The Ups and Downs of Dieting

weightloss3Every diet book will tell you that you should try to weigh yourself under the same conditions every time so that you minimize the effect of daily fluctuations in weight (caused by eating and drinking) on the readings you get.

Virtually every diet book will also tell you that as you diet you can expect considerable ups and downs and that you shouldn’t worry about these. They are caused by various factors, most notably your body’ retaining fluids for reasons which may not be obvious. Consequently, you shouldn’t worry about these multi-day fluctuations in your weight. As long as your overall weight goes down over time, you’re making progress toward your goal. To keep you from stressing out about these upticks in what the scale tells you, some diet books will recommend that you only weigh yourself once a week. That will give you a better chance of seeing a lower reading than what you saw the last time you got on the scale, but it will not guarantee this.

From what I’ve seen in others who have followed this strategy, it may actually increase the stress they feel when they see an uptick in the scale reading. They feel like they have wasted a whole week of dieting, and if they don’t weigh themselves for another week, they’ll have that feeling hanging over them for a week.

So I don’t do that.

I tend to be systematic in my approach to things and, since I have something of a scientific bent (as illustrated by this blog), I keep detailed info on my diet, exercise, nutritional supplements, etc. By analyzing this data, I can note trends over time and figure out what my body best responds to.

One item I keep track of is a daily reading of my weight, which I used to generate the above graph (click it to enlarge it in a pop-up window). It shows me losing sixteen pounds between April 9th and May 30th. (Overall, I’ve lost almost forty-four pounds since going back on my diet in mid January, after taking a few months off to let my metabolism re-set.) The graph lets you see the kinds of ups and downs one can expect during an effective diet, which is why I thought I’d show it here. Most diet books don’t show what your weight trendline is likely to look like, but it seems to me that it would help prepare the reader for the kinds of ups and downs to be expected.

One of the things I’ve noticed over time is that I tend to have a weight rebound immediately after each time I achieve a new low (unless I’m on a semi-liquid variant of my diet that keeps pushing my weight down). It’s like at each new weight low my body decides that it needs to reassure itself that we aren’t going to starve, so it starts hanging on to water and my weight increases temporarily. You can’t see this very well on the above graph because of the special events it records (the colored areas), but now that I know this happens, I expect it and so I don’t get concerned when it happens. It’s a normal part of how weight loss works for me.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that the stress of travel will cause my weight to bounce up. That’s what’s happening in the purple box on the track line. It was the day I went up north of L.A. to give talks at a Protestant school. Sure enough, when I got back my weight had gone up (this particular spike is exaggerated due to the time of day I had to weigh myself), but the effect was temporary and only lasted a few days.

The two blue boxes on the graph represent tiems I was varying my diet. I occasionally do experiments to see if I can make it more effective than it normally is. (Normally I lose two pounds a week on average.) The first blue box represents a period when I switched to an almost-all-liquid diet that focused on protein. At the moment, I’m trying a diet variant focusing mostly on fat. I can’t maintain such diet variants for overly long (they tend to be way too BORING to sustain indefinitely), but gathering the data will show me what my body responds to best.

"Where Are They Taking Those Women . . . ?"

sabinesAt the moment I’m listening to an audio course on Roman history (which I will review soon), and as I go through it, it’s bringing to mind all kind of incidents I remember that involve Roman history. One of them occurred just last year.

I was in an art museum with a family of friends, and we were looking at a room of sixteenth to eighteenth century paintings, most of which dealt with biblical or mythological themes. I was studying a picture at my eye-level (Daniel in the Lion’s Den or something like that), when the tiny voice of the family’s youngest daughter rose to my ears.

“Where are they taking those women . . . ?” she asked.

I bent to look at the painting at her eye level and saw that it was a painting of men hefting women on their shoulders and carrying them off (much like the one I’ve reproduced here, which is of the same event).

I looked at the card next to it to see what it was titled. “THE RAPE OF THE SABINES,” the card said.

My mind reeled for a second as to what to tell the child.

“To have fun,” I said.

