How I Use My FitBit, Diet and Exercise To Lose Weight

What the doctors and diet industry won’t tell you is that if you want to lose weight, you need to make eating and exercising work together. Why? Suppose your BMR is 2,200 and you don’t exercise beyond about a mile’s walk on the commute and to get lunch. That’s about 2,300 calories (that’s right, one mile at 4 mph at a reasonable weight is 100 calories. See why exercise alone won’t do it?) At a 500 calorie daily deficit, that’s 1,800 calories. Do that to your body a couple of times and homeostatis is going to kick in: your body is going to turn down the energy it uses to get through the day to allow for the lowered intake. This is where the exercise takes effect: not only does it force your body to burn calories, but it tells it that there’s an expectation of higher activity rates and it had better stay alert. This counters the homeostasis, and you get your 500 calorie deficit.

Okay? Eat less, body slows down; exercise more, body speeds back up again. That’s why we need to do diet and exercise together.

My Fitbit tells me the number of calories I have left to eat today, assuming I don’t do any more over-the-BMR activity. This is often a scarily low figure. I used to have very inactive Saturdays, and had used up my allowance after breakfast and lunch. If the calories left falls below about 200, I know it’s time to get some walking or exercise in (because hot chocolate drink in the evening). Basically, I keep going until the "calories remaining" is back where I need it. Now, I don’t actually just walk round our office (not trivial, you could run the 400 metres round the full length of my floor) until I use up 250 calories, but it does encourage me to, say, get off at Oxford Circus and walk rather than go to Piccadilly Circus, which is just round the corner from my gym. That’s often all it takes.

It’s not enough to say “If you eat a little too much, you can walk it off.” You need to know you’ve walked it off.

It’s not quite as closely-managed as I may have made it sound, but it’s possible because the Fitbit, or any other tracker with the same functionality, makes it easier to monitor my activity and intake. As with checking the calories / 100 grammes on food packaging, it’s a habit that’s easy to get into and quickly becomes automatic. Using this method, I’ve kept up a 500+ calorie / day deficit for three weeks, with no real pain.

Feel the Emotion, Don’t Buy The Chocolate

Eating and training well consistently are easier to do if your life is in a reasonable groove. It doesn’t have to be a dull routine, just stable enough that you know you will be able to make your training sessions, and you’re not going to be exposed to distracting business lunches or trips to places where all the food is heavy and the portions are large. That much is obvious.

The real trip-up isn’t missing a training day or a heavy night on the lager and curry. The real trip-up is from the consequences of interacting with other people, or “emotions” as you earthlings say.

I can only speak for myself, but the experience of rejection is chemical. I feel like someone has injected me with something you wouldn’t want in your system to set you up for a Saturday night. Along with fear, it’s the only emotion I experience that vividly. If that is Argentinian steak, everything else is new potatoes in comparison. If I get to feeling that I have been rejected by the entire human race, or am rejecting all sorts of good things for myself, then I can fall into a slump from in which it’s a really good idea to eat a bar of chocolate every night. And biscuits while watching a couple of episodes of a box set. And some cake for tea. One nasty bout of self-pity and I can add an extra 1,000 calories per day for a week or so. And eat lasagna instead of salad and chicken escalope for lunch. That’s at least four pounds straight on, and it takes a while to get back into managed eating again.

Don’t even think of quoting Buddhism at me. I will dive down the Internet and squirt custard in your face if you do. Anyone who lives a life worth living is going to have mood-altering emotions, and they are going to act out on those emotions. Most people have a drink, others pop out for a cigarette, yet others spend hours talking about it, and I eat because I’m a non-smokng alcoholic with no other resources.

I’ve mentioned before that having something to interrupt the progress from feeling to chocolate is useful. I’m not a believer in managing one’s emotions: managing what I do under the thrall of those emotions is usually a fairly sensible thing to do. But not denying what I’m feeling. Feelings tell us things about ourselves.

Feeling rejection tells me I really do want something; feeling angry tells me that my boundaries have been stepped over; feeling scared tells me I may be about to lose something valuable; feeling frustrated tells me either that I’m stuck in a situation I can’t get out of or that I’m not taking the action I need to take; feeling bored tells me I need to re-think how I spend my time. Not feeling anything tells me I’m where I want to be doing what I want to be doing. (Happiness isn’t a feeling: it’s the absence of bad feelings. The “up” feelings that even I get from time to time are from drugs that the body produces.)

Try to change what we feel and we lose the information. (But maybe that’s why other people try to do that.)

Emotions have to be acknowledged, felt, and their effects managed. The effects, not the emotions. If I want a good jag of self-pity, then I’m going to have one, but what I’m not going to do for a while is let them take me into Asda (?^%$!) when on the way to the car so I can stock up on biscuits and chocolate.

