Thank you for writing this. Improving the world's health, a gross at a time.
If one is inveterately lazy, as I am, the optimal form of exercise is rucking. Carrying a backpack for a couple of hours, up and down hills (or stairs, if your town is flat), three times a week. Maintains cardio fitness, core and back chain muscle condition, joint health, and balance. Start with ten percent of your body weight and work up to a quarter, more if you like. Water bottles are handy units of weight, especially if you use metric: a litre of water is a kilogramme. Rucking is strongly recommended by Peter Attia in "Outlive", amongst others.
I like tramping (NZ word; it's like hiking, but with much more mud, rougher tracks (trails), and steeper hills) so I get my rucking in bursts in the weekend.
On diet: in my youth, I one day told myself, "I'm not the kind of person who likes sweet things". Somehow that has mostly worked. A few years ago I had to add "or pasta".
I'm so lazy that I quit my desk job and now work a job that requires me to be standing up and doing moderate exercise eight hours a day. My step counter regularly records fifteen thousand steps or more, but I think it overcounts. If I were younger I would retrain as an electrician. Rucking as a job, with extra joint mobility exercises built in.
I read somewhere that men respond well to regular weighing, but women much less so. Social proof is more important for the fair ones, apparently. When weighing yourself remember to allow for recent intake and removal: half a litre of water and two cups of tea (my normal morning routine) is a kilogramme. And don't worry about single numbers; the trend is the thing. Don't start worrying about that extra kilogramme until it's been there for a month.
Finally, what really matters for health is fat around the viscera. This is most directly measured by waist to height ratio. Measure around your waist and divide that by your height. The healthy range is 0.4 to 0.5 (two fifths to one half, for devotees of old number systems). Works with all body plans, with amputees, and with all ages above infant, apparently.
"Statistical evidence supports that WHtR is a better predictor of cardiovascular, diabetes and stroke risk than the body mass index (BMI) because it accounts for the distribution of abdominal fat, which is known to increase the aforementioned risks.
"Abdominal fat affects organs like the heart, liver and kidneys more adversely in terms of cardiometabolic risk, than fat around the hips and bottom.
"In a comprehensive study by Lee et al. that revised 10 studies, BMI was the poorest discriminator for cardiovascular risk factors whilst the WHtR was the best discriminator for hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia in both sexes." - https://www.mdapp.co/waist-to-height-ratio-whtr-calculator-433/
Edit: I see that page has written "WHtR" where they mean "WtHR".
Yeah, now that you mention it, I'd seen a guy rucking years ago, but he did it in a military context with a specifically designed weight, and he was already young, fit, and trim. Lugging weight around in a sack, or on your back, is probably something ordinary people took for granted as part of their daily experience chopping wood and carrying water over millennia (or even tens of thousands of years of evolutionary time). Water bottles are probably a good idea too, although I have so many weights around I'd probably just toss a couple into the bottom of a bag and go.
I've also read about waist to height ratio; I just tried and got 0.47. You can probably tell that when I wrote this article I was mostly trying to be anecdotal rather than clinical - most people don't measure themselves that way. I'll also say that I'm used to noisy measures and don't mind them much; it's obvious that BMI can't be a perfect measure of health because muscle is more dense than fat, and muscle is healthy while fat (at least above a certain amount) is not, so you could be a bodybuilder and register as "overweight" by BMI. Most people are not bodybuilders, though, and I don't think even Cat Pause would have been confused into thinking "My BMI is high but it doesn't matter because bodybuilders also have a high BMI." (Then again sheesh, who knows)
I personally use an app called Cronometer to track my eating habits in order to get the appropriate intake of calories, carbs, proteins, and fats my body needs, especially because I lift weights. Ideally, this means having a high protein and high fat diet, though, because I love coffee and tea (natural hunger suppressants), sometimes I ingest about 900 calories some days when I'm supposed to be eating 1900!
Gen Z will have an app for it, yep! But I'd never heard coffee or tea were appetite suppressants before, but the headlines at Google Scholar seem to corroborate. Possibly that's why while I'm dieting I can get by with a very small breakfast and a cup of tea.
