70 lbs. down. Now I can rant about obnoxious fitness fanatics.
Last edited Sun Sep 21, 2014, 08:34 AM - Edit history (4)
Everything I have to say now is just as valid (or invalid) as it would have been 70 pounds ago. Before I started seriously working on my weight this past April, however, much of what I have to say would be too easily dismissed as "making excuses" or "defeatism". I had been fit for a very long span of time once before too, however, and I would have said many of the same things back then as I will say now, but when I've tried to say these things during my out-of-shape years, somehow any experience from my past, when I'd been fit and trim for eight years, didn't count.
Hear me now and believe me later, fitness fanatics, your experience of fun and exhilaration in exercise is not universal. Just because you love to "feel the burn" doesn't mean everyone else will (if only they'd give it a chance!). Not everyone who runs gets a "runner's high". Not everyone gets a big thrill out of lifting ten more pounds than they could lift last month (at least not a thrill that it exceeds the pleasure of a pint of Ben & Jerry's). Not everyone will feel like an exercise session is "my special time for myself".
For some of us, exercise and a healthy diet means unpleasant work. Worth the effort, but work. Drudgery even. For me the rewards of diet and exercise are in the results, not, by far, in the process that gets me there.
I'm all for trying to psych yourself up for a big effort, and for a sensible, non-fanatical form of positive thinking. I'm not, however, for the magical quasi-religious version of positive thinking, where people speak as if they're going to bend reality to their will by blowing sunshine out their asses, by the sheer power of determination combined with gross oversimplifications crafted into unctuous motivational slogans.
For example: I personally have to translate "Find something you love to do!" into "Find something you can tolerate". It helps for me to have something I'd rather do even less than my exercise too, so that exercise becomes a break, relatively speaking, from that other thing that's even less appealing. I've run into fitness fanatics so certain that there's a FUN! FUN! exercise option for everyone that if you don't agree there's something fun you'd like to do, then you must (in their eyes) simply be looking for an excuse not to exercise, and you must be deliberately setting yourself up for failure.
The most tolerable exercise I've found so far is walking -- fairly brisk walking, often getting up around an average speed of 4 mph for as long as two hours and change. The trade-off here is that for a given span of time, walking doesn't burn as many calories as jogging or running or many other exercises focused on calorie burning, but at least walking is the closest thing I've found to a pleasurable form of exercise. Walking certainly has its very pleasurable moments, particularly on a nice, sunny day, but it's still more on the side of hard work when you're putting up with bad weather and putting in more than 120 miles per month.
I managed 112 miles of walking in December before the weather got too bad for doing much walking in my favorite park. I've since done a little snowshoeing, but now most of my exercise is on indoor equipment, with a much lower pleasure/drudgery ratio there. I have to rely on the trick of exercise being a way of getting out of doing something I like doing even less, which is where having a gym at work comes in handy. Using the sort-of-elliptical-rider-like-thing at work counts as a break when compared to sitting at my desk. I have an elliptical rider at home, but using it seldom feels like a "break" from relaxing at home, so it's harder to motivate myself to use that conveniently located equipment.
I've wondered how widely applicable the common advice of going to the gym (or doing other exercise) with a friend might be. While I can see how some people might get something out of making exercise more social, it certainly wouldn't help me much. I can hardly be alone in that. Given many people's busy schedules, trying to coordinate exercise time with someone else sounds like a recipe for failure, an opportunity for bad excuses to pop up when your friends aren't available.
Further, I imagine a lot of the people who need to get into shape later in their lives were people like me who weren't in great shape when they were younger, who don't have strong, positive associations with exercise and team sports. Maybe for some of the enthusiastic fitness fanatics out there they find their fitness activities to be a recapturing of joyful memories from their youth. Some of us, however, are trying to get in shape without being reminded of what it was like when we were picked last for teams in gym class.
Some fitness fanatics have an obnoxious, Republican-like "we built that!" sense of their own glorious self-made achievements, one that admits little to no room for luck and fortuitous circumstance.
While I think I have a lot to be proud of in what I've accomplished over the past 9 1/2 months, I'll gladly admit to having some great advantages that certainly aren't due to any particular special virtue of mine.
