The Dead Weight

How are your New Year’s resolutions going? What? You F’d up already? Well, there’s always next year.

I used to think that the type of people who make New Year’s resolutions are really devoted to self-improvement and have a plan for themselves. These people know about setting goals and are committing themselves to achieving them. But I don’t believe that anymore. I mean seriously, a year? That’s the unit of time measurement you’re going to make your plans around? Seems unnecessarily long. Why stop at a year? Why not make New Decade resolutions? That’s nine less times you’ll have to resolve to do anything. You can be like,

My resolution for 2010 was to quit smoking, but then in February I got drunk at my brother’s wedding and borrowed a few smokes from my uncle and started up again. Well… I guess I’ll try again in 2020.

People often say things like, “New Year’s Eve is for amateurs.” People who say that tend to be people who think there is something cool about “going pro” at getting drunk and having a miserable evening surrounded by strangers. But while I don’t agree it’s for amateurs in that sense, I do think it’s true that New Year’s is a time for amateurs in regards to people making changes in their lives. Nobody who really is committed to making a change waits around for some arbitrary start date. Every time some fat broad in my office says, “I start my new diet on Monday!” What I hear is, “I pretend to start my new diet on Monday.”

So if you’re pissed at yourself for screwing up your New Year’s resolutions already, drop it.

Just start over and start now.

Oh my god…. I’m so full.

So, I spent the last month eating damn near anything and everything that I wanted. I ate cookies and candy. Turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy. Went out to parties and had things wrapped in bacon and punch that was loaded with booze and empty calories. I ate one of those cakes that’s rolled up to look like a log. Or maybe it was an actual log. I don’t know. That’s just how out of control I was. How much damage did I do? We’ll find out Wednesday.

Here’s an announcement about the future of this blog. I’m going to be posting here somewhat regularly for the next month or so. Then I will be making a minor announcement sometime in February that will change the direction of this site. That sounds unnecessarily cryptic, I know, but there’s really no point in getting into it any further at this point in time. You’ll see. It’s all fun stuff, don’t worry.

I hope you all had a great holiday season and that 2009 is off to a great start for you.

So I fast-forwarded through the Biggest Loser finale the other night. Somehow they managed to fit 14 minutes of compelling programming into a scant two-hour time-slot. This season was won by the woman of ambiguous ethnicity (the younger one).

I enjoy the show and I enjoy the idea of people making positive changes in their life but there’s certainly something a bit depressing (or hilarious, depending on my mood) when you read or hear of the “winners” gaining back some or all of the weight.

For example, Ryan, the guy who won the first year ended up gaining all the weight back. Here’s what he wrote about his preparations for the last show in his season:

I wanted to win so bad that the last ten days before the final weigh-in I didn’t eat one piece of solid food! If you’ve heard of “The Master Cleanse” that’s what I did. Its basically drinking lemonade made with water, fresh squeezed lemon juice, pure maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. The rules of the show said we couldn’t use any weight-loss drugs, well I didn’t take any drugs, I just starved myself! Twenty-four hours before the final weigh-in I stopped putting ANYTHING in my body, liquid or solid, then I started using some old high school wrestling tricks. I wore a rubber suit while jogging on the treadmill, and then spent a lot of time in the steam room. In the final 24 hours I probably dropped 10-13 lbs in just pure water weight. By the time of the final weigh-in I was peeing blood.

Fun!

Dear Oprah,

Hey there, sweetheart, what’s going on? I hope you’re enjoying this holiday season. I picked up a recent issue of O magazine (I’m not sure which month it was but I’m pretty sure you were on the cover) and it has some great advice on where to get the best cashmere socks and a very compelling interview with Blair Underwood. I don’t know how you do it, girlfriend!

Listen, I hear you’ve been having trouble with your weight recently – you’ve slipped back into some old habits and packed on a few of the pounds. Sounds like you could use a visit from hunky home-improvement guru Ty Pennington to renovate your big fat rear-end! Right, girlfriend? What? Oh, I’m sorry, I was just kidding around. I apologize.

