

"Are you sure you want me involved in this goal?" I asked. She said yes. She and I both know that I would get her to where she wanted to be. "You know that this means that you will weigh your self daily and report to me your numbers. I will want you to..." She stopped me. As I predicted, she was already uncomfortable giving me these numbers. Maybe it was a girl/ guy thing. But, the moment she refused to share with me her data was the moment I told her to pick a new goal.

As in any form of goal setting, data should drive you and help you make decisions. I, as a teacher, know this all too well. Who will I ever know if my students are progressing towards their goals if I never measure, record, and analyze anything? Data helps me make informed, intelligent decisions. The same goes for my athletes. When we set goals, we need to collect progress reports in the form of numbers. And, the data needs to be related to the goals. The cartoon shows what happens when you collect too much data. For example, when I coach the weight loss lady above in her last season, she had a distance goal of finishing a 13.1 mile race. When I wrote her workouts, they were flexible and distance based. She had to report back to me how far she actually ran, when she ran, and how it felt. Speed was not important.

Here's step one in your weight loss venture: You have to collect weight data. Use your bathroom scale. Yes, I understand that this is contradictory to a former post. Your bathroom scale is completely unreliable in telling you how much you weigh. But, it is not unreliable in helping you gauge weight loss when you use it correctly. Most people jump on the scale, look and the number, react to the number, and jump off. This is not a very good way to go about things. Where's the objectivity? (I'm not referring to your waist line.) 

We need to record at the same time on a daily basis and chart it. We also need to refrain from making hasty conclusions on the data. Suppose you went running one day and had a crappy run. In 1 hour you managed only 5 miles even though you felt like you were pushing hard. Your HR was in Z4 the whole time. Last week, you did that same run in under 50 minutes with your HR in Z3. Would you conclude that you have gotten slower because of that one crappy run? Doubtful. You just had a bad run, for whatever reason. Now, if you repeated this over the course of a month, 5 times a week. The conclusion that you were a 5 mph runner would be much more accurate. Same goes for your weight. Don't focus on one individual number. Don't compare yesterday to today. Focus on the trend over the course of a long period of time.


The best time to gather your data is first thing in the morning. Wake up. Pee. Get on the scale. If you were really serious, you'd get on the scale naked. Your clothing is not necessary in this venture and possibly counter productive. You must jump on the scale, look at the number, NOT react to the number, jump off, and write it down. I record mine in Excel, but I am thinking on moving my weight loss numbers over to Garmin. The website were I record my workout numbers also allows my to record my weight. Garmin has even gone so far as to develop a scale that will record your weight and send it to the website wirelessly, for those too lazy to click the buttons yourself (which may also be at the root of weight loss problems). 

Now, and this is the toughest part of all but vital enough to repeat: Once you have recorded it, completely forget about the number. It is not at all important. It is just a number and not your real weight anyway. You need much more data before you can do anything with it. Again, physically write down the number in a place that you remember and leave it there. Do this again and again for a minimum of 2 weeks. In reality, you should keep recording the data until you no longer wish to have a weight loss goal.


How's Your Slope?
Once you have at least 14 data points, make a graph. Garmin will do this for you. So will Excel if you ask it nicely. Here's my graph starting from the day after Thanksgiving Break. I was, most likely, at my fattest.

Please notice how the numbers go up and down. Also notice that there is some missing data. I was not a good student last week. It was a recovery week in my training which almost always means that eating habits are steady with extra sleep thrown in. Extra sleep means extra rushing in the morning and I did not record. Bad Banter.

If you look at the slope, the line is obviously lower on the right than on the left. This is what the math geeks refer to as a negative slope, which is exactly what the line should look like if you want to drop weight. I do not expect your line to look like this. I honestly don't care what your line looks like at this time. It's just data. And, I've already started implementing the next few stages of weight loss. The slope of the line is really the only thing that matters. We need to know if you are gaining weight (positive slope), losing weight (see above), or holding steady (flatline). My guess is that a majority of people are actually flatlining. Careful as flatlining might mean you are dead. If that is true, you can stop reading now. You'll likely be losing weight in the very near future.

You are not done. You need to continue doing this daily. There may become a time in the future, when you no longer have weight loss goals, when you can stop. Until then, you need to weigh and record. It seems like a lot of work because it is. If your are like me (and I think you are), you'll take short cuts. Most of the shortcuts involve eating less and making smarter food decisions/ substitutions. If you start losing weight over the long term, as identified in your charting, there's a good chance that your changes are positive. If you are maintaining or gaining weight, there's a good chance a more invasive approach is needed. I'll tell you more about that in the near future.