One of the biggest advantages I have is that I've got a lot more free time than many other people: I work about six miles from home, so I don't use up a lot of my day commuting. I have no children, so I'm not spending time playing taxi driver or sitting through soccer practice. I've got a good paying job that nevertheless seldom keeps me in the office late or follows me home after hours.
When you add in extra time for changing, showering, going to and from the gym on top of 45 minute workouts and two hour walks, I've easily been spending 8-12 hours per week on exercise. I certainly wouldn't blame others for having a hard time trying to make that much time in their lives for getting fit. In fact, it was going from a mostly work-at-home job to a commuting job where I spent 1.5-2.5 hours/day stuck in my car, depending on traffic, that killed my first eight years span of staying fit. Over the course of a year "fuck it, I'm tired!" slowly won out over my commitment to fitness. Even once I was working close to home again, it took years (until just last year, in fact) for me to finally get sick of the weight I'd put on and get started working out again.
Now that weather has reduced my walking time, I've got a great advantage in working at a job that provides free membership to a health club in the same building, and where my boss doesn't mind me taking afternoon workout breaks when my fairly flexible schedule permits.
One dieting advantage I have: I'm not a big fan of heavy helpings of sauces, sandwich spreads and salad dressings. It's no sacrifice at all for me to say "hold the mayo". There's 100 calories or more saved right there by doing something that makes a sandwich taste better to me. I like this dish at Friday's called "Cajun Shrimp and Chicken Pasta", but I ask for 1/4 of the sauce (as well as substituting multigrain pasta and adding extra red bell pepper), and I love it that way. Big puddles of sauce at the bottom of a dish of pasta frankly disgust me. I like just enough sauce to slightly moisten pasta, and that's it.
I cringe to see the amount of salad dressing that many other people drown their salads in. I've decided not to bother with low calories dressings because I can get by with 100 calories or so of bleu cheese on a big salad and be perfectly content.
Another dieting advantage: I seem to be someone who gets a bit of an appetite suppression effect out of exercise. It's not that I'm never resisting cravings, not by far, but I'm seldom racked by hunger pangs either. (Sorry, ladies, from what I've read men are much more likely to benefit from this suppression effect than women.)
I'm doing just fine losing weight without adopting any particularly special or strict diet. No puritanical elimination of this or that, no all-organic, no low-carb, no gluten-free. I'm not spending a lot of time trying to find "superfoods" or other foods with this or that purported fat-burning, immune-boosting effect. I'm simply eating less overall, cutting out a lot of desserts I used to indulge in (but not all of them!), eating more vegetables and a little more fruit, making more of the carbs I eat whole grain, eating lean meats and a little more seafood. I certainly am not freaking out over GMOs, diet soda, or artificial additives. While I think we should all be a bit careful and wary about what goes into our food supply, I certainly do not buy into the hair-on-fire "OMG!111!1!1! TEH CORPORATIONS R FEEDING US POISON!1!!1!" histrionic freak out that's popular on DU.
I used to do the low-fat diet thing, during the first long span of fitness in my life, but this time around I've decided not to worry so much about fat, so long as I favor healthier fats. Not only have I lost a lot of weight this way, but I've got my cholesterol down to 133, with good HDL levels and low triglycerides, all while suffering much less from hunger pangs than I did on the low-fat diet.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...and I think "enraged" is a good description of the way in made me feel most of the time. I don't know how I managed to put up with it for eight years (well, seven solid years and another spotty year before crapping out on it), because I definitely wasn't having any fun with it.
I'm looking forward to the spring when I can get back to mostly walking. For some reason, however, I don't resent the "ARC trainer" I use at the gym at work so much (it's kind of like an elliptical rider and a stair climber), possibly because I know I'm getting a break from my desk while I'm using it. 
...aren't serious calorie burners unless you have A LOT of time to put into them.
For those particular examples, I don't have any kids to play with, and I don't like gardening or dancing that much. I have a hard time imagining doing 500 calories worth of dancing everyday.
Given how sweaty I get doing 500 calories of other forms of exercise (I have serious hyperhidrosis -- I seldom see anyone at the gym as soaked in sweat as I am) I'd be spraying my sweat all over the dance floor if I went at it that hard. It wouldn't be pretty!
...which, since I'm not a big fan of exercise in general, is doing things that I can do while mostly being tuned out.