I’m one of your devoted gross of subscribers and I always read your blog with great interest. This is the first time in my life that I make a comment to a blog post and I suppose there are many others like me, for whom this problem has occupied a lot of life energy. It would be devastating for your blog to dwell to much on this topic, I agree.
I have read an uncountable number of books on the subject since 1968, when I was 16 years old. Less calories than the body needs to sustain it’s weight is what is necessary, they all told me, and provided recipes for for calorie-low fat-low food. It was tragic to follow these diets, always hungry and miserable. As with Weightwatchers (they have probably modernized their diets by now).
Then came the low carb awareness and changed the whole game set-up. Low carb works. New books in the book shelf. I don’t feel well on a very low carb diet in the long run though, so after a few initial days to tell the body it’s time to start burning the excess fat I add some more vegetables to get about 30-40 g of carb each day.
A low carb, high fat diet works on it’s own if you are a person with well regulated apetite and hunger feelings that are adequate. That’s not me. I have never been like that, always overeating.
I have come to realize that for me it’s impossible to keep my best weight without keeping track of my calorie balance.
But as you point out, counting calories really sucks. So I have made myself a simple but useful Excel workbook that makes it a lot easier. It was a lot of fun to make it and since it’s my own baby I love it. It takes some minutes each day to use it. This is why I only use it, when I’m not overly busy with my main interest, which is and always have been gardening. So when gardening starts taking all my time I put the excel sheet to rest for half a year and inevitably gain around 1 kg per month in spite of all the exercise I get in the garden. And when the garden goes to rest, the workbook has to be awakened. And enough exercise must also be incorporated. The Excel workbook accounts for that too. It’s quite accurate now, so that I can see just how the present day’s calorie balance have influenced my weight. This is important and takes away the guessing and wishful thinking, like ”Now it seems that I finally can eat anything I like, without adding weight”. There are plateaus both in gaining and loosing weight. Without exercise it’s virtually impossible to lose weight. A pedometer is a good device.
Cutting down a lot on carbohydrates is essential. Exercising is essential. And not overeating is essential. So eat enough at meals and eat low carb. Eat enough fat so that you can feel that ”almost full”-feeling.
And exercise. I need at least 9000 steps om my pedometer in order to be able to eat a reasonable amount of food and still lose weight.
Having such an engineering approach to the problem of losing weight is really not something you can show people that you want to regard you as a normal person. I have tried to give it to some people I know well, and who know me as an otherwise sound person, but none of them have been able to take it on, despite a desperate need to lose weight. And even they got a little suspiscious of me, seeing that I have such a trait that they couldn’t relate to... Since you seem to be a rather engineering minded person yourself I seems safe to tell you about it. To me it has been a real game changer.
There are a lot of similar solutions to buy at the Internet. They have never worked for me. It must be tailor made. I have used my Excel sheet for many years now. It’s built on the Swedish Food Councils big database and completed with the facts of other foodstuff that I like to eat, not included in their database.
To simplify life, I have a rather standardized manner of eating, with a couple of breakfasts, ten different lunch alternatives and a few evening meals. The main meal is lunch.
I have always had the ideal that eating should be instinctual and just work automatically. But I’m not that way and I suspect that most people overweight is not either. After I accepted that I have a handicap not being able to control this well and made my Excel solution, life has become much easier. And I have indeed, little by little, come to better understanding of what to eat and when I have eaten enough and when not to eat.
The Excel workbook consists of three sheets.
The recording sheet, where I record everything I eat. It has a simple LOOKUP function and yields the total amount of calories and macros of the day. It's easy to use.
The data sheet for the LOOKUP function
The result sheet, that gives peace in mind. Here I put the totals from the recording sheet and the reading of my pedometer and here I write every days morning weight. I totally agree with Cubicle Farmer that this is essential (for me). I also think, like him, that it is essential to have "sports-perspective" on the whole thing. It must be fun.