You’ve been struggling with your weight for over 30 years and I know you think the answer has to be difficult or mandated by some expert you’ve brought on your show. But you yourself are living proof that even with the best advice available and your own personal chef, it’s still very easy to gain the weight back. One big problem that you need to get over is your belief in magic; your belief in books like The Secret, or putting pictures on your Vision Board, or “sending your desires out into the universe” and all that shit. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist. If that stuff did exist, we wouldn’t be talking about your fat ass again because you would have willed it into the ether already. The universe doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t give people yachts and it doesn’t give them pediatric AIDS. The universe is indifferent. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t have the capacity to care.

But I do, and I’ve got a bit of a heads-up for you. Remember in the 80’s when you went on that liquid diet and then you carted out that wagon with the fat in it? You looked real skinny but you ended up gaining the weight back super-quick, so that kind of sucked. And then, in more recent years, you went on a “sensible” diet where you did a lot of power-walking with Bob Greene and ate poached chicken breasts and wild-rice and things like that. And, although it took longer, you ended up gaining that weight back too. Well, here’s something Dr. Oz isn’t going to tell you: eating “healthy” to lose weight is just as flawed a long term strategy as going on a liquid diet to lose weight is, because neither strategy has anything to do with your relationship with the foods you naturally crave and enjoy. You never learn to eat them in moderation, you only learn to avoid them. Oh sure, you told all of us that after cutting out the sugar and the grease you learned to love the taste of carrots or whatever, that’s what everyone says, but in the long run look what has happened. Or, as Dr. Phil says, “How’s that working for you?”

So I’ve got some different ideas for you about how to lose the weight. You can read about them on this blog. I hope you’ll check them out.

And hey, how about this Barack Obama fella? Am I right, girlfriend?!

I’m in the midst of celebrating Christmonth, which is a month long holiday I’ve created between my birthday at the end of November and Christmas. But you can celebrate it too, even if your birthday isn’t at the end of November, just use Thanksgiving as the start of your Christmonth.

Christmonth (pronounced criss-month) is a time when we should all try to live two attitudes to their fullest. The first is “good will towards men,” which is a fairly common sentiment this time of year. The second is “aww, fuck it.” For example, “I really shouldn’t sit here eating a pan of brownies and watching ancient, Tivo’d episodes of Scott Baio is 45…and Single when I told myself I would wallpaper the guest-bathroom today. Aww, fuck it, it’s Christmonth!” In fact, the spirit of Christmonth is all about extending the idea of good will towards men to include yourself too. You get to be hard on yourself and disappointed in yourself the other 11 months out of the year. For this month just relax and do the things you want as long as you’re not hurting anyone else.

I realize a lot of my advice comes down to “Hey, just chill out,” but I think that’s a valid bit of advice in a lot of ways. It might not be useful for everything in your life, but I think the things we obsess about can sometimes be helped by taking a step back rather than being more vigilant.

Well, I’m taking a week off to go celebrate my birthday then Thanksgiving with family and friends. That means a lot of cake and pie and mashed potatoes and late-night Turkey sandwiches and everything that’s not conducive to losing weight. But there are times when losing weight isn’t my #1 priority. There are times when my #1 priority is gravy. Yum.

Hope everyone reading this has a great Thanksgiving and I will be back with some new stuff at the beginning of December.

There are very few people I have a whole lot of respect for in the fitness business. But one person who I could not possibly feel more affinity and affection for is Jack Lalanne. A few years ago I was on my couch at home and I was either sick or just exhausted from a late night, I can’t remember now. As I was flipping around the channels looking for something to zone out or fall asleep to and I came across ESPN Classic which was doing a marathon of Jack Lalanne’s daily TV show from the 50s and 60′s. I was completely captivated by him. Part of it was because I enjoy almost anything from the that time period, but beyond that I loved his attitude and his philosophy and his boundless energy. It’s not so much that I agree with everything he says, but he embodies an enthusiasm and “can-do” spirit that I really admire. He talks a lot about vim and vigor and intestinal fortitude and a lot of other words your rarealy hear these days. Even when losing weight wasn’t a concern of mine I used to love to watch the show which I would tivo every morning.

Here are some Jack highlights.

