Building on Past Experience

Building on Past Experience

Tuesday, August 02, 2011 

In the early stages of one of my earlier attempts at losing weight, I read somewhere that you can't change your whole life at once. The author recommended that you create one good routine, and stick with it until it becomes a habit. Once that routine is fixed, you try changing something else. If the first thing slips, abandon the second change and go back to solidifying the first one. 

I tried that, but I never got to the third good habit. What I did get was a habit of walking on my lunch hour at work. That habit stuck with me for a decade before I became inconsistent. 

 Later on, I noticed that walking on my lunch hour was enough to keep me from gaining weight and even lose weight very slowly; but it's no good losing 5 pounds in 10 months if I put 8 pounds back on in November and December. Walking wasn't enough, so I took up weight lifting. 

Weight lifting, starting from no knowledge, was an interesting challenge. Like most newbie lifters, I made mistakes. I trained too light, and then when I added enough weight I trained too often. I pulled a shoulder and didn't recognize what was happening soon enough, and had to take several months off. Came back to the weights a little smarter, and fell off the wagon a couple more times. 

In 2008, I totally fell off the fitness wagon. Life happened, in the form of significantly increased expenses and no increase in income. I had to learn budgeting, never having maintained a detailed personal budget before in my life. I got it done, and exceeded my initial budgeting goals. I also gained 16 pounds in 2008, and touched my all time high weight in late December. 

2009 was the year of the Rodent Diet. I lost 24 pounds, mostly in the second half of the year. What, you may ask, was the Rodent Diet? There were reports of mice in the building where I work. Efforts to control the mice (which I never saw) included changes to the rules. No food at the desk. All food brought in must be in sealed, hard containers (not just in baggies). All food must be consumed in the cafeteria, on the ground floor. It was really eye-opening how many times I wanted to walk out into the office and grab a piece of chocolate that wasn't there any more. 

After the rodent problem was solved, I tried to keep up the way of life that the Rodent Diet had enforced. That worked, for a while, and coincided with being on the wagon for fitness. In 2010 I achieved my lowest weight since 1991. Then I fell off the wagon, and gained about 10 pounds back over the course of a year from mid-2010 to mid-2011.

Enter SparkPeople. I could see that things weren't working. I knew I needed to eat less and exercise more, but I lacked motivation. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that I needed to track what I ate. I'd been avoiding doing that for two decades. So, let's see how long I can follow this web site and if I can learn to put it all together. 

What I've learned in the first three weeks is that success builds from past experiences. I know how to walk, I know how to ride a bike, I know how to lift weights, I know about overtraining. Add a pinch of motivation, and the fitness comes right back without needing very much attention. That's good, because weighing and measuring food is totally new to me and will need a LOT of attention.

So I learn about food tracking, and how much better food scales are now than the last time I looked twenty years ago. I learn about SparkPeople having a lot of nutrition data already there, and entering my own being easy, if a bit tedious. I learn about putting in what I really measured and letting the program calculate calories instead of having to measure to fit arbitrary serving sizes. A lot of the nuisance has gone away, handled by computing power and a large community entering nutrition data. 

The more interesting thing is how much food selection resembles envelope budgeting. There are only so many calories to work with, and I can spend them pretty much as I please; but some choices will be less satisfying than others. I can have a bagel and cream cheese, but it's expensive. Eggs remain a staple. Other former staples get squeezed out, and some new staples come into my kitchen. Most importantly, this follows naturally from the choices I make to get the most satisfying meals I can within the parameters of minimum and maximum calories, carbs, fat, and protein. 

I don't know whether I could have done this without the work I did in 2008 on budgets. If I could have done it, it would have taken longer to figure the food out. There were food surprises--choosing to drink less tea in order to get my water, simply not eating some of the "expensive" stuff because it never fits into the day very well, not missing some of my former treats that got squeezed out, and enjoying the treats that remain more for their being rare. These food surprises feel very much like the results of envelope budgeting, where I end up spending less on things I would have thought couldn't be cut, because there are only so many dollars and other things turned out to be more important to me. 

Yeah, I know. The budget metaphor isn't perfect, and it may not work for a lot of people. But it's working for me. It's part of building on my past efforts, even where those efforts weren't in the area of nutrition or fitness.