What a thoughtful comment! You're quite right that I'm familiar with spreadsheets (I made the second image in this post) and if I were to track my calories or weight, that's probably the way I'd handle it to easily get plots and trends. Have you tried fitting polynomial curves to your weight over time to see the seasonal changes, or analyzing the weekly changes in weight to see whether variation in calories or steps on your pedometer better predict weight loss?
For me personally I find that I *can* eat what I like in winter so long as what I like includes plenty of vegetables. The hardest times for weight gain for me are the humid continental summers and it's too warm to really push on exercise. I don't exactly live in Montpelier, but it's a good stand-in for the northern area of America's New England region, and this is what the climate there is like: https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/84156~25716/Comparison-of-the-Average-Weather-in-Stockholm-and-Montpelier
Autumn is lovely when it hasn't rained and the roads are dry enough to go running, spring and winter are cold enough to go out and exercise in the garage and winter will absolutely dump snow out of the sky by the bucketful. But I'm not much for swimming, which is the thing I'd have to do all the time if I wanted to get good exercise in the muggy summer heat!
Excel is really handy and I use it a lot, but I’m not very advanced. I use it for lists of plants in my extensive garden, lists of my according to some people too many belongings (packed in numbered banana boxes and easy to find by this system) and I have even used it to make drawings for various small building projects in lieu of a better design program.
I have found out, with the help of very simple formulas in Excel the ratio between exercise (in the form of number of steps) and the intake of food that keeps my weight constant. The calorie comsuption of each step on the pedometer I found out by walking known distances couning steps and maesuring time and using different info from the Internet on energy consumption for walking. And it seems I have got it right. This has resulted in a table (in another sheet in the same workbook) which makes it possible for me to know how much I must restrict food intake when I’m unable to get enough exercise. I have a couple of knees that are not always on my side, unfortunately. I used to do a lot of running in the beautiful forrest around here, but had to give it up long ago. Walking mostly works quite well, though. Swimming and cycling not.
In winter it’s rather dull here and a lot of time to indulge in dubious interests like diving into Excel and one’s own metabolism.
In summer, spring and autumn people in this country are much more social and this makes the input to the Excel sheet much more difficult. Eating is very much part of being social and I’m a very social creature. I try to guess the amounts I’ve eaten as well as the probable ingredients, but this is of course not enough satisfying to my scientific soul, so it soon ends up with parking the spreadsheet for it’s summer holiday. When the grey and dull winter arrives, everyone in this country seems to go into a collective mild depression (probably due to the lack of daylight) and sociability is not impressive. Then introspection can get it’s time again and keeping track of eating and exercising can be taken up as an interest, even though it takes some time to realize that the feasting days are over and the bleak winter reality has come to stay for a while. In the southern part of Sweden winter is just four months. Relaxing is also welcome after the many months of hard work. When Christmas approaches I have taken the spreadsheet to my heart again and I’m able to tackle the Christmas challenge in a constructive way.
Perhaps I should be flattered that you bother to talk to me at all when there are so many better things to do! I have long insisted that walking was an excellent way to exercise (long before I really had any business telling people what to do). It's just about my favorite way of exercising, so long as there is something to see, whether good architecture, or greenery, or a good sunset, or stars. Arcturus and Antares are my favorites, and while Antares I doubt is visible from your latitude, Arcturus is probably nearly circumpolar, and easy to find high in the sky right now, so long as the weather is good. I seldom bother to write about them, because there's little enough to say that can't be found on Wikipedia, YouTube, or apps that can help you find them, but I spend a lot of time looking at the sky.
I'll go out and find Arcturus. Not many people know the names of the stars. It's easy to impress, just by showing where the Polar star is. I used to walk in the late evening when I had a dog, but nightly walks are not to be recommended here nowadays, since the forest is now full of wild boars. They can be encountered also in broad daylight (I met three sows and countless piglets one afternoon), but when darkness falls they really step up.
Wow, that's more than I've had to deal with! I've encountered moose and deer at the side of the road, but they're herbivores and pretty placid most of the time.
