Foodist Page 17

  • Clean house

  • Choose activities, not passivities (dancing anyone?)

  • Wear a pedometer

  • Carry all the groceries at once

  • Visit coworkers instead of e-mailing

  • Take the long way

  • Have walking meetings

  Even if you already work out consistently, you should still strive to be less sedentary during the rest of your day. It shouldn’t be hard to do. I’ve even found a substantial meditative value in incorporating more physical activity. Several of my most intractable problems have been solved during my long walks with my dog, and I’ve been plowing through podcasts and audiobooks while running more errands on foot, which I swear makes me smarter.

  When you’re busy, it’s easy to make excuses about why extra effort is impossible or not worth it. But adding more movement to your regular daily activities is far and away the easiest way to lose weight and improve your health, so why not? It’s tempting to be lazy and just wait for the elevator with everyone else, even though you know the time it saves you is insignificant. But I hope I’ve convinced you that it’s worth resisting the urge to be sedentary and making an effort to move whenever possible. If you need extra motivation, try making it a game or competing with your friends using social pedometers that are now available.

  BE A 10,000-STEP MANIAC

  So what is the ideal amount of NEAT? And how do you know if you’re getting it? Exactly how noninactive (for lack of a better term) we need to be is a hotly debated topic in the scientific community, but you don’t need to sit around and increase your risk of dying while the experts make up their minds. Most people don’t get anywhere near the levels of activity that researchers are arguing over, so simply making a concerted effort to move more will make a big difference.

  One number that’s been thrown around a lot and that works well for most people is 10,000 steps a day. I’ve found that when I spend the day working at my computer and maybe running a few errands in the car, I clock around 3,000 steps. If you don’t move much and don’t have a steady gym habit, this is probably close to the number you’re getting as well. When I have a fairly sedentary day, but do manage to make it to the gym and squeeze in a little cardio and weight lifting, I’ll hit between 6,000 and 7,000 steps. To push myself up past the 10,000-step mark, I need to do something extra, like walk the dog to the park, walk to the gym, or hike to the grocery store (I live in a hilly neighborhood). In my current healthstyle I consistently hit between 10,000 and 12,000 steps per day, and I know that in this range maintaining what I consider my perfect weight is fairly easy. If I walk more than this, I can reliably lose weight. You can see why I’ve become something of a 10,000-step maniac.

  Interestingly, the days when I’ve hit my highest step counts are almost never gym days. Instead, they tend to be days when I’m running errands on foot downtown (I can easily hit 17,000 to 18,000 steps) or vacation days when I’m exploring a new city. I once walked over 26,000 steps in Tokyo,* and it was one of the best days of my life. Extra movement doesn’t need to be painful.

  If it isn’t feasible for you to spend an additional hour walking your dog each day, there are a few ways to squeeze in extra steps without drastically cutting down on your work time. Standing desks or, better yet, treadmill desks are becoming more and more popular in office settings, particularly as companies try to cut down on health-care costs and sick days. It’s definitely worth asking around the office to see if a new desk is feasible for your workspace—your coworkers might even think you’re a genius for coming up with the idea. If a standing desk is impossible, look into getting one of the small pedaling machines that can fit under any standard work desk. Though pedaling isn’t the same as walking, it will serve the same function and is far better than nothing, if it’s your only option. These only cost around $20.

  To make sure you consistently hit your 10,000-step goal, my number one recommendation is to buy and wear a pedometer. Since we know how easy it is to let your NEAT activities slip, tracking your step count will force you to pay attention and keep you honest. It’s amazing what a big difference such a small device can have on your healthstyle.*

  PUMPING IRON

  Obviously I’m a huge proponent of NEAT and 10,000 steps. They work and are enough to change the lives of most people. Yet there are still reasons to consider upping the ante and adding some cardiovascular exercise and strength training to your regimen. As I’ve mentioned, I make an effort to hit the gym four to six days a week on top of the NEAT activities I’ve built into my healthstyle. My workouts are precious to me, and I am not a happy camper if I go too many days without training.