The Real Food Groups: Dangerous, Safe, Caution and Protein

I’ve been mildly obsessive conscientious about looking up and recording calories for about a week now. It’s an easy habit to get. Pick up some food from the shelf, flip the pack and find the nutrition table. You’re looking for the kilocalories (these are so-called "small calories”, and a small calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of a gramme of water by one degree centrigrade; a “food calorie” is 1,000 small calories, sometimes written with a capital C). It’s worth doing for a while. I still can’t quite get over how many calories grains have, and how much fuller I feel if I eat the same amount of calories in root vegetables or potatoes.

Nobody can remember long lists of food and calories and of course it is silly to check everything before you eat it. The point is that you don’t need to. Start looking at calories and some patterns will jump right out at you. (Context: I cook most of my food at home from raw or tins of beans. The only processed foods I eat turn out to be those in the “Dangerous” group below. But if you eat prepared meals with little sachets of oil or mayo, you’ll need to look at the labels.)

Here’s one so obvious it’s hit even me within a few days of looking up the numbers:

Dangerous: 500+ Cals/100g or per portion. Nuts, seeds, dried fruit, cakes, biscuits, pastry, chocolate, four tablespoons of oil (Indian food cooked in ghee). Also anything that adds a disproportionate about of calories: mayo, salad cream, white or brown sugar.

Safe: less than 100 Cals/100g. Fruit, vegetables. Potatoes. Plus these have, if un-processed, lots of fibre which make me feel full.

Caution: between 100 and 500 cals/100g. Any carbs (wheat, rye, corn, rice, polenta and anything else that the health food faddists are pushing), cream, yoghurt with added flavours. Cheese, especially the hard stuff. Also sauces and gravy. Also beas: baked beans 150 calories / 100g, borlotti beans 355 calories / 100g. Cheap jam donuts, 250 calories. Bagels, 250 calories. Good strong wholemeal bread, going on 100 calories per slice.

Protein: between 100 and 500 Cals/100g (depending on fat content: oily fish and red meat is higher). Meat, fish, eggs. Protein comes from dead animals, not plants.

Protein gets its own group because animal protein is the foundation of any diet. (This blog is written by a man for men and men eat the flesh of dead animals and fish. Veggies and vegans are women, no matter what gender they may be. I know there are some serious lifters out there who are vegan, but they are exceptions.) Anytime you want to increase your oestrogen levels, tuck into the soya. Anytime you want to put on weight, get your proteins from beans that also come stuffed with carbohydrates.

August 2015 Review

There’s a Flanders and Swann song about the weather in England. “In July the sun is hot. Is it shining? No, it’s not!” July is usually hot but quite sunny. August is now terminally grey and overcast. And depressing. It’s also the month when, for some reason, I start to take stock of what I’m doing and make some changes.

I changed up my work shirts to blue, single cuff, non-iron, slim cut, 17.5x35 from T M Lewin's. Of whom I’ve long been a fan, but until I looked at their website I had no idea just how many combinations were available. The one I ordered was exactly what I wanted. I lost two pairs of trousers on the train earlier this year (it feels like last year) and punished myself by buying replacements from M&S. Those got dumped as well, for two proper pairs, again from T M Lewin's.

Finding out from my Fitbit that pretty much no matter what I did, I got around 6:15 - 6:45 hours’ sleep (unless I really do climb into bed at 21:30 or so), I decided that watching an early evening film and getting back at 21:30 wouldn’t kill me, as long as I didn’t then spend an hour looking at nothing much on the internet. So I’m trying to make that a new habit.

I read The FUSE: Gridlock; DMZ: On The Ground; Hadley Freeman's Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies; Mai Jai's, Decoded; Philippe Georget's, Summertime All The Cats Are Bored; Fuck Yeah, Menswear; a monograph on Basquiat’s paintings; The Architecture of Modern Mathematics; and No Highway by Neville Shute.

I saw Straight Outta Compton at Cineworld; Salt of the Earth, Eden, Diary of a Teenage Girl, and Precinct 75 at the Soho Curzon, The Killers at the Prince Charles Cinema. Also S1 of Miami Vice. (Will Nikita look as dated in thirty years?)

I’d registered for the Windows 10 upgrade on my old Samsung, and a couple of weekends after the launch date, it told me it was ready to install the new OS. Which it did in about ninety minutes, from the internet, without losing any data or programs, or requiring me to fill in forms about the software I use. Corporate IT departments please note.

My new gym routine is fairly settled. Tuesday is weights day. Sunday and Thursday are body-weight flexibility exercises: jumping onto or over boxes; Vipr movements; … ; and pull-ups, pull-downs and rows. I need to work on my back. Following my trainer’s advice, pull-ups get done first, and following some bro-science, I don’t do a set to failure. I feel a lot less ache-y and more energetic as a result. Three weights sessions were not doing it for me.