Good luck spotting Arcturus! It won't be too easy lately as the moon is waxing and hangs in the sky nearby (not to mention the extremely short nights where you are). And who knows what the clouds will do for you. But it's the brightest star in the Northern hemisphere, a big red bear you'll find chasing the sunset for the next several months.
I don't think diet is easy for anyone. I've met people who claim "not to like food" but they are rare. I am much less picky than Apple Pie, I love everything. The world is conspiring against us, with a massive supply of tasty calorie rich food and drink that our ancestors would have marveled at. IMHO, an "instinctual" approach is unwise, our instincts evolved for an entirely different environment. As a 200 pound male I have it pretty easy actually, my base metabolic rate gives me more leeway with calories and I can just kind of wing it without counting calories (just bending my diet to be 30-40% towards eating a bit less and a bit better than it was before is sufficient). Keep up the good work!
I'll put this here for posterity, an N=1 success story for anyone it may help. I'm a 55 year old man, 6 foot 3. (190cm). I currently weigh 200lbs (98kg), so I'm right on that "happy boundary between normal and overweight". I've been as heavy as 230. My main activity is cycling, I can ride 100km in 5 hours (counting all stops) without undue discomfort. (I seemingly don't have much genetic potential for power or VO2 max, so even among local riding clubs I'm a bit slow. Oh well, I can do it.).
How did I lose 30 pounds and how do I keep it off?
1. Q: Is it diet, cardio, or weights? A: Yes. Some people swear that one or the other of those is most important. I don't know who is right because I do all of them.
2. I found activities I like and exercise most days (mostly cycling either outdoors or on the trainer, rucking, the occasional swim, and weights 2x per week with a Youtube video by Hasfit. I used to run but I developed foot problems so now I ruck with friends instead). That's something I do all the time and will do for the rest of my life. Sorry, if you have hobbies, exercise has to be one of them. We are made to be active.
3. Diet. You know what to do here. Eat less, eat better, drink less alcohol. (And I LOVE yummy high calorie foods and I LOVE alcohol - fun and delicious! ). Add more salads to your diet. Pick your spots to cheat a couple times per week and enjoy those things mindfully and in moderation. Get used to the idea that you can't have what you want whenever you want, but on Friday you can have a pint or two.
4. Weigh yourself every day and write it down. Do this every day for the rest of your life. If someone tells you not to do this, ignore them, they want you to fail. I find it maddening when people say "I lost weight but then I put it back on", like the extra 30 pounds was a mugger that jumped on them in an alley. FFS. I promise that if you weigh yourself every day, the weight gain will not "sneak up on you". If your habits start to slide a bit (it has happened to me a few times, nbd) you can see it happening, and you can do something about it before 5 pounds turns into 20.
5. Set a goal and be patient. Write the goal down in your calendar, literally, what you want to weigh every week until you reach the target. Aim for 1 pound per week, that's plenty. More than that and you risk losing lean mass. Nobody loses "30 pounds", they lose one pound in a week, and do it for 30 weeks in a row. Presto, you just lost 30 pounds.
5a. Yes, your weight fluctuates up and down a couple of pounds each day based on fluid retention, what you ate, what you um, evacuated, etc. Don't be disheartened by putting 2lbs on in a day because it will come right back off the next day. Look at 3 day or 7 day moving averages. Make a game of it: sportscaster voice: "can he get under 203? Can he do it! He's been so close. Is this the day? Yes he can!"
6. Being active and fit feels wonderful in daily life. Being able to carry groceries, help a friend move, go for a long walk in a new city without a second thought... priceless and totally worth it. Your clothes look a lot better on you when you're trim. They look better off you too.
7. This all depends on having your life together and having the emotional bandwidth and spare willpower to care about this. I've been lucky in that regard.