Unless I'm greatly mistaken, yoga would require a lot of concentration on form and technique (at least at first), and I'm afraid I'd likely lose patience and dedication before I got very far with it.
I can easily burn off several pounds in a weekend at a trance festival.
Dancing is the best!
Ride the Music!
Walking is easier on the joints than running, and partly because of that, I suspect there are more who keep it up later in life, when health is even more important, and the lack of youthful resilience makes its maintenance more of a challenge. It's good for your back. Personally, I love to walk. But even if for you it's just the most tolerable, that's better than not tolerable.
So keep on truckin'.
...that I must be doing it all wrong if I'd ever eat at a place like Friday's, and one person who mistook my OP as an attack on anyone who happens to enjoy doing exercise, I've been pretty happy with the responses.
The one person who fortunately won't ever see my OP is my right-wing fundy sister, who in no small part was, let us say, an inspiration for the OP.
Maybe, just maybe, DU has turned some kind of corner!
Take your inspiration where you find it, is my motto.
Sounds like the makings of a new diet book... The F.T.S. Diet..... With the diet book market being as big as it is and the amount of bad info and drivvle out there? Seriously, you have have you're introduction already written 
Nice to read someone's realistic assessment for once, as opposed to all the "bright-siding", "personal responsibility uber alles" nonsense we have to put up with so much in this culture.
I am one of those who actually enjoys exercise and will happily do an hour a day without much complaint, but dieting is always a horrible trial for me. And I am one of the severely hypothyroid unicorns/liars/excuse-makers out there (at least according to the weight Nazis on DU) - must have meds every day or I become extremely ill. So between that and my natural love of all things cake, losing weight is pretty brutally hard for me. Since age 25 (when I developed thyroid disease) I've mostly been one of the "fat fit" with good strength, cardio, BP, cholesterol, etc., but constantly too high on the scale. And I've never managed to love fat-free, no-sugar foods like everyone always claimed would happen if I just dieted enough. Every time I diet I just end up liking cake more than I did before, LOL!
The diet part seems to be the easier part for you. Too bad we can't combine our strengths to make weight loss easier for both of us - I'll exercise and you diet and we'll both get skinny. 
Anyway, congrats again, and thanks for sharing!
...is the relief of stopping.
At first I wasn't listening to anything at all. I can get very, very sweaty when I exercise, and in the past I'd found earphones or headphones irritating when I was hot and sweaty.
Growing boredom, however, inspired me to give a new pair of Apple EarPods a try. Those worked well for me, and what was really amazing is that I jumped from an average walking speed of around 3.2 mph up to 3.6. Music really helps me move.
I am thinking of giving audio books a try one of these days, however, or at least some good podcasts.
Nothing personal.
That is inspiring me to change into my gym clothes and go work out
...I've got a TV set up in that room to provide some welcome distraction. Quite often I'm watching Rachel Maddow.
The first elliptical rider we bought turned so creaky and squeaky after a few weeks of heavy use that I could barely hear the TV any more. I would have returned it for a refund if it hadn't been sitting around for two years before I started seriously using it. We had to upgrade to a more expensive model that's very quiet and has thankfully remained so.
And agree...most fitness fanatics are like jocks that never outgrew the high school pecking order.
Congrats on the weight loss! I just dropped 10 pounds, and it is not easy in the least. I'll be pulling for you!
I hadn't weighed myself in a while, and when I got on that new scale I was shocked by what I saw: 270 lbs.
As it turns out, the scale needed to be calibrated. After that, however, it still said 263, which was bad enough. I think the 270, however, even if it was a false reading, added a little extra shock value to help get me going.
I'm six feet tall, with a broad-shouldered build, and weight tends to distribute itself fairly evenly around my body, so up to a point I can get away with packing on the pounds without the end result looking too bad. That's sort of a blessing and a curse, since it takes a bit of gain before I look too fat, but twice now in my life that temporary illusion has lulled me into letting things get a bit out of hand before I took action.
The new scale was important in another way: Our previous scale was flaky enough that you could stand on it, get one weight, get off, get back on, and then get another weight that was typically 2-3 lbs different, even as much as 5 lbs different. That made it hard to notice anything but really big changes in weight. The new scale was a lot more consistent, and being able to track my progress day to day really has helped me.
