FatGuyThin

The First Step on the Road to Leanness

When you were young, you knew nothing of calories, carbs, fats, or diets. You knew only about feeling hungry and feeling satisfied. And, like all babies, when you were hungry you let the world know in no uncertain terms. When you had enough, you refused to feed.  

Yours was the perfect eating system, and you never got fat. 

When you were older, your parents wanted you to eat on their schedule. So they made you eat at set mealtimes. They encouraged to clean your plate - whether you needed to or not. If you misbehaved, you were sent to your room without dinner. If you were good, you were rewarded with a high-calorie treat. Your parents used food as reward and punishment. 

They taught you to ignore your body’s hunger signals. Signals that had kept your food intake in perfect balance with your body’s needs. You learnt to eat when you weren’t hungry, and you ate until you were stuffed. You became afraid of hunger. And you got fat. 

By the time you were an adult, these eating habits were deeply ingrained.  

To lose weight, you need to unlearn what your parents taught you. You need to get back in touch with your body’s natural hunger signals. You need to eat when you are hungry and to stop before you feel stuffed. 

This is the first step on the road to leanness.

 

Fat is Not Your Problem

Most people who lose weight never achieve true leanness - they look pudgy and soft and they regain some or all of the weight they lost.

They treat fat as if it were the problem. But fat isn’t the problem, fat is the symptom of the problem. The real problem is overeating. No matter how little you think you are eating, if you have excess fat, you must be eating more food than your body wants.

Most people who manage to diet some or, rarely, all of their excess fat away are still left with the problem. And this is why they regain the weight.

If you can fix what causes you to overeat, you will be unable to retain excess fat. A natural consequence will be a lean body that reflects your level of eating.

The real, real problem is what causes you to overeat.

The Truth

I could tell people what they want to hear: that losing weight and shaping up is easy.

I could slap my before and after photos on food supplement bottles and sell them as a miracle fat loss cure. I could compile a load of crap about diet and aerobics and flog it as an ebook for $37 a pop. God knows plenty of people are doing just that and making money. But I won’t. 

I choose to tell the truth. The truth about the stuff I wish I had known sooner. The stuff I found out the hard way by sorting through all the bullshit – bullshit that can keep you from your goal and separate you from your money. 

"The truth will set you free - but first, it will piss you off."  

Accountability Part II

Do you tell yourself that your loved ones, friends, and co-workers will keep you accountable and help you lose weight? 

Do you ask them to stop you from overeating and to tell you to exercise more?

If you do, what you are really doing is using them as a crutch for your lack of personal responsibility. 

Your loved ones, friends, and co-workers cannot keep you accountable even if they wanted to. It’s not their job to save you from yourself - that’s your job. When you try to delegate that responsibility to someone else, you give up the power that comes with it. You give up the power to change.

Ask yourself this: if your loved ones, friends, and co-workers hold you accountable, how come they let you get fat in the first place? Are they accountable for that too? Of course they're not. You are. You got yourself fat, and only you can get yourself thin. 

Do you tell yourself you are doing it because you don’t want to let them down? The only person you are letting down is yourself.

“You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.”

- Jim Rohn

It’s good to have support from your family and friends but, once you become an adult, they are not accountable for your actions. They can support and encourage you, but they cannot be held accountable for you and they cannot help you hold yourself accountable.

Taking responsibility can be scary. Instead of trying to ease your fear by blaming others, you need to take full responsibility and act.

Until you do, you are powerless.

The Weigh-In

People will do almost anything except eat less in order to get a lower reading on the scales.

Saunas, running in a rubber sweat suit, and taking water pills are a small sample of the things people tell me they do on weigh-in day. The thing these activities have in common? They are nothing at all to do with fat loss.

3500

Something I (foolishly) assumed that most people knew until this week: there are approximately 3500 calories in one pound of fat. 

To lose one pound of fat, you need to eat 3500 calories less than your body uses. 

On the flip side, if you eat 3500 calories more than your body uses, you will gain one pound of fat.

Once you understand this, it becomes easy to spot the bullshit peddled by some weight loss “experts”.