OK no, I'd say this is unwelcome work and effort if you're off of a diet. If you're not specifically trying to lose, I'd say weigh yourself every Sunday, and be ready to start restricting your calories if you hit your boundary. You're not going to get mugged for 10 pounds if you're weighed yourself every 7 days. In fact, if you even get mugged 2 pounds in 7 days, something is seriously weird; that's abnormal weight gain, even if you're 6'3"
YMMV, but I don't agree *at all* that this is "too much work and effort". It is the most important thing I recommend, and also the easiest. It literally takes 5 seconds every morning. Get up, yawn, scratch balls, take a leak, stand on digital scale, write number down in a notebook. You're done. I routinely "put on 2 pounds" in a single day, and then lose it the next day, due to fluid retention, what you ate, what you, um, evacuated, etc. A single number can be misleading, so the trend over a few days is what matters.
If the day to day fluctuation isn't important, why do I say weighing yourself every day is important? Because it is a daily ritual that focuses you on the choices you are going to make that day. Doing a 40 minute exercise video instead of sitting on the couch and scrolling twitter is *a choice*. Having a second glass of wine with dinner is *a choice*. Even though most of the fluctuation in the next day's weight is noise, it doesn't feel like noise, it feels consequential, so weighing yourself every day matters. A weigh in six days from now is too distant to feel consequential.
It takes a certain mindset to have a scale in the same room where you sleep, along with a pencil and paper, and do the same thing every day, even on weekends, even when you're not trying to lose weight. Personally, I work best on inspiration, not routine - that's pretty normal for people high in Openness. Habits are good, but I've been successful, and I simply had no need to weigh myself every day.
Probably like you, I have the scale in the bathroom (next to the bedroom), and the notebook/pen on a shelf next to the bathroom door. I'm having trouble imagining a lower effort undertaking than this one. If you don't have the mindset for this you can forget about a five hour bike ride :)
I suspect you don't weigh yourself daily because you don't know that weight varies by as much as five pounds in a day (that's not typical of course but I've seen my own vary by as much as 4lbs). https://greatist.com/live/why-your-weight-fluctuates-5-pounds-per-day#daily-fluctuations A single weekly weigh in will have too much variance IMHO compared to a moving average of your last several daily measures.
Yeah, if I'm in the mood for it, a five hour bike ride is five hours of fun. I'm not going to do that every day. I'm not even curing 50 pound dumbbells anymore, because now that I proved to myself I could do it over the course of a week without injury, I lost interest and am now on pushups and chinups (and my abs are sore; evidently they hadn't been exercised in a while).
"The world is conspiring against us, with a massive supply of tasty calorie rich food and drink that our ancestors would have marveled at. IMHO, an 'instinctual' approach is unwise, our instincts evolved for an entirely different environment."
If this is the way you experience food, and weight, OK! And all right, maybe that is truly and genuinely the experience of the overwhelming majority of Westerners in the modern world. But I'm the kind of guy who eats watermelon rinds and banana peel bacon: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/watermelon-stir-fry
For me, my set point has pretty much taken over, there's no need to step on the scale except every week or so out of curiosity, and not really any surprises when I do. If I forced myself to endure this 20 second commercial "that literally takes 5 seconds" every day, I'd regard it the way I do any other commercial I can't click through. Hating components of your fitness regimen isn't conducive to maintaining that fitness regimen.
Yes, I think the experience of food you and I have is very different. For me, limiting my consumption of yummy high calorie food and drink is a constant practice of mindfulness and self-discipline. To maintain my weight, energy levels, and health, I must make it a habit to generally move a bit more than I want, and eat/drink a bit less than I want. I don't hate this, I've simply accepted that this is how it is. (It does get a bit easier over time as your tastes change and fast food becomes less appealing... but I would never ever say no to a bacon-wrapped filet mignon).
I think that's true of a lot of people. I reread the part of your piece about laboriously working your way up to being able to eat scrambled eggs... wow no, I cannot relate to that *at all*. Scrambled eggs with feta are delicious. Banana peel bacon? LOL oh god no. (you'd have a pretty easy time maintaining weight though, so more power to you!)
you remind me of a friend I have who recently stopped drinking alcohol entirely. he said "why do I do this? I get a very slight buzz which I don't find particularly interesting, and I feel awful the next day." My experience is very different: I *love* a few delicious alcoholic drinks and I feel fine the next day. If there were no consequences I'd drink all the time, it is only by a constant exercise of self-discipline I don't have 15 drinks a week.
