Fat to Fit, Part III - Tools

In  Fat to Fit, Part I - Decision and  Fat to Fit, Part II - Commitment, I described what led me to decide to become healthy and the commitments I made to get there. I've had some help; here are three tools that have proven invaluable in implementing my decision. 

The first is LoseIt (LoseIt), an app on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac that I find essential. I record my input and output, what I eat and how I exercise. It tracks calories consumed and burned and progress toward my goals plus other metrics too numerous to mention here. Its great value is in holding me accountable and helping me stay motivated. There is a LoseIt community and I now have 42 friends from all over the country that I’ve never met. We’re in it together encouraging, praising, and gently pushing each other. We engage in various challenges to keep interest high and we exchange ideas and tips for both eating and exercise. We share our experience, strength, and hope. The psychological research, by the way, strongly demonstrates that it is easier to achieve individual goals in a supportive community. If you are serious about getting healthy and losing weight, I urge you to give LoseIt a try. It’s free but there is also a premium membership option that I find really helpful. 

The second tool is Fitbit (fitbit), a wireless device that tracks daily activity and health indicators. I use it to keep track of steps taken (my goal is 10,000 per day), miles walked, floors climbed, and calories burned. It’s quite small and fits on your belt or clothing. At night I wear it in a wristband to track my sleep - a perennial problem of mine - and it monitors time in bed, time asleep, and sleep efficiency. It’s a motivator as well, e.g., gently urging me on when I’m close to my daily goals. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve walked the dogs a little longer or parked a little farther away from the store to pick up some extra steps. Each time it’s not much but it all adds up. It costs $99 but you can get it for less on Amazon or eBay. It syncs with my computer and with LoseIt so things aren’t counted twice and I don’t have to do extra data entry.

I also use RunKeeper (RunKeeper), an app that records my outdoor exercise activity via GPS and also syncs with LoseIt and my computer. I have it on my iPhone and it tells me how long I’ve walked, distance, pace, and speed. It plays music from my iTunes library that I’ve selected. I’ve set goals for the number of miles I want to walk and the pace I’d like to keep. It reminds me when I haven’t walked for a few days and congratulates me on setting and achieving intermittent goals. Like LoseIt and Fitbit, it also generates reports about my activity that I can periodically review to see how I’m doing. I use it for walking but it can obviously be used for running and a host of other activities including skiing, cycling, swimming, and hiking. It’s free but there is also a premium membership option that I don’t use - yet. 

In Part IV I’ll discuss three obstacles I’ve faced in my journey. I'll conclude with Lessons Learned in Part V.

Fat to Fit, Part II - Commitment

In Fat to Fit, Part I, I described what led me to decide to get healthy. It's very much an ongoing journey. Here's what happened next.

In September, 2011, I decided to eat healthy. In October, 2011, I decided to make exercise a part of my daily life. The word decide is critical. It wasn't desire or necessity. I had wanted and needed to do these things for decades. Nothing changed until I made a decision.

People confuse desire with motivation, as in "You have to really, really want it".  The difference between desire and motivation is the difference between  "I want"  and I will". I  had really, really wanted and needed to eat right and exercise regularly for years. For the reasons discussed in Part I, I finally made the leap to "I will." The pain of not changing was now greater to me than the difficulty of changing.

A decision inherently includes a commitment to do whatever is required to implement that decision, easy or not, convenient or not, and, especially, comfortable or not. I made that commitment. Specifically, this included:

• Recording everything I ate and drank - and I mean everything - every day as I consumed it.
• Engaging in formal exercise at the gym five days per week. For me, this meant going to the gym before work, Monday through Friday, at 05:15 a.m.
• Finding ways to be more active every day.
• Thinking about what I was doing as a process that occurred one step, one bite, one meal, one day at a time. Seeing it as a way of life, not a diet which I knew from my history I would eventually abandon.
• Refusing, absofuckinglutely refusing to judge my day to day efforts, their results, or myself as either good or bad. Instead, I took responsibility for my choices as healthy or unhealthy with predictable consequences. If I didn't like the choices, I could make different ones since I had the power over what I did.
• Remembering to enjoy myself along the way by seeing it as what it actually was: an adventure, challenge, and opportunity for growth and learning.  
  