Jack’s 10 Steps for self-improvement:

Jack shows you how to lift 1000 pounds (or accomplish any impossible task):

Jack’s dog Happy who meanders in and out of the set during filming:

Sadly, ESPN Classic stopped showing the show in the morning, I guess to make room for some Shamwow commercials or something. The good news is there have been a few DVD releases that you can find at Jack’s site. I highly recommend his “Collector’s Edition” DVD’s Vol. 1-4. If you buy them as a package they’re dirt cheap. They’re probably the only exercise videos I’ll ever watch because they’re the only ones I enjoy watching. The exercises are scored by an organ player right in the studio! The shows seem a little bizarre compared to what you see these days, but I think they’re perfect.

What you see in this blog is not just my attempt to lose weight, but also my attempt to quantify the process of losing weight without following a diet. As I struggle through that, you will get to see the touchstones that I come upon during that search. So this post covers an idea I had this weekend.

To summarize:

My idea is that you know what you need to do to lose weight. You know that if you have a 14-egg omelet with sausage and chocolate-chips for breakfast that you should take it easy for lunch and dinner. In fact you know better than anyone the best way for you to lose weight because you’re you and you know what your issues are. The idea that the answers are out there somewhere is actually slowing you down. You don’t fail to lose weight because you lacked some knowledge that would allow you to lose weight, you fail to lose weight because you lack follow-thru. The ideal situation is that you are not constricted by any rules but you are still losing weight. This doesn’t mean that you’re eating like a pig and still losing weight, what I mean is that there are no particular types of food that are prohibited and no times of day that you have to eat or can’t eat.

I want eating in a manner that allows you to lose weight to be incredibly important to you, but I also want it to be so second nature that you don’t think about it or stress about. It’s like taking a shower. You wouldn’t usually go more than a day or two without taking a shower, but at the same time you don’t spend you day thinking about showering. Showering is so important that you engage in it almost every day, but so automatic that you don’t worry about it. This is what not eating too much can become, but we have to beat it into you.

People hate counting calories and exercising. Do you hate counting calories and exercising? Good, then we can use them as leverage.

Weigh yourself tonight. Okay, now let’s imagine you’re on diet probation and the scale is your probation officer (It’s a dumb metaphor, but it seemed to be the easiest way to describe my idea). For the next two days you can eat and exercise as much or as little as you want. You can have 1 meal a day or 100. You can eat celery every meal or drink hot fudge. It’s up to you. But at the end of the second day you have to check in with your probation officer again. Have you lost weight? If so you get another two day pass. Wake up in the morning and remind yourself that you’re trying to lose weight that day, but beyond that do as you like.

However, if you don’t lose any weight you’ve violated your probation and you’re going back to diet jail. And in diet jail, you’re MY bitch.  For your first violation you will be in diet jail for two day and you have to exercise at least half an hour day. Once those two days of strict calorie counting are over you’re free and you’re released out into the public again. But you still have to check in with the scale every two days.

And you can keep doing these two days with no rules over and over as long as you’re losing weight after every two-day series. But the second time you fail to lose weight you’re going back to the joint for three days of strict calorie counting and 35 minutes of exercise. And it will keep going like that. Each time you “violate probation” (fail to lose weight over a two-day stretch)  you add another day to your sentence and another 5 minutes to the amount of time you need to exercise per day during the calorie-counting period. So the fifth time you fail to lose weight during the two-day no-rules period you will have to count calories for the next 6 days and exercise for at least 55 minutes per day each of those 6 days. And you’re not allowed to estimate calories during the calorie-counting. Everything needs to be measured and weighed or come from a source where the calories are already listed. But that’s a pain in the ass, you’re saying. Yes, that’s the idea.

The theory is that the prospect of counting calories and mandatory exercise will be so unappealing that you’ll curb your eating and get in a little exercise during the course of each two-day diet even though it’s not mandatory. If you keep your nose clean and stay out of trouble then every time you weigh-in you’ll have lost a little something and you’re free to live without any rules in place. But if you act like a douchebag and eat like a pig then you’re going to the pokey.

Ideally you would find that every two days you had lost at least a little weight, even just a percentage of a pound, and then you would never have to count calories or mandate exercise at all. Your goal during those two-day periods would be simply to not eat like a maniac (or, even better, eat like you’re on a first date) and maybe get some exercise in when you can and keep yourself out of jail, the big house, the pokey, the graybar hotel, Old Stoney Lonesome, the pen, the can, the hoosegow, and so on.