Low Cholesterol + Junk Food = Weight Gain

          

          Taking advantage of my lower cholesterol level due to taking generic Lipitor, I went to Vons grocery store to buy ice cream which was on sale. Not merely a sale but the container had exactly ½ gallon instead of the downsized 1 ½ quarts which is the norm nowadays. I don’t remember the last time I bought ice cream, but I know it’s been years. With the ice cream, I became a little bit more adventurous with my diet which meant that I started eating food that I used to eat before my cholesterol level started going up. For three days I ate a couple of hamburgers, ham and cheese sandwiches for two nights at work, and half gallon of ice cream (a coffee flavored concoction with caramel bits, YUM!). That's not even counting halloween candy. Well,  in just those few days of a fare of unhealthy foods, I gained weight. I don't know how all that eating has affected my cholesterol level but I'm supposed to have it checked a week after Thanksgiving.

 That just shows you that even if cholesterol level is normal or low, you still have to be mindful of what you eat because the calories can still make you gain weight. To add to that, it's the type of calories that will do it and in this case, fat calories from the burger, ham, and ice cream. The weight gain is a risk factor in itself so regardless of cholesterol level, I still have to eat healthy foods, especially that I am no longer able to run and can't rely on it to burn off the extra calories.

                So I ate badly for three days and gained about three pounds which I tried to work off with exercise. I had to add extra minutes to my workouts to try to burn off the weight gain but that didn't work out too well. Even an intense one hour session of a spinning workout barely made a dent. In my delusion, I tried to justify the weight gain as muscular weight due to a more consistent routine of weight training in recent weeks. Um, yeah, right!

 Then I did two days of sensible eating and got my weight back in control. It all boils down to portion control, not going overboard with the calorie intake, and choosing good calories instead of junk ones. Mind you, this is just an experiment of one and I'm not trying to be preachy here since all I've said has been researched and advised time and again. The most important thing about losing or maintaining weight is eating sensibly and using exercise as a supplement. A healthy diet counts more in keeping weight down than making it up by exercising excessively just to compensate for eating badly.

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Reverting To Old Habits

I've been holding off posting this for more than a month now because there were other things going on, but here's my take and inquiry into losing and regaining weight after crash dieting.

Last year, some of the day shift nurses had a competition on who can lose the most weight within a certain amount of time, like the TV show The Biggest Loser except without nutritionists and personal trainers. The contestants contributed money in a pot and whoever lost the most weight would claim the winnings. The nurse who won the contest lost more than 40 pounds mostly by dieting. I never heard this nurse mention anything about exercise. As an outside observer, I noticed that he/she kept the weight off for many months. However, recently, it seems like he/she has been regaining some of the lost weight. During the competition, this nurse followed a low calorie diet fastidiously and was able to do so for several months after winning, but recently, it appears that she has reverted to her former pre-competition eating habits, like eating goodies that people bring in to work which she didn’t partake of during and immediately after the contest. This made me wonder if majority of people who initially succeeded in losing weight eventually regained it or even added more. I’m pretty sure there has been research done about that already but I’m just not up to looking it up at the moment. This also reminds me of one of the actresses who played a nurse on the TV show ER. She had gastric bypass surgery and lost a lot of weight. I stopped watching ER for a couple of years and one time when I happened to glance at the show in its last year, the actress had regained a lot of weight. Look at Randy Jackson, one of the judges on American Idol. He had a similar procedure, lost some weight, but he doesn’t look so different now than he did before he had the surgery. Another nurse went on a strict diet where she can eat only certain kinds of food at a particular time of the day. She initially lost weight but now I noticed that the puffiness in her cheeks is back. I’ve observed her eating between her supposedly strictly scheduled meal times. This leads me to believe that people can initially succeed in losing weight through crash diets and surgery, but they cannot get away from their previous eating behaviors for too long, and thus gain some if not most of the weight back. While I have never been overweight in my life, please believe me when I say that staying the way I am physically takes a lot of hard work. The discipline to keep it up is tough but doable, however it takes tenacity and a lifestyle change. I’m guessing that people who eventually backslid to their bad habits discounted exercise as an important factor in maintaining what they achieved through dieting and surgery. But that’s just my opinion and I could be wrong. I’m not a calorie counter but in the end, it all boils down to that, whether one likes it or not.

It’s hard to crash diet for a couple of months, but it’s even harder to maintain the lost weight afterwards. All I’m ultimately saying is that keeping weight down to an acceptable level (whatever level that might be to you) is very hard work and a matter of changing long-programmed behaviors in your brain. Is it just normal human behavior that makes us revert to bad habits? I am probably as guilty of that as the lapsed dieters because I tend to return to my injurious running habits after trying to retool my stride. We could all do better. This is not to bash those who have tried and failed but a matter of questioning why it happens. And then there are people who are happy and content with what they have physically, and if they are healthy to boot, then who am I to question them?

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Has Not Running Made Me Gain Weight?

As a (former) runner, I relied too much on running to keep my weight in check. I’m sure other participants of whatever activities they enjoy do the same thing. Thus my biggest worry about having to stop running more than three weeks ago now, is the inevitable weight gain from the decrease of calorie burning activity.

But first, how much do I miss running? I miss running alone, I miss running with friends, and I miss running with the AREC club. However, in the three weeks since my last run I’m surprised that I haven’t craved it as much as I thought I might. Maybe, because my brain already knows that since I don’t have to run tomorrow or the next day, it has sort of adjusted to the idea. Or perhaps because my dreaded weight gain if I stopped running has not materialized. Instead, I’ve been surprisingly doing very well in controlling it. Maybe because I no longer have a good excuse to overeat thinking that I can run off the calories tomorrow anyway. To a certain point, it also seems like my stomach has contracted to accommodate lesser food because I feel fuller more quickly than before. In the past few years I have also accumulated some exercise machines to use as cross training tools for running. Using these machines have now become my main workouts.

From past experiences when I had to stop running every day, then had to stop for as much as two months due to injury, I have always gained weight because my food intake never changed. One reason being, when I used my exercise machines, I only did so in one constant pace. In the past two or three years, I discovered that when I increase the intensity of the workouts, I could come close to the calorie burn equivalent to running. Nowadays, I do mainly interval workouts on the elliptical machine, stationary recumbent bike, and stationary upright bike. This has helped me maintain my weight in recent weeks since I was forced to stop running (it’s not because I’m sweating more due to this heat wave, is it?). I am hoping that my new sport of cycling can become an adequate substitute to running as an outdoor activity. Although I’m not getting the runner’s high that I’m used to, I’m quite content with the amount of discipline I have managed to have so far. Not only am I a running addict, I’m also an exercise addict. Here’s looking forward to keeping it up!

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