“Oh,” she replied, contentendly.

sevenbridesActually, as the Roman history course I’m listening to now points out, the “rape” of the Sabines wasn’t really a rape. It was actually “kidnapping with intent to marry,” but it still left me wondering what kind of weirdo would hang a painting of the event at the eye-level of a six year old child. That’s one of those practical organizational rules like “Don’t put the horses at the front of the parade.”

(FYI, if you’re not a student of Roman history, you may have heard of the abduction of the Sabine women from the goofy musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, where it is recounted in the goofy song “Oh Those Sobbin’, Sobbin’ Women.” Sobbin’ = Sabine. Get it?)

“Where Are They Taking Those Women . . . ?”

sabinesAt the moment I’m listening to an audio course on Roman history (which I will review soon), and as I go through it, it’s bringing to mind all kind of incidents I remember that involve Roman history. One of them occurred just last year.

I was in an art museum with a family of friends, and we were looking at a room of sixteenth to eighteenth century paintings, most of which dealt with biblical or mythological themes. I was studying a picture at my eye-level (Daniel in the Lion’s Den or something like that), when the tiny voice of the family’s youngest daughter rose to my ears.

“Where are they taking those women . . . ?” she asked.

I bent to look at the painting at her eye level and saw that it was a painting of men hefting women on their shoulders and carrying them off (much like the one I’ve reproduced here, which is of the same event).

I looked at the card next to it to see what it was titled. “THE RAPE OF THE SABINES,” the card said.

My mind reeled for a second as to what to tell the child.

“To have fun,” I said.

“Oh,” she replied, contentendly.

sevenbridesActually, as the Roman history course I’m listening to now points out, the “rape” of the Sabines wasn’t really a rape. It was actually “kidnapping with intent to marry,” but it still left me wondering what kind of weirdo would hang a painting of the event at the eye-level of a six year old child. That’s one of those practical organizational rules like “Don’t put the horses at the front of the parade.”

(FYI, if you’re not a student of Roman history, you may have heard of the abduction of the Sabine women from the goofy musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, where it is recounted in the goofy song “Oh Those Sobbin’, Sobbin’ Women.” Sobbin’ = Sabine. Get it?)

Welcome to New Server Land

Typepad supposedly upgraded its servers last night, so this should cure the slow response times we’ve been having on the blog lately.

Let’s hope so. I don’t want to have to move the blog again after getting it settled in here.

Thus far it *does* seem on my end that the server is responding much faster and without the long hang times that were plaguing it the last few days..

Spines Sprouting Everywhere

Brumley has a good piece on the recent displays of intestinal fortitude by bishops vis-a-vis pro-abort (and other pro-evil) politicians.

The same page (father down) also has an interesting interview with Bishop Bruskewitz on the national conference’s Review Board (dealing with the aftermath of the sex abuse scandal) and the problems that the bishop sees with it. He’s quite displomatic in how he phrases things, but if you read between the lines he’s severely slamming the way the board has been set up and run.

(Now if Brumley would just migrate to a board that has built-in permalinks so people could point directly to individual stories. . . . And if he would only post more regularly. His content is too good to be allowed not to exist.)

Increase Your Albedo!

Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.

Here’s the scoop: The earth’s albedo (i.e., the amount of light it reflects) is increasing. It had been doing down. Now it’s going up. Scientists don’t know why.

Since a higher albedo means a cooler planet, maybe it’s a sign that global warming ain’t gonna warm. Maybe it’s all a big cycle.

Or maybe not.

Was refreshing to see the scientists in the story saying that their findings neither confirm nor disconfirm the greenhouse effect and that more study is needed. A little scholarly caution does the soul a world of good.

A Nice BMI Calculator

Here’s a handy online tool for calculating your exact BMI or Body Mass Index. This is the standard figure used for reckoning overweight and obesity.

The system is open to some criticism in that it doesn’t take into account all the relevant factors (e.g., is the person a body builder who has extra muscle in his weight, or a person who has suffered muscle wasting and has less muscle than normal inhis weight, or a person who is large or small boned), but it’s still nice to be able to calculate your exact BMI and see how you stack up against the idealized numbers in common use.