And I had a signing ceremony with Sis and Nephew at my solicitors. They are now my attorneys for Finance and Care. This is a slightly more emotional exercise than you might think. It involves thinking, if only for a while, about what you want to happen to you when you start going gaga or get some unpleasant cancer. Which was probably why I felt it was a much more emotionally-messy month than I’ve made it sound.

Counting Calories - Get An App

My Fitbit has started telling me about the food I eat. Or rather, I have started to confess to it. It has a UK food directory, which makes it a lot more useful than the American version imposed on users last year. To use it well, I’ve had to get into a couple of habits: reading the calorie count on food packaging, and calculating or measuring the weights of a single item (as when I buy two salmon fillets.)

Download a calorie counter app - I use Fitbit’s built-in tracker, or try MyFitnessPal, or Google for some reviews. Very few food brands cross national borders, so you need one with an English food list if you’re in England, a French list for France and so on. However since you are never going to eat another packaged supermarket supper again, but cook nearly all your own food from raw ingredients you’ll only be using a fraction of the food database and since modern food suppliers simply don’t provide us with a wide range of foods (as opposed to brands), it won’t take long to build up the short-cut menu that all these apps have.

The app does a number of things for you. It can look up calorie values (Apple, 1 medium), but most of all it can do the calculations for you. Food packaging states the calorific value of 100g of the contents. It might tell you per pack or per item as well. Portions are rarely 100g. You can try to calculate the calories in 115g of salmon at 229 calories / 100g in your head, or you can use the app. Look up the food, adjust the portion size and add it to the list.

Is it worth doing this? Isn’t it all a bit “quantified life” (whatever happened to that?) and geeky? Shouldn’t we just, you know, use our common sense, eat properly and don’t obsess about it? Well, no.

I walk five miles a day during the week, and do three hours a week in the gym. That, along with my basal rate, burns around 2,800 calories a day. I need to lose weight (aka body fat), and to do that I have to maintain a 500 calorie / day deficit consistently. (Much less and my body will homeostatically adjust for the difference.)

Know what 500 calories is? 500 calories is a slice of fudge cake from Cafe Nero. It’s a Tuna sandwich from Pret. It’s six chocolate digestive biscuits or a 120g bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. It’s not quite all of a Steak-and-Kidney pie from Square Pie. It’s a 100g of potato crisps, two-and-a-half small croissants from Sainsbury's, four tablespoons of olive oil (!), or a square of Bakewell tart from Pret.

I don’t smoke. I don’t drink, and I don’t get much chance to do the other thing either. If something happens that causes me to get emotional, I might show the weights who’s boss, but I’m more likely to hit the fudge cake. You can go have a couple of pints (260 calories) or some wine (equivalent about 300 calories). If it’s really bad, I may wind up at a meeting, eating a bar of chocolate, and listening to some middle-timer rattling on about nothing. So I need a habit - recording food eaten - that interrupts the habit of eating on emotions. I may be suffering emotionally, but dammit, I don’t have to put on weight as well. The Fitbit app tells me how much I have left to eat for the rest of the day, allowing for my planned deficit. That’s what I really need to know and will keep me in line.

If your common sense is unusually well-informed about the calorific value of various foodstuffs, if you can prepare and cook food from raw ingredients quickly, and you have the emotional reactions of a brick, you can "use your common sense, eat properly and not obsess about it”. Otherwise, get an app and start tracking.

What 2000 Calories Looks Like (3)

According to Mrs Robinson the GP we should all be eating 2,000 calories a day because diabetes.

Schools need to teach pupils what 2,000 calories a day looks and feels like. It means a breakfast of toast or cereal, a sandwich and zero calorie drink (like water) at lunch and a supper of protein, veg and a portion of carbohydrate like some boiled potatoes. Some fruit and a yoghurt, and you’re basically done for the day. Who eats like that nowadays

This also has to be the most joyless menu ever devised. Mrs Robinson is clearly one of those who believe that good living is dull living, flavourless living, tasteless living. Decent people don’t have fun. Decent people have a sad sandwich in their car between housecalls in nearby villages. With water. Decent people don’t even fry-finish their potatoes because Oil Has Calories.

2,000 calories a day is not a bowl of cornflakes, a home-made ham sandwich with a glass of water, and boiled potatoes, carrots and a thin slice of chicken, with an apple and a yoghurt as snacks. Nope. That would be about 1,000 calories. And it would be a really bad diet. Those morning carbs - eaten at 06:00 - will burn straight off after a stressful commute, leaving you craving something by about 09:30. Those sandwiches for lunch you made at home will suffer the same fate: you’ll be craving by 16:00 or so. Yoghurts are about the most pointless food ever devised. And I defy anyone to eat 500 calories of fruit (excluding bananas) in one sitting. Or even in a day.