I know some people don't like using scales at all, others say to only weigh once per week, but for me tracking daily progress has been a very useful motivational and strategic tool.
Even without the new scale, however, I think I was on the edge of finally get my act together again. I was starting to get where my knees were bothering me a lot, and I found myself wanting to lean on furniture and push off in order to stand up, or lean on furniture to lower myself down more carefully. That was making me feel way too old too soon!
...but I was younger then too, so I'm figuring when I reach my target weight (about another 10 pounds) I'll be able to ease up some, but perhaps not quite as much as before.
Or work out just as hard, and eat a little more.
...for coming along to play the snooty fanatic to good illustrative effect.
...(and perhaps, rarely, nothing but amusement) at that post.
There are some posters, however, for whom it's standard operating procedure in nearly every posted disagreement to theatrically demonstrate, "Hah! Observe how very amused I am at your foolishness, which I am so far above!"
Particularly obnoxious versions of that kind of poster use this a lot: 
It's a easy way for them to avoid having to make their own case and defend their own positions.
Thank you again for your contributions to this thread.
One should expect a little bluster and exaggeration for theatrical effect when someone introduces a post as a rant by their own admission.
Further, besides not calling all fitness fanatics obnoxious, just referring to those who are obnoxious as such, I also never said that all people with an interest in fitness are fanatics about it, just in case the use of the word "fanatic" itself is also bothering you.
On the other hand, if you read the OP in such a way that the kind of person who would sneer condescendingly at the mention of another person eating at Friday's might take offense at my words, then please, point out the particular words that have this dire effect so that I can go back and edit my post... to put those words in a bold font for emphasis.
now i'm off to do my five sets of five hundred pound squats.
cute kitty!
I have saved one pair of 40" waist jeans, however, to do an "after" picture. I'm down to 32" now, so those old jeans aren't "comfortable" anymore, they're tent-like.
I'm fairly confident of my ability to maintain since I'd managed one stretch of nearly eight years once before, and this time around, even though I'm still not a rah-rah enthusiast, I find the walking I'm doing a lot more tolerable (and even occasionally enjoyable) than the grudgingly used stationary bike that I somehow managed to stick with all those years.
there IS hope for me. 
...I had joined years ago. I was doing a lot of walking and some working out on my elliptical rider at home before that, but then decided it was time to add a little weight training.
High school (and junior high) gym classes are a pretty bad memory for me too, more humiliation than outright bullying. That makes gyms and locker rooms less than my favorite places, but I don't think it was as traumatic for me as you've unfortunately experienced.
I sweat so much that I've got to wear different clothing for exercise most of the time, although that usually just means gym shorts and a T-shirt, so it's not terribly specialized gear.
Perhaps this is a bit shallow of me, but I have to admit that I find it easier to go to the gym now that, even though I'm a good way away from being a jock, I am generally on the fitter side of the people I run into there.
i hope it didn't seem that way. i admit i'd be more disciplined about my practice if there was a studio and instructor in my area that i liked the way i did my first martial arts instructor (tae kwon do). for some reason those locker rooms smell different to me. maybe because i stopped getting bullied only after i started practicing. being a weakling teenage boy is stoopid. you have do stoopid things to keep from going down the tubes. no wonder our society is so gender-warped.
…during "Phys Ed" class, where our lack of physical ability was put on display for everyone.
I have never had a membership in a gym, and it is highly unlikely that I ever will,
unless the gym installs a dance floor and a sound system.
This is my gym
and this
...here's a picture to show where I am at in this process. Sorry for the goofy expression on my face. I can't help it when I know someone's taking a picture of me.
I'd like to think this isn't too shabby for having just turned 50 a few months ago.
...because I think if the shock of getting on that new scale hadn't done it for me, my knees going wonky were going to push me over the edge soon anyway.
When I got to the 50 lbs. down mark, I went into a sporting goods store and picked up two 25-lb. weights, just to get the sensation of carrying the same weight I'd finally lost. I was amazed at the extra pressure I felt on my knees and the soles of my feet, and it made me very happy to know I was then relieving myself of all that extra stress on my joints.
This past week I tried the same thing at the gym at work with two 35-lb. weights, and that was even more... well, both gratifying and terrifying at the same time. 