  

And that is exactly what I have done, to the best of my ability, for the last 15 months. 

In Part III, I'll describe the tools I've discovered that have really helped me achieve what, for me at least, is simply amazing. In Part IV, I'll  discuss the obstacles along the way. In Part V, I'll conclude by discussing what I've learned and what's next in my journey to health.

Fat to Fit, Part I - Decision

As the holiday food binges begin to show up on our scales, today is either a great or terrible day to talk about obesity, depending on your perspective. Mine is this: I was obese from the age of ten (maybe earlier) until very recently. Do the math and that turns out to be 55 years give or take. I did every diet known to humankind and lost hundreds of pounds over those five plus decades. Like most dieters I gained it all back and then some. Like most overweight people I suffered intensely over weight issues - and ate to alleviate my suffering.

By 2008 I was within shouting distance of 350 lbs and quite desperate. I underwent gastric bypass surgery and in nine months lost about 100 lbs, almost exactly the 70% of excess weight the surgery statistics predict.Over the next three years I gained a little and lost a little without much effort either way and by September, 2011 I had regained 15 pounds. I was no longer morbidly obese but I was still overweight. I was not particularly ill nor was I really healthy.

Within a two week period I had both a cancer and a cardiac scare, a daily double wake up call. Though both turned out to be false alarms, they did show me a future I wanted no part of, including being caught up in the jaws of the medical industrial machine. I made a decision that month that I believe has changed my life.

I did not decide to go on yet another diet. I did not decide to experiment with the sundry drugs or supplements touted from time to time as the cure for America's weight problems. I did not seek out a celebrity chef/fitness guru/diet expert/or life coach.

Instead, I decided to live healthy. I sought to change my life.

To do that I knew I needed to eat healthy and exercise - no magic answers and no pills. There were other things as well but those two were the core. Motivation is a decision plus a committment. I made the decision and committed to doing whatever it took to live healthy, whether I wanted to or not, whether I felt like it or not.

Since September, 2012 I've lost 56 pounds, dropped six inches from my waist and two from my neck, increased my endurance and strength tenfold, and have blood work that tells me everything is good. I am healthier than I've been since I was 10 years old. I've also bought and discarded several wardrobes and begun to (a little, anyway) enjoy clothes shopping. For the first time since I can remember, I like the way I look and I enjoy (though not always gracefully) the compliments I get.

And the journey isn't over. In Part II, I'll describe exactly what I did to achieve these results.

Yet another reason to make the decision and commitment to exercise in the new year!

Exercise Your Brain

Does Anybody Care When There Isn't A Shooting?

Yet another article documenting our failed mental healthcare system! It's interesting that the only time this seems to come up is after some horrible act perpetrated by someone who is or is presumed to be mentally ill. Will we ever care at any other time? Probably not.

Why? Lots of reasons.

Mental health doesn't have the cachet or constituency of other causes, e.g., breast cancer. The mentally ill don't vote. Prisons are seen as popular job creators in the public sector and increasingly as profit creators in the private sector. Mental health facilities and services are seen as drains on the taxpayer and are often first to be cut. The people who provide the bulk of mental health care at all levels - psychologists, social workers, and counselors  - and the services they provide - psychotherapy - are devalued in the mental health system. Name another profession that is paid less in real (not inflation adjusted) dollars than it was in the 1980's for the same or more work. The mental health system - like the rest of health care - is fully controlled by insurance and pharmaceutical industries totally uninterested in prevention or in any treatment - no matter how effective - other than proprietary drugs.

Combine all this with the failure of deinstitutionalization, primarily because it was not properly implemented or  funded, and you get what we have now - a system that simply does not work. Not for the severely mentally ill or their families. Not for those whose problems cause them great suffering even when not considered severe (most depression and anxiety, addiction.) Not for those who develop or experience worsened physical illnesses as a result of psychological stressors (chronic pain and physical disability, obesity, exacerbated morbidity inphysical illnesses.) Not for the citizen/taxpayer who ultimately pays for everything anyway. Not for society as a whole.

Failing Mental Health