My experience with dieting and exercise

post by Apprentice · 2012-10-31T23:36:28.873Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 6 comments

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Tomorrow I will start on a diet plan to bring my weight down. I'm aiming for a reduction by 5 kg in 6 weeks. Many plans like this fail but I am confident (let's say 80% confident) that this one will succeed. Why? Because I've done this several times before and succeeded. I seem to be reasonably good at dieting.

The obvious problem is that I start regaining weight once a diet is over, necessitating another diet down the line. Now, some people say that cycles of weight-gain and dieting are a horrible thing where each gaining period brings the weight higher than before and each dieting period is harder than before and makes you lose muscle and screw up your body. I haven't personally experienced this. I am 183 cm tall and during my adulthood, my body weight has fluctuated between 80 and 100 kg. I don't have extensive records but I was about 85-88 kg at age 18. At age 21 I was about 83 kg. On my wedding day (age 24) I was 100 kg but that was exceptional and fairly quickly went down again. A couple of years ago I was 80 kg. Now (age 32) I am 90 kg. You get the idea.

After a successful diet I think to myself: "Well, if I can lose weight with amount X of willpower and organizational skills I ought to be able to maintain my weight with amount Y where Y << X. Since I am capable of exerting X for weeks at a time, I should be capable of exerting Y indefinitely." Clearly, this fails to work for me and I think the reason is that Y << X just isn't true. The organizational effort to eat a maintenance diet is not substantially less than the effort to eat a weight-loss diet. And the willpower side of thing doesn't look too good either. It's a bit easier to resist tasty treats when I'm not really hungry - but it's not that much easier. Also, losing weight is a very motivating goal and I get to see positive results as things progress. Maintaining weight is a boring goal which I find it hard to get worked up about.

Now, upon reaching this conclusion I've thought things like: "Maybe effort X is necessary to maintain my weight. But I can't spend effort X on this stuff all the time! I'm not a health nut, I can't obsess over my body year in year out." Well, now I've decided that maybe I can bite this bullet and make it work for me. I'm going to try to keep the effort high on an ongoing basis. But maintaining weight is still a super-boring goal so I need to spice things up a bit. That's where exercise comes in.

My most efficient diets haven't incorporated any exercise. Doing workouts throws additional variables into the mix and from a simple weight-loss perspective the additional management effort doesn't seem worth it. But I do actually like exercise and the good thing about it is that it can provide me with fun and motivating body goals even when I'm not trying to lose weight. So, I think spending effort X on my body is going to be more sustainable in the long term if X involves a lot of exercise.

I started doing regular exercise in September, focusing on increasing my strength. I'm happy with the results so far. I'm measurably stronger than when I started and look slightly more muscular. Tomorrow I'll shift emphasis to weight loss while trying to maintain my modest strength gains. After the weight loss phase I'll work on something else - haven't decided what yet.

I'm all for self-improvement and optimization and I'd like my exercises to be effective. To that end, I've been trying to do some reading. Lots of people like Starting Strength and I did pick up some useful things from that book. But it happens to be the case that barbell exercises are not an option for me. My constraints are as follows: My wife and I have an 8 month old child and a 3 year old autistic child. They need a lot of attention. If one of the adults is away from home in the evening it puts a lot of strain on the other one. This makes a regular gym habit impractical for me. Going out for a run isn't much better.

So I do my workouts at home and it turns out that this works just fine. There are plenty of bodyweight exercises to do and I've got a couple of adjustable dumbbells to spice things up a bit. Books that have helped me include You Are Your Own Gym by Mark Lauren, Never Gymless by Ross Enamait and The Naked Warrior by Pavel Tsatsouline.

See also Minimum viable workout routine which is a strength-training program that means to minimize time and mental effort. What I mostly need to minimize is time away from home. Perhaps people differ substantially in the obstacles they need to remove to achieve their fitness goals.

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