It's really hard for me to lose weight. Eating is a form of comfort for me. I'm sick of people who tell me that exercise will make me feel better because it DOES NOT.
People like you give me hope. Thank you for your post.
it seems to be working!
Stevia is another name for the stuff, I believe.
...so to speak.
I can understand that there could be an important biological difference between getting sudden blood sugar spikes vs. having a slower release (the glycemic index thing), but if it's healthy to eat a bit of fruit and other "natural" sources of sugar, I think it's a bit extreme to treat added or refined sugar as if it's this totally different beast, like it's a contaminant or a poison in practically any quantity.
This comment is aside from what was said in another response -- you can certainly get fat-free milk that doesn't have added sugar. Not true, of course, of many other low-fat and fat-free products.
from someone whose raison d'être basially *is* adding extra weight to the barbell, "feeling the burn" and stuff like that. Pure cardio still is, and will probably always remain, "work" for me, though, something I will never enjoy but have to put myself through
...because that way it's easier for you to understand what it must be like for people who can't find much pleasure in any of it.
Of course, it would be great if you and I and everyone else could enjoy all of it instead.
Two of my best friends are actually marathon runners.
One even travels all over the US and Europe regularly just to run.
I think she's totally nuts. If only she'd be normal like me, and learn to appreciate the pump after a drop set in the bench press, or the joy of a PR in the dead lift.
People are weird, aren't they?
...in some enthusiasts.
...knowing that it's mostly to bridge the gap until the weather gets better. I did manage to get in 16.5 miles over the weekend -- a bit cold out there, but still a nice change to be outside again, and I didn't have to deal with too much slippery ice on the trails.
...I wonder how many calories I could burn by fracking?
Essentially I have found my diet is the biggest contributor. Even now I am still shocked at some of the calories I am blindly eating... It says 140 calories, but there were supposedly 3.5 servings here in this little bag, so that's really 490 calories. I thought we were supposed to have serving sizes that made sense on these labels? No way am I going to sit down with a bag of gummy bears and eat only 28.5% of the bag each sitting. (Gummy bears are the final sugary thing I have yet to give up. I really need to find another snack.)
I walk at least 45 minutes a day at about 4mph which is enough to get my heart pumping a bit (up hills) but my legs haven't burned doing this in years. It's probably time to transition to jogging but I haven't made that leap yet. I do find walking enjoyable, though it took a while for it to get to this point with routes that I find interesting. (It didn't help when I was very fat and people driving by cruelly yelled insults at me while I was trying to exercise. I live in a college neighborhood.) Winter doesn't make it easy but luckily the past couple of years ice has been at a minimum. I have figured out how to plan routes accommodating the wind, which has been the biggest problem recently. I hate the idea of a gym and exercising around a bunch of fit strangers, so I would like to avoid that.
So bottom line is that cholesterol and blood pressure are normal without drugs, I feel good, and some women actually check me out now.
I'd say it's been about even between diet and exercise for what's been important for me.
I had a few good eating habits to build on (I tried to make sure I ate some fresh veggies most of the time, I kept the sauces and fatty spreads to a minimum), but still treated myself to too many deserts and snacks and fried foods. Improving my diet alone would have gotten me going, but not nearly as fast as with all of the exercise I've done at the same time.
For the first 50 lbs. I lost, which I lost at a fairly steady 2 lbs/week, I'd say nearly half was directly attributable to calories burned during exercise -- I've been burning 3500-4000 calories/week. And I've been fortunate to get some appetite suppression effect out of exercise too, so it's been less of a struggle to reduce the amount I eat.
A lot of my diet control comes from avoiding situations that require control -- like now I only rarely go to my favorite Mexican restaurant, something that used to be a weekly event, because it's waaaay too easy to inhale many, many tasty, fresh hot tortilla chips that are provided endlessly for free. I've decided I'd rather just splurge a bit on rare occasion than go there more often, but while torturing myself by trying to stop at tiny servings of chips.
I've mixed in little spurts of jogging with my walking at times, but as long as I'm still losing weight (or holding at my goal, in another 10 lbs) I'm not planning to say to myself, "Hey, this walking is too easy now. That must mean I've got to push myself until I'm struggling again!".
If easy does the job, I'll settle for easy.
Response to Silent3 (Original post)
