The Fad Diet
Haha! You thought I wouldn’t post again for like 3 years, didn’t you? You were wrong! Although to be honest I think the odds on two posts in one week on this blog were 75:1 when I checked with my bookie yesterday afternoon (his name is Hmayek, he is from Armenia, he loves taking NBA bets, and you really really REALLY do not want to get to know him or his friends if there is any way you can possibly avoid it).
This will be the first post in the extremely long and unpredictable series tentatively entitled “How Matt Hearn Became Marginally Less Fat And A Little Bit More Muscular (But Let’s Be Real, It’s An Ongoing Process And Hearn Is Still Pushing Two-Fitty)”. It starts thusly:
In late September of last year, after a summer of trying to keep the fat at bay by running incessantly in my Vibram Five Fingers but still eating whatever I wanted, I was somewhere around 260 pounds, and my feet and shins were essentially destroyed by running in un-cushioned shoes. I had to completely stop running and wait for my feet to heal up, occasionally getting out on my bike a little but mostly sitting on my butt eating 4000 calories a day and wondering why I had so much trouble getting back to my fighting weight.
Then my good buddy Brian Smith sent me a link to the TNT Diet book, produced by Men’s Health. I flipped through the sample sections and said “Wow, this makes sense.” The book, among its other qualities, alerted me to fact that losing weight was a grand idea, but dudes like Daniel Craig aren’t just skinny, but muscular.
Duh.
I immediately grabbed a copy of the book off Amazon (for about $5, which I guess isn’t a very good sign). The TNT “Diet” is essentially a low-carb one, although it adds in a bunch of stuff about carb timing and insulin and stuff that was largely meaningless to me because unless you’re within about 15 pounds of your ideal weight you should be doing “Plan A,” which is: eat from this approved list of foods that don’t contain carbs. I’ve had great success on low-carb diets in the past (I dropped about 40 pounds in 2004 doing one), so I said let’s knock this out for a few months and see whatup.
The more important thing I learned in the TNT book was some basic muscle-building, however. Weightlifting, using a variety of techniques, to build muscle. The book says don’t even bother with cardio (although it mentions some High-Intensity stuff to do if you are insistent upon it). None of this was particularly revolutionary, I’d lifted weights a little before, but what I’d never done was focus on diet and exercise AT THE SAME TIME. Either I was running and lifting and going nuts but eating like a pig, and therefore seeing no fat loss, or I was eating well but doing no exercise so I would lose some fat (and muscle) and then watch it come roaring back as soon as I stopped “dieting.”
I specifically remember the date that I started the diet and exercise plan: October 4th. I remember this because my boy Josh got married on the 2nd, and the food we ate that weekend was unbelievable and rich. I probably gained 3 pounds just from red wine. That Monday morning, I weighed myself and the scale reported 265 (and cried out for a moment when I first stepped on it). Yeah, it was time to fix this.
The diet was a breeze, I’d low-carbed before. I loaded up on meat and cheese, avoided bread and potatoes, and dropped 5-6 pounds in a week, the usual water loss. The workouts were fun and interesting, with the exception of the “Dynamic Warmup,” which I did religiously, and which consists of jumping jacks, arm circles, lunges, various other calisthenics, finishing up with something called “groiners” which are about as enjoyable as they sound. The first workout contained “static lunges,” “incline dumbbell bench presses,” “hip extensions,” “seated rows to neck,” and finished up with the “prone cobra,” in which you lie on your belly and left your head and feet off the floor for 60 seconds, tightening the back muscles. The workouts switch up fairly frequently to keep you from getting bored, with “goblet squats” and “planks” and things, and the rep and set counts change as well as you get stronger. I was losing a little weight every week, mostly enjoying the routines, and hoping I’d be looking like Dwyane Wade by spring.
Then, while looking for more info on the diet and exercises, I stumbled across the Men’s Health Forums, and discovered a whole new world of exercise and diet advice, as well as some of the most outrageous douchebags ever to operate a computer, which is where the story will continue next time.
Hey dude, love the health kick. Being that my professional world revolves around cholesterol and cardiovascular disease I’ve been exposed to numerous talks and studies from big wig scientists and Harvard types on diet, exercise and weight loss. Interestingly enough the only thing that is consistent in the scientific literature is that weight loss is a simple energy homeostatsis concept. Calories in, calories out. One of the main flaws in aggressive low carb diets is that they are hard to adopt as a stable lifestyle change. Great for 6 months, not so great for 6 years. But since people love fad diets, they sell a lot of books. So the suggestion I have is to think long term, find something that challenges you but isn’t crazy and you’ll slowly loose weight but won’t gain it back.
Also, the studies consistently show that exercise alone won’t do much for weight loss due to energy compensation (eating more than usual after a workout) and energy conservation (plopping on the couch for hours after a strenuous workout). Even if there isn’t weight loss though, your cardiovascular health, including blood pressure, cholesterol (through triglycerides) and glucose metabolism (staving off diabetes) greatly improves. It’s a shame that the lack of pounds falling off leaves people disenchanted and then they stop, despite having made great strides to live longer and healthier. Again, if you find exercise you actually enjoy, you will want to do it forever even if you aren’t getting weight loss from it.
Usually, I keep quiet when people talk about diet and exercise because people are incredibly passionate about the strategies they pick up online or in books (often times developed by people who don’t know much about the field despite their “new” theory), but you seemed open to it. You’re a nerdy infophile type like me. I just wonder if you’re still awake…
Oh, believe me, all that stuff comes up later in my lengthy recounting of what I’ve learned. 🙂 What I’ve come to believe about low-carb diets is that they do something to you, I’m not sure what, that causes you to start actually eating less. The first few weeks, your body responds to the change in diet the way it usually responds to any change in diet: water loss. And you see pounds drop off on the scale and get super excited and keep going, and what eventually takes over is you just don’t eat as much, even when you eat enough to feel full all the time.
The problem I’ve discovered is it stops working after a while, or maybe just my body no longer responds to it because of the number of separate times I’ve tried it. Nowadays the only thing I can do is simple caloric deficit, which I’ll come to later in the series.