At week twelve (technically it’s week 13) it seems that I might be at a critical point in my diet/exercise/metabolic health grand project and according to some it’s the point where many diets or enthusiasm for exercise tend to fail. Last week I had a bad one this week I admit and at the end of my long walk I was so beat up that I spent several hours on the sofa just drinking coffee and warming myself up : in a way that encapsulates a common failure mode of exercise – working hard for a while but then slobbing out. For me this week the near failure was a combination of stretching the elastic band of exercise a bit too hard, having a sore back from my squat routine and a pair of knees that are asking for new bearings.
With any luck my change in exercise routine got me over the hump although it was the first week out of the last three months when I didn’t finish the week saying Ten as I completed the last medium distance or long (for me) exercise walk. Instead, this week, I would have had to say something like 42 at the end of the week as I hadn’t completed my usual Ten medium distance (3000 steps) but at least 42 much shorter walks of 1500 steps or thereabouts.
In the past I threw myself into rapid weight loss diets and great exercise enthusiasms with the seemingly inevitable result that they failed at this point or some time before. One of the key differences though is that iv’e never tried to make long term changes to quite fundamental habits so iv’e always ended up reaching for the biscuit barrel when everything fails. The lesson that I never learned is that we do enthusiasm for only a short while, manage discipline and willpower for a bit longer but we often come up against our own hormonal drives such as the post sugar/post insulin crash hunger which makes us reach for the biscuit barrel all over again. When we do of course what we get is a short sugar/dopamine spike and round and round we go : the mixed message that our bodies and brains get being that our intentions and willpower are a lot weaker than our evolved hormonal drives.
To illustrate this I want to talk about an online discussion regarding weight, exercise and diet, between then MP Ann Widdecombe with TV presenter who knows and who cares. Widdecombe’s argument being that calories in equals calories out – essentially that all calories are equal. At the time it annoyed me because at that time Conservative MP’s always annoyed me and what it reminded me of was the strident Mrs Thatcher telling us why it was good to sell off council housing and even better for the former tenants to become proud house owners. That there was patently no plan about the future need for social housing hadn’t even been considered. If there’s an analogy to be made here it’s that I haven’t taken enough variables into consideration with my grand plan,
When it comes to the calories in vs calories idea and that all calories are the same idea then we know that not only is it not correct in any sense other than pure thermodyamics in a close system experiment but it isn’t the complete picture and has nothing to say about how human physiology deals with calories. One of the other diet ideas that often fails harks back to the famous Minnesota Study in which Ancel Keys studied the effects of drastically reduced diets featuring largely a complex carbs diet and using not exactly volunteers as trial subjects.
Although Ancel Keys was later discredited for cherry picking his data in later work he was almost on the cusp of making a major discovery about the natural failure of reduced diets based on mostly complex carbohydrates and severely restricting dietary fat and protein. His subjects experienced extreme hunger, food discomfort and even ended up stealing food from each other. One of the things that he wasn’t able to study at that time was the natural down regulation of the body that almost always occurs in near starvation/extreme dieting conditions. From memory nor did he evaluate the, now predictable, loss of muscle mass with any precision. Unfortunately, while nearly great, it was a failure in that he seemed to only see what he wanted to see and ignored what was right in front of him.
Keys never talked about, or researched, the more modern phenomenon of willful dieting and I believe that his later obsession with dietary fat being a major cause of heart disease discredits him entirely. Unfortunately the diet industry and media picked up on his obsession which is why we see food like products being advertised as low fat while not telling us that they have to be loaded with additional sugar to make them palatable. Anyway : that’s the subject of a future post so lets continue with digging the dirt on failure modes in diet and exercise.
Early failure is obvious, the clearest example being the failure of near all New Years resolutions : former US Navy SEAL team commander Jocko Willink says that they last an average of 13 days. I got past that one by being a couple of weeks in to my SMART plan by New Year – oh and I didn’t make one – which helped. Usual failure often happens early on in the new year when ego and ambition meet Mr Rain and Mrs Wind – yes, early attempts – certainly at outdoor running – make for an unpleasant experience when you’ve already done a day’s work. Later failures seem to come when the novelty wears off, little progress is being made such that enthusiasm and willpower fade when faced with the black hole gravity of sofa and TV.
Later fails are more like what the body does when it senses work overload coupled with inadequate food supply : you might think you’re doing well with your one long gym session per day except that when you get home you veg on the sofa, eat fast carbs and your brain tells you that everything is fine but all the time it’s downregulating such that it’s conserving as much energy and fat as it can. There are also several hormonal pathways at play and none of those can you apply sheer willpower to. In week 13 I thought that I might be at that point as going for a medium distance walk became a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and I was aching to get home and rest.
At the same time I came up against an entirely new (to me) potential failure : in brief I became overwhelmed by how much new information I had recently taken in but felt at a loss to know how to proceed. I have to remind everyone that I effectively have a brain injury and I can easily become exhausted – both physically and mentally – while at the same time having the kind of mind that can disappear down every rabbit hole in sight. My new personal failure mode is best described as me vs complexity although I have already dialed back my walking to several short sessions per day that don’t feel like exercise and concentrated more on giving myself more protein while taking away more of my former standard English diet. In the next (companion) post i’m going to explore the use of checklists to help me get past the complexity.
Best wishes Y’awl
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 