  Moderate- to high-intensity cardio exercise is one of the best things you can do for your health. It lowers blood pressure, raises your healthy HDL (high-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, improves your metabolism, and generally makes you feel fantastic. Words can’t do justice to describe how good it feels to be able to climb the Eiffel Tower without breaking a sweat. Being in great cardiovascular shape, more than any other thing I do, makes me feel as though I’m in control of my body and have the endurance to get through anything. My typical workouts only include about thirty minutes a day on the treadmill, stationary bike, or elliptical machine, but it’s enough to make a tremendous impact on my quality of life.

  If cardio has the greatest impact on how I feel, strength training gets the trophy for improving how I look. Regardless of how much (or little) it tips the scale, weight lifting can transform the shape of your body for the better, and I highly recommend it for both men and women. The same body weight can look very different on a person depending on how muscle is distributed. Don’t think of strength training as adding bulk, but as improving shape and adding tone. Women in particular tend to fear the effects of weight lifting, but without testosterone it is difficult for a female to develop large bulging muscles like a male. Instead, strength training creates beautiful lines and curves on a woman’s body and helps you look better at every size. I promise, ladies, once you see the changes, you’ll never go back. For the dudes, strength training is equally beneficial, though I doubt you fellas need the kind of convincing the girls do. Besides the obvious perks of adding strength and improving physique, weight training also does wonders for your body’s resilience and gives you more wiggle room to enjoy your favorite foods.

  A final bonus of high-intensity exercises is their impact on energy levels. I was somewhat surprised to learn that vigorous exercise doesn’t lower your inclination toward NEAT, but raises it. In one study, scientists measured NEAT three days before and three days after overweight individuals performed either moderate- or high-intensity exercise. There was no measurable change in NEAT until the third day after exercise, when it increased 17 percent after moderate activity and 25 percent after intense activity.3 That’s impressive and shows there could be a synergistic effect of being more active.

  I’ve said that I spend thirty minutes doing cardio exercise whenever I’m at the gym. In addition, my workouts always include a brief (twenty- to thirty-minute) weight-lifting session. My workout partner* and I focus on two or three major muscle groups each day and try to get through the entire body (shoulders, chest, biceps, triceps, back, and legs) two times per week. We also do some kind of abdominal or core workout each day. That’s it.

  10 Tips for Starting and Sticking with Exercise

  1. Commit to consistency

  This is worth repeating. Make a commitment to sticking with your plan. If you find yourself not able to meet your goals, change them so they’re easier.

  2. Take baby steps

  I jogged around the block for years before I got lost one day, accidentally ran eight miles, and decided marathon training no longer seemed so ridiculous. Don’t expect to turn into Superman overnight. For now, just try to stop being Hedonismbot.

  3. Pick an exercise that’s fun

  Not all exercise happens in the gym. Like to climb rocks? Shoot hoops? Swing the bat? Start with
the fun stuff and work your way up.

  4. Bring a friend, make it competitive

  Having a workout partner is one of the most effective ways to be accountable and make your workout fun. Making it a competition is also great for motivation.

  5. Join a sports team

  Even better than one friend is a group of friends. Intramural sports teams are a fantastic way to squeeze in a few weekly workouts.

  6. Get into music, podcasts, and audiobooks

  If your schedule isn’t conducive to group activities, your iPod has still got your back. Put together an inspiring workout mix, download some of your favorite podcasts and audiobooks, and whistle while you work.

  7. Get a dog

  You know what takes a lot of energy? Puppies! If you can’t get motivated to exercise for yourself, at least do it for Fluffy.

  8. Recharge with caffeine

  Sometimes a long day can make an evening workout seem impossibly difficult. At times like these, caffeine is your friend. After about half an hour you’ll need to work out to burn off that extra energy.

  9. Get some nice workout clothes, shoes, and MP3 player

  New toys are fun. Sometimes it’s the little things that help the most.

