Short Term Effects Of Eating On Weight

Okay, if you saw the Biggest Loser last night, you may have noticed the way Jillian and Bob were going on about the contestants who gave in to the temptation the night before the weigh in.

Especially regarding the man from the Yellow team, who had enough calories left for the day that he didn't go over.

What was the big deal about it being the night before the weigh in? Wouldn't it have gained the same amount of weight no matter which day they did it?

And didn't the man from the yellow team stay under his calories for the day? Why the freak out?

I'm sure Jillian explained this, but the producers didn't show it because they wanted to have more time to show phone calls home.

But here's the deal:

What you eat affects your short-term weight fluctuation.

Here's an example:

Did you ever see that episode of Pee-Wee's Playhouse where the little bully puppet jumped up and down on Pee-Wee's hand, and made him put too much chocolate syrup into the Ice Cream soup? And Pee-Wee thought it was a crisis, until he realized he could just add more ice cream?

It's the same way with your blood.

If you eat too much sodium, that all goes into your blood stream. If your body just left it that way, it would make your blood too high in sodium. Even dangerously high in sodium.

But your body wouldn't allow that. It wants the blood to always have about the same degree of selinity. So it dilutes the blood, with water.

So the more sodium you eat, the more water your body retains. The more water your body retains, the more you weigh.

Same thing with carbs. Excessive carbohydrate intake causes the body to retain extra water to process the carbs. The cheesecake, the M & M's, the peanut butter cups--the contestant's bodies all had to retain extra water to process the simple carbs in the sugar in those foods than it would have if the contestants had eaten their normal meals, more balanced between complex carbs and protein.

This is part of why people lose so much the first week on the show. They're not losing all those pounds of fat. They're losing the fluids the body maintains in order to deal with their unhealthy lifestyles.

Keep this in mind if you're doing any kind of weight loss contest for work or something--as it starts getting close to the final weigh-in, stay away from simple carbs and cut back on the sodium.

Please, please, please, don't abandon the carbs altogether or starve yourself--that stuff is bad for you, and just makes long-term weight loss harder.

But know that the eating decisions you make today can affect your weight in more ways than just the fat it might put on you.

No Good News, And Some Thoughts On That

If I haven't been blogging a lot here, well, it's because things haven't gone well.

I've never really shaken the infamous New Year's Cold, and I've had a hard time putting myself in the right mindset to do this.

It's an interesting position to be in. I think I blogged before about the whole mind-over-matter thing.

It's a lie, of course. Mind-over-matter is really just you-against-yourself. Or in this case, me against myself. There's no mystical "matter" out there that my inner self is struggling to overcome. It's all just me. The part of me that wants to do something, the part of me that wants something else, the part of me that's afraid of something, the part of me that doesn't want to give something up.

I used to write fiction. Can you imagine a fictional character who circles problems as much as we do in real life? Nobody would respect him. A fictional story about a guy who starts out with goals like the ones I outline in this blog and, years later, is even heavier than he was when he started?

Not exactly Jack Bauer.

I love the jokes about the hyper-competent Jack Bauer. Here's one of my favorites:

Somebody once tried to tell Jack Bauer a knock-knock joke. Jack found out who was there, who he was working for, and where the bomb was.

We laugh, because on some level we understand that even though Jack's competence makes us love him, it also makes him a wee bit unbelievable. None of us are that are that capable. All of us screw up, second guess ourselves, second guess each other, and often spend way more time justifying why whatever we have decided to do is okay than we do trying to convince ourselves to do what would be great.

And it's crazy. The principles for happiness are simple. Eat fewer calories than you burn. Spend fewer dollars than you make. Do more for others than you ask them to do for you.

And even though we all know that, intellectually, there's still this part of us on some level that fights that, that doesn't really believe it, or that, if it believes it, believes that it will take long enough to manifest itself in reality that it wants to get in a few last kicks for before settling in for that long draught that will come before the harvest.

Farmers call this "Eating the seed corn."

And I've been doing it, on and off, for years.

I mean, if we want to extend the metaphor, there are times where I'm digging the seed corn up out of the dirt, just to get another handful.

But I think the "No Good News," in the title may be a little misleading.

Because today I did sit down with a counselor at a college and start going over the plans to get me finished with my degree.

This is not an easy thing for me to do.

I remember college. I remember working two jobs, one in the middle of the night, while I had classes at all hours of the day, including morning and evening classes, as well as volunteer hours at the campus TV station. I remember sleeping in snatched moments here and there, always having to set my alarm for a different time before I'd go to sleep.

The prospect of going back to school as a man in his 30s with a full time job and a family is downright terrifying to me.

But I'm going for it. Because ultimately, I can't just sit here, planting and digging up, planting and digging up, planting and digging up.

It's time to leave some stuff in the ground for a while.

Friends With Goals

Her Frogginess, who often graces this blog with her wisdom in the comments section, has started a year-long turnaround blog of her own.

And vlog.

There is also, to quote her categories, "Jibber-Jabber."

And all kinds of other cool stuff, because she's just cool.

Check out The Year Of The Frog.