A diet I heard about recently claims you can eat unlimited amounts of pasta and potatoes and still lose weight. This is nonsense. IF YOU EAT MORE CALORIES THAN YOUR BODY USES – regardless of where those calories come from – you will get fat. 

Interestingly, the same diet tells you to limit the amount of bread you eat. It seems you can gain weight by eating too much bread but you can lose weight by eating unlimited amounts of pasta or potatoes. 

Worryingly, people are paying five pounds a week to so-called weight-loss councillors (read: slimming club agents) who believe this fairy tale.

Blame

“It must be water”, “I can’t understand it, I’ve been good”, “I’ve been in the car all week”. Some of the excuses I’ve heard this week from people who have failed to lose weight.

Not one of them was prepared to admit to the real reason. Not one of them would admit that they had eaten too much.

This is not rocket science. It’s easy to work out what the problem is. If you eat too much you get fat. Blaming something else will keep you locked into a cycle of denial that will stop you from reaching your goal. 

Accountability

Have you ever signed one of those contracts you get in some diet books - the ones where you commit to losing weight and you tell your spouse, friends, or relatives so they can help keep you accountable? 

They don't work. 

They don't work because you are accountable to one person: you.  

It’s the same as buying a gym membership and telling yourself that you’ll use it because if you don’t you have wasted money. 

If you think you need the threat of embarrassment or loss of money to force yourself to lose weight and shape up, you don't want to do it. You have to want to lose weight and shape up; you cannot force yourself to do it.

If you start to entertain thoughts of signing a contract or forking out for a gym membership to keep yourself honest, stop. It means that you are not taking responsibility. Until you do, you are doomed to failure.

Discomfort

If you want to lose fat, you have to get uncomfortable. 

Not the kind of message you’ll get from your celebrity fitness DVD or see on the label of your favorite fat burning supplement and for good reason: discomfort doesn’t sell supplements or DVDs. But the hard truth is you’ll get nowhere until you accept discomfort.

“You must become uncomfortable. Feeling good does not create change. Feeling uncomfortable creates change.”

Larry Winget

Diet and fitness books tell you what you want to hear; to look for ways of making exercise easier – to potter about in your garden until you work up a “light sweat”, to roll around on an over-inflated beach ball and to eat every two hours so you don’t get hungry. 

Don’t want to sweat or get hungry? Poor baby! 

You need to get hungry and you have to get uncomfortable. How else will you find out what true hunger feels like and how else will you send your body a strong enough signal for change when you workout?

If you want to believe that effective exercise involves a leisurely jog along a golden beach while you grin like a Cheshire cat on heat, and if you want to believe that you can buy a slimmer body over the counter of your local health food store, then be my guest. Just don’t expect to lose fat.

Discomfort is where progress starts and fatness ends. 

When things start getting uncomfortable, you know you are on the right track.

I had to get really uncomfortable before I decided it was time to do something about my weight. The discomfort was very real, very personal, and very scary. Instead of running away from it, I faced it head on. I discovered it wasn’t so bad after all. For 46 years I tried to bury my discomfort with food. I fed it until it became a 320lb behemoth that I could no longer ignore. 

“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”

John F. Kennedy

The good news is that once you accept discomfort, it gets easier. The more willing you are to accept discomfort, the easier losing fat becomes.

Diet books and magazines want you for a repeat customer. It’s in their interests to keep you fat. That’s why they set their word processors to find words like “uncomfortable”, “hard”, and “work” and replace them with words like “enjoy”, “easy”, and “relax” - words that give you a warm glow inside but do f**k-all for losing fat.

Did that make you feel uncomfortable? Good! We’re on the right track. 

Running: Even Forrest Gump Knew When to Stop!

“That day, for no particular reason, I decided to go for a little run…”

That’s about the best reason I’ve ever heard for running: no particular reason. You’ve got to love the simplicity of Gump’s thinking. He wasn’t running to lose weight, or for his health. If he were, his momma – who was wise beyond her years - would probably have put him right. Running is bad for your health and crap for weight loss. 