  10. Reward yourself

  Doing something consistently is an accomplishment, even if your actual task seems small and insignificant. If you’ve been exercising regularly, don’t forget to pat yourself on the back for many jobs well done.

  If you aren’t familiar with the equipment in your gym, find a friend who can show you the ropes or consider hiring a trainer for one or two sessions to show you what to do. Personal trainers these days seem to prefer teaching complicated exercises that involve multiple muscle groups (not to mention strange equipment), so ask them if they can keep it simple for you, so you won’t have any trouble doing the exercises on your own. There are certainly benefits from the fancy exercises personal trainers love to teach, but I’ve found that too often people feel intimidated at the thought of doing these on their own and end up using this as an excuse to not work out as often. If you feel obligated to pay a trainer every time you work out or need to have special equipment to exercise properly, you’re creating unnecessary barriers that will likely sabotage your efforts. Good old-fashioned pulls and presses work just as well as the fancy stuff for looking and feeling great.

  WHAT IF I DON’T LIKE TO EXERCISE?

  You know who you are. As hard as you’ve tried, you’ve never liked going to the gym. Maybe you’ve even hired a personal trainer a few times, hoping the added expense and accountability would be enough motivation to turn you into a regular gym rat. But it didn’t work. Every time you’ve started an ambitious workout program with the goal of getting in shape, something—you’re not even sure what—has cut you short before you’ve reached your goal.

  Deep down, though, you know what the problem is: you don’t like working out. It’s hard, it’s uncomfortable, it’s sweaty, and the weight room has a weird smell. You don’t like the way you look in those stupid clothes, and who even has time for that sorta thing anyway? But still you wonder about those people who are in the gym all the time. What’s their secret? How do they stay motivated day after day and year after year? Are they a different species? Or is there something they know that you don’t?

  Few people on this earth were born with an innate love of the gym. But what generally separates people who like working out from those who don’t is simple: fitness. Working out sucks when you aren’t in shape. But the good news is that you don’t need to become a complete meathead to get to a place where exercise is no longer a pain. Just like learning to cook, once you reach a minimum proficiency level—in this case fitness level—exercise stops feeling bad and starts feeling good. And just like with cooking, the only way to get there is to just do it.*

  If you’re just starting a workout program, your goal shouldn’t be to get buff or lose weight. The first step is getting to a fitness level where you no longer hate to exercise. And for that all you need is consistency. When you first start your program, don’t force yourself to do anything too hard or unpleasant; just make sure that you stick with it and never quit. Before I began exercising, I had always hated running. So the first time I went jogging, I told myself I would just run until I got tired. I literally made it about four blocks and went home. After a week or two I was up to eight blocks. That was over ten years ago, and I’ve since completed three marathons. Running is no longer my go-to sport, but I’m now the fit person I’ve always wanted to be.

  There’s no reason to torture yourself at the gym. Once you’re in better shape, you will enjoy pushing yourself a little harder every now and then. But until you get there, just make yourself do something. Anything. Just do it regularly, and don’t make excuses.

  The key to being consistent is making your workout so convenient/easy/fun/awesome that not doing it just feels silly.

  NINE

  RECALIBRATION, TROUBLESHOOTING, AND MAINTENANCE

  “Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

  —YODA, STAR WARS

  “Success and failure. We think of them as opposites, but they’re really not. They’re companions—the hero and the sidekick.”

  —LAURENCE SHAMES, AMERICAN NOVELIST

  “Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.”

  —AL BERNSTEIN, AMERICAN SPORTSCASTER

  The ideas we’ve covered so far are enough to free most of us forever from the tyranny of dieting, never again to subject ourselves to long days of lemon juice and cayenne pepper. Naturally though, there are exceptions. If you’ve spent a decade or more eating a steady diet of processed foods, or if you’ve gone on and off enough weight-loss programs to make Kirstie Alley blush, you might find that getting back on track is a little tougher than I’ve made it sound up until this point.