Mrs Robinson needs to know what 2,000 calories looks like. She also needs to get some kind of life. In the next post, I will explain how to manage your diet without counting a single darn calorie.

What 2000 Calories Looks Like (2)

So let’s talk about diabetes. There are two types of diabetes. The first is what your grandmother had: an auto-immune destruction of beta cells in the pancreas that makes insulin production impossible. That is managed by injecting a substitute insulin. This is Type 1 - or as I will prejudicially call it, “real” diabetes. The “not-real” type is diabetes-by-analogy, or so-called “Type 2“ diabetes, and this arises when, for one of many reasons, the body can’t process sugar as well as it used to, and the blood-sugar rises to the point where nasty lumpy sugar molecules can start doing some real damage to various parts of the body. At one point I went along to Ashford Hospital after fasting for twelve hours, was given a litre of Lucozade to drink and had my blood sugar levels measured two hours later. I think it came out at 9 mmol per litre, which meant I had, according to the World Health Organsiation, impaired glucose tolerance, or as the PR people call it “pre-diabetes”. My levels now are around 4-5 mmol / litre. Diabetes mellitus is diagnosed at 11.1 mmol / litre. 

When my blood sugar came down, I stopped getting random infections, often in my nose, my head cleared and my emotions stabilised. Even though I was in the middle of a horrible re-organisation at work, about to be down-graded, and under stress, I felt better. Increased blood sugar isn’t funny, and it’s vaguely scary how little it needs to increase before it has a noticeable effect on my ability to function at the levels needed in today’s working world. Chronic high blood sugar is nasty and dangerous and can really, really mess up your life. But it’s not a disease, it’s a symptom.

Why don’t I want to call "Type 2 diabetes” as a disease? A disease is a chemical process in the body caused by some (usually external) agent, and the symptoms are the results of that process. Stop the process and the symptoms go away - that’s what we call ‘curing the disease’. A disease is usually cured by killing a virus or bacteria, or in some cases, by chemicals that make our own immune system back off attacking a perfectly acceptable part of us. A real condition, such as syphilis is treated with a real medicine with a real chemical effect. This will work despite our body fat, exercise regime, religious beliefs, the state of our chakras, how much exercise we do, or how mindful we are (which is the definition of technology: it works whether you believe in it or not). The only change we usually need to make to our diet is giving up alcohol for the duration. 

Calling something a disease creates the expectation that there’s a cure for it that works whether we believe in it or not. Since high blood sugar has many causes, there isn’t a single cure for it. At best there would be a medicine that reduced blood sugar to normal levels. There is, and it’s called “insulin”. But NICE doesn’t like giving it to people who aren’t Type 1 because it’s expensive… I mean, because they fear the patient will become dependent on it. Instead they hand out drugs with names that end in “formin”, which make a third of the people who take them feel nausea, while a third have problems with their, ahem, married life and stop taking the pills within a month.These drugs definitely do not work. Not like penicillin or ranitidine work. 

The pharmaceutical industry wants you to think that high blood sugar is a disease, because then you will expect to be prescribed a cure, and press your GP for one. It may not happen now, but at least a couple of years ago, there was an NHS bonus for GPs to diagnose you as having high blood sugar, get you on nasty drugs and then find your levels had dropped. That sounds more or less like a bribe to me. Despite that bribe, the NHS no more believes in “Type 2 diabetes” than I do, and suggests exercise and diet as the first approach to managing high blood sugar.

But “they didn’t push the envelope”. The NHS recommends small changes in diet and exercise regime. What the doctors will never tell the poor saps sitting in front of them is that the change must be sudden and fairly extreme. (It is of you’re very obese and get a diet from a nutritionist.) I went on a 1,500 calorie / day diet and hit the gym four times a week. That works because the body can’t adjust to the sudden and dramatic change of regime, and it burns calories and loses weight, especially fat from the abdominal region. The official advice is to make small changes, and rightly so: the parade of long-term un-exercised carb-munchers that GPs see would simply keel over if they tried to repeat what I did. 

1,500 calories is the US Army’s extreme weight-loss diet and you’re not supposed to do it for long (I can’t find a decent link to this anymore and there’s a lot of faddy looking stuff when googling “us army 1500 calories”). It works in conjunction with, oh yes, being a soldier. Not an office-worker. Being in good shape is part of a soldier’s job, as it is part of a model’s or an actor’s. They get support for it. Being in good shape is not part of an office-worker’s job, and they don’t get any support for it. Capitalism doesn’t care about your body-fat, except to sell you gym memberships and fad diets to get rid of it, and the shit that puts it there in the first place. 

As for the 2,000 calorie thing? Turns out that was a classic piece of US governmental bureaucratic fudge. 

We’ll carry on in the next post.