As I say, whatever works for you… but it seems to me that getting to (and maintaining) a healthy weight is a matter of routine, not inspiration. Inspiration is for writing songs, where the momentary flash of insight is all you need. Good health is just the accumulation of a thousand mundane daily choices: routine. There’s nothing “inspiring” about lifting weights for 45 minutes 2x week, week after week, or having water instead of beer with dinner 4x per week…. after a while it’s just the thing you do and it feels weird not to do it. Habit. I found the “weigh yourself every day” thing to give lots of useful data but even more useful as a morning affirmation: I am the kind of person who thinks this is important enough to spare 5 seconds every morning to do it.
I don't experience making music as a momentary flash of insight, but rather a long teasing process of listening, playing, changing, and listening, which has to be sustained perpetually by inspiration. Good health with me is the same. When the dandelions bloom, they inspire me to eat them. When the sun sets, it inspires me to go for a run. I have no interest in eating dandelions every week, nor running in the heat, the snow, or the rain. Come to think of it, there are no dandelions most of the year, and I've hurt myself trying to run when the weather was wrong for it. You are interesting to talk to, but manifestly a very different sort of person from myself!
What advice to you have to give to the borderline underweight young men of today? If you knew what you know today when you were 18, would you have done anything differently?
Sometimes it’s just down to having a ridiculous metabolism in youth. My middle brother, a keen first grade rugby player, could not gain weight for the life of him until he hit 25. From 15 he did all the things, ate a stupid amount of balanced calories, supplemental protein, the extra training and got to a measly 65 kg soaking wet by the time he was 18. It was a liability when he was 40 kg lighter than some of his team mates. But he was a good player and the strategist for the team. By 22 he’d had 2 ACL reconstructions, worked construction, and stopped stressing about gaining, and then hit 70 kg. He’s a happy 75 kg at 30, after a third ACL done playing for Italy in the Tag Rugby World Cup.
Sometimes it’s a matter of aging a bit and the mid 20s slow down that helps.
My advice to younger me would be to have a gap year or two, working a physical job that involves carrying things. Construction, or farming, or forestry, or something.
I actually did this: I worked for a central heating/air conditioning firm straight after secondary school. Carrying 50 window-unit air conditioners up four flights of stairs in a half-built building is still a memory.
And join a sports team: football, volleyball, something like that. BUT, importantly, listen to the coach and do the conditioning exercises if you don't want to be crippled in later life. I didn't play team sports, being somewhat schizoid. But there are semi-solitary pursuits like rock climbing, hiking or hunting that help too. But being around other men is good psychologically for young men.
Possibly give them targets, if they respond to numbers: join a gym, focus on the big four exercises (squats, deadlifts, pullups, overhead press). Targets: squat, 1.5 times body weight; deadlift 2 times; pullups, four muscle-ups in a row, overhead press, 1x body weight. An 18-year-old male could get there in nine months, probably - ah, youth is wasted on the young.
Off topic: Why do you self-identify as "somewhat schizoid" instead of "somewhat aspie"? Is it a generational thing or does it carry different meaning?
On topic: My son, about 18 years old, doesn't like to eat a lot of food. He isn't picky, but he tends to feel full like someone on Ozempic. Nothing strange in that, except that he is very thin, like BMI 18-19. He says he would prefer to eat even less, but eats to keep his body from thinning out totally. He bikes a lot and works hard when asked to, but he is not overly interested in building muscle mass for the sake of it. Any advice for this rather specific case?
On the one hand, BMI 18.5 and above is still technically "normal." On the other hand, everything that I've read suggests that it's better to be on the higher side of normal, and if he's not naturally able to maintain weight, 20 kg/m2 would be much safer.
Unfortunately in most cases, being Mom means there isn't that much you can do unless there's motivation on his part. But if he's already eating more than he's hungry for, I can see there may well be probably some motivation there, which means you might be able to initiate a genuine diet.