  The problem is that what we’ve been eating for the past fifty years is worse than useless; it actually creates some serious metabolic issues that require special effort to overcome. Insulin resistance is a hallmark of the standard American diet (aptly abbreviated as SAD), and it can make weight loss especially difficult by compromising your normal metabolic responses to food. Though it is usually reversible, insulin resistance requires some special dietary adjustments until normal metabolic function is restored. Other problems like food sensitivities and intolerance can also contribute to stalled weight loss and more subtle health issues. Once you’ve resolved all your healthstyle hiccups and landed in your happy place, you’re ready to enter the final stage of becoming a foodist: lifetime weight maintenance.

  METABOLIC MELTDOWN

  Make no mistake about it, our Western diet is not normal. The USDA estimates that caloric intake increased 24.5 percent (about 530 calories per person per day) since 1950, with the vast majority of the extra food coming from processed grains (9.5 percent), processed oils (9.0 percent), and added sugar (4.7 percent). Though we’re eating more meat than ever, the percentage of fat consumed from meat fell from 33 percent in 1970 to 24 percent in 2000, demonstrating once again that saturated fat isn’t the problem.1

  To put these numbers in perspective, Americans are consuming on average 200 pounds of grain per person per year, up from only 155 pounds in 1950.* This is equivalent to 10 servings per day, even after adjusting for waste and other factors. The USDA also notes that these numbers are an underestimate, since they exclude wheat products not manufactured from flour, such as Shredded Wheat. The sugar situation is even worse. Consumption of sucrose (table sugar) and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) increased 39 percent from 1950 to 2000.2 The numbers get more disturbing if you look back two hundred years. According to researchers Stephan Guyenet and Jeremy Landen, who compiled data from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the USDA, the average American consumed only 6.3 pounds of sugar per year in 1822, compared to 107.7 pounds at our peak of sugar consumption in 1999.3 On his blog Whole Health Source, Guyenet reflects, “Wrap your brain around this: in
1822, we ate the amount of added sugar in one 12-ounce can of soda every five days, while today we eat that much sugar every seven hours.” He remarks, somewhat jokingly, that if we follow his sugar consumption graph to its logical conclusion we’ll have a diet of pure sugar by the year 2606.4

  The pre-Victorian era sugar consumption of 6.3 pounds per year would be considered neurotically low by today’s standards. In fact, if you announced it as your goal, someone might accuse you of having an eating disorder. It’s important to remember, though, that it isn’t our ancestors who were abnormal—it’s us. Virtually everyone is eating too much sugar. There are exceptions, but if you are not yet making a conscious effort to avoid restaurants and packaged foods, you are almost certainly eating more sugar than you’re aware of. Moreover, if you are currently overweight or experiencing metabolic dysfunction, sugar and processed grains are probably the reason.

  Our bodies are not designed to be fed this way. As we discussed in chapter 4, there’s a happy range in which most of us can consume one type of food in reasonable quantities without much problem. But when you start venturing out of that range (remember the bok choy lady), especially by orders of magnitude as we have with sugars and grains, our bodies lose the ability to deal with foods they could normally handle without issue. These problems manifest as metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes and obesity. They also disrupt our normal satiety signals, making us less sensitive to insulin, leptin, and ghrelin, hormones that tell us when we should and shouldn’t eat. This is all bad news and ultimately leads to a world of problems known collectively as “diseases of civilization,” which include metabolic syndrome, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer.

  These problems can be reversed up to a point by eating more vegetables and fewer processed foods, but if you’ve assaulted your body with flour and sugar for long enough, it can be difficult to get it to return to its normal food responses. In these cases, special steps may be necessary to return your metabolism to a state where it reacts normally to what you put in your body. At the extreme end of the spectrum this could mean using medications to help regulate your metabolic processes, as is the case with type 2 diabetes and prediabetes. But people with any level of metabolic disorder can start to right the ship by eating in a way that resensitizes their body to insulin.