“…so I ran to the end of the road.”

It seems that just thinking about losing weight flips a switch in peoples’ heads that gives them the overwhelming urge to run. Otherwise intelligent people start stumbling around the streets in shell suits and tight T-shirts, but all they get for their trouble is injuries and a potbelly. 

“And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd run to the end of town.”

The Oxford Dictionary defines health as “the state of being free from illness or injury”. Does that sound like any runner you know? Does it? Really?

If you run, eventually you will get injured. Tapping a keyboard can give you repetitive strain injury, imagine how much damage you can do to your bones and joints by repeatedly striking the pavement with several times your bodyweight.  

And please don’t be fooled into thinking that running shoes will save you. Running shoes are like the filter on a cigarette: they only reduce some of bad things – in this case impact forces - but not all of them. The big difference here is that cigarettes have a government health warning on them. Maybe it’s time the government put a warning on running shoes?

Warning: running can seriously damage your health. 

“And when I got there, I thought maybe I'd just run across Greenbow County.”

When the little running switch in your head flips on, wellbeing is relegated to the dark recesses of your brain and “endorphin rush” and “enjoyable scenery” suddenly become your life’s purpose. 

People tell me running helps take their mind off of their worries. Now, I fully understand the need to get away from the daily grind, but you can do this without guilt, injury, persistent colds, chest infections, comedy shorts, or expensive running shoes. 

While we’re on the subject, there’s something I simply must get off my chest. Many fat people say they are too intimidated to use a gym - which I can understand to some degree. However, they don’t seem to mind mincing around the street in tight shorts and a headband looking like an extra from Shallow Hal. Now what’s THAT all about?

“And I figured, since I run this far, maybe I'd just run across the great state of Alabama. And that's what I did. I ran clear across Alabama. For no particular reason I just kept on going.”

And don’t tell me running is a fantastic calorie-burner because it ain’t. 

The average marathon runner burns about 2800 calories. Now, 2800 might sound like a big number (and it is a big number if you place a “£” in front of it - well, it is to me), but when you consider a pound of fat packs a whopping 3500 calories things become a little clearer. It turns out that our marathon runner slogged away for 26 miles on the energy in a paltry 13 ounces of fat. That’s 13 ounces, NOT 13 pounds.

What’s more, our runner would use 300 calories if he just sat and watched the marathon on TV instead of running it. So those 2800 calories are really 2500 and that paltry 13 ounces of fat just dropped to 11 ½ ounces. 

“I ran clear to the ocean. And when I got there, I figured, since I'd gone this far, I might as well turn around, just keep on going.”

You were designed to use energy efficiently; that’s how the human race survived. It’s also why you can run for half an hour on the calories in a jam donut. The same jam donut can keep your brain alive for 50 hours. Though, judging from the level of thought that many people seem capable of, I suspect that number is on the low side. I digress.

“When I got to another ocean, I figured, since I'd gone this far, I might as well just turn back, keep right on going.”

If you still consider running a viable exercise, let me ask you this: Do you feel compelled to run after eating a “treat” to “burn it off”? I have two words for you: guilt absolution. 

That’s the name for what you are doing when you try to absolve your feelings of guilt by running after eating a “forbidden” or “naughty” food.  

Does this sound healthy to you? 

Running will not make up for dietary indiscretions. What it will do, however, is reinforce indiscriminate eating. 

Many runners I know binge eat. Despite what they believe, there aren’t enough hours in the day to run off the amount calories in the chocolate, pizza, and beer they binge on. How do I know? Because they’re fat. 

Feeling guilty after eating, and compulsive exercise are unhealthy.

“I had run for 3 years, 2 months, 14 days, and 16 hours…

…I'm pretty tired... I think I'll go home now.”

That’s what I love about the producers of Forrest Gump: they keep it real. After running all that time, Forrest didn’t lose an ounce of fat. What’s that? He wasn’t injured, either? Don’t count on it. I’m waiting for the sequel where Forrest has double hip replacement surgery and tendonitis in his knees. 

“It happens.”