Shamed into Silence

You know what I hate? Blogs where the author spends every other post apologizing for taking so long to add a new post. You’re busy — so what? We’re all busy, you lazy good-for-nothing, jerk-face, moron…

Oh. Yeah. That was supposed to be about me. Sorry.

So what has kept me from updating this blog? Well, work is pretty time-consuming, but that’s not the whole story. It’s more about what I’ve been consuming that’s aided my silence — and it ain’t time.

A public diet is a very stressful undertaking. What if you don’t lose the weight? What if you work out and diet and it just doesn’t come off? I don’t know the answer to that last one, because I haven’t been working out or sticking to a diet, so let me know if you find the solution.

And when you’re publicly trying to lose weight and failing to do so — because of your own incompetence — it’s not easy to get online and admit it to everyone. But, well, I’m learning that I need to do just that.

Another thing I’m learning — again and again and again — is that losing weight and getting in shape is actually very easy for anyone who eats healthier foods and exercises. I know this because I have lost the same 10 pounds five times now.

But there is something in my brain that keeps screwing up. You know you shouldn’t eat that, but you do anyway. You know you should put down the fork, but you don’t. You know you should get off the couch and go to the gym, or at the very least take a leisurely stroll around the block, but instead you keep both cheeks firmly planted on the couch, waiting for the next show to come on.

I am beginning to worry that the public nature of my failure won’t be enough to get me going. And I don’t know why, exactly, I behave like I do — I just do it.

I know lots of people think of their lives like they’re in a movie and I’m no exception. At this point in the film, I can hear the people in the theater saying, “Why does this guy keep sabotaging himself? Why doesn’t he just eat that apple and drink that water and go spend 30 minutes on a treadmill when he gets off work? It’s so simple!”

That’s what I would be saying, anyway, despite being lodged in a comfy chair eating popcorn. The truth is, I don’t know why I am the way I am or what I can do to overcome it.

I was talking, a year ago at this point, to Dr. James Rand, who studies the way our brains communicate. When I told him I was going to the gym and getting healthy he said, “Good luck. I hope it works out. It probably won’t.”

I thought he was just being negative, but as the parents of two autistic kids, he is intimately aware of how hard it is for people to overcome their nature. Somewhere in my nature is a guy who just eats and eats and eats with little thought to the consequences. I just need to find that guy and figure out how to change him mind.

Or I could kill him. Whatever works.

Shocking New Discovery Not Shocking At All!

So, let’s cover what we already know, OK?

- Carbohydrates are bad.

- Too much fat makes us fat.

- Lean protein is good.

But maybe all of that is bunk, because science has finally produced a study to tell us what we should have known all along:

The key to weight loss is eating fewer calories than you expend. Big surprise, right? And yet the world seemed pretty interested in study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

So what does that mean? Well, it’s true that some foods are healthier for us than others. That has to do with vitamin content, what kind of fat they contain and how much dietary fiber is in them.

But if you ate only ice cream and steak, but burned off more calories than you took in, you’d still lose weight. You might not be super-healthy – but that’s because weight is only part of the puzzle in a healthy lifestyle. Believe it or not, there are plenty of skinny, sedentary people who eat crappy foods, just as there are lots of healthy, active overweight people.

So when it comes to weight loss, the rules are pretty simple — burn more calories than you take in and the weight will (over time) come off. But if you’re interested in a healthy lifestyle, you’ll have to pay more attention to what you’re getting in those calories and how you burn them off.