Plan and discuss things with him, try to get him on the scale every morning, and find ways to give him food that has low satiety but high calories, especially right before bed. Think peanut butter & chocolate milkshakes, fatty cuts of meat, that kind of thing; if he can drink a shake every night before bed in the way anyone else would take their medicine, he's going to gain. I'd also talk about limiting caffeine.
But as I mentioned, for a typical 18 year old man, his own motivation will be a major factor, and if he's not really interested, things may not go anywhere.
For me, there is the complicating factor that he probably inherited that sense of satiety from me. I absolutely hate overeating. In an environment of plenty, that is a great advantage, because I never have to worry about keeping my weight down.
So I'm afraid to ask my son to eat much more than he likes, because I'm afraid to ask him to suppress an instinct that is also very good to have. It is just that in him, that instinct seems to have a dosage problem. He is very health conscious, partially because he doesn't care about tastes anyway (and he follows his parents' in abstaining from caffeine). But we are losing track of what is really healthy and what is not.
Oh, I wouldn't be too worried about suppressing an instinct he inherited from you, since it likely will never go away. And honestly I wouldn't be too worried about his weight at this stage, either; he's barely underweight, if at all. But good luck, Tove!
>>And honestly I wouldn't be too worried about his weight at this stage, either; he's barely underweight, if at all.
Yes, that's the question I'm after: How much should a good mother nag, really? So I'm searching input from you formerly very thin men to get some data - something like a table of what different men who were very thin at 18 did, and how that turned out. Now I have three cases. That is better than the single one I had previously (the one of a thin man called Anders).
I was similar as a youth, BMI under 20, although it was running rather than cycling. I was never interested in building muscle for looks. But strength is worth having, I discovered.*
There is a certain type of man that likes to play dominance games, such as trying to crush your hand in a handshake. I had this happen fairly often as I looked scrawny. Swinging a hammer and carrying things for eight hours a day meant that I could hold my own and sometimes turn the tables.
Being strong helps a man be confident; others react to that.
And working with other men in something physical, developing a male persona, is good for being able to connect to men later in life. The difference in young men between those who can connect and those who are only comfortable with their peers is quite noticeable.
Schizoid: I like to think I can be sociable when required, and that I don't have aspie traits such as repetitive actions or words. Last night, for instance, I had quite a good conversation with my emergency department nurse, talking about her kids and mine, food, preferred exercise, her work as "peer support" for younger nurses in E D, and several other things. (Don't worry, it was only a small heart attack; I should be home in two days.)
Most of the time, though, I prefer to be quiet and ideally alone.
* If I knew then what I know now, I would have chosen gymnastics as a sport. Not so easy in a rural area, I know.
I would have done many things differently if I knew at 18 what I know now, but the major issues would have related to religion, love, and education. Weight would have been very minor compared to those.
Just speaking of weight, though, I think I simply would have gotten things together faster if I knew by 18 what I know now. By 18, I was already sort of getting it; I just didn't work as fast as I could because I wasn't really sure about things. The simple lessons I was missing were:
* Being skinny isn't like being short or tall. It's very hard to change your height, but weight is something you *can* control,
* Good sleep will help with absolutely everything in life, and sleep is seriously easier if you turn off blue lights at night and have something like melatonin or doxolamine to fall back on, and
* It may be hard, but the way to gain or lose fat and muscle is through effort habitually sustained over time. If you form habits, the effort will come much more naturally, and those habits can carry you very far in just a few years.
If I'm getting you right, you are more or less always on a diet. That is admirable, but it is not enviable. Do you think you could have developed a functioning instinctual approach to food, if you accepted your thin build as a teenager?
In general, do you feel like eating more than you do? Is not putting on weight a sacrifice to make on a sensory plan? Or is overeating just a response to stress that is not really pleasant?
I'm less on a diet than I could be - the diet is "Always buy vegetables," "don't waste food," and "if you're restless, exercise." These are a trio of habits that feel easy, fun, and don't register as work for me. So far as I can tell, Cubicle Farmer is always on a diet.
I was indeed mostly accepting my thin build as a teenager, much like anyone in the fat acceptance movement accepts their obesity. And no, I don't think I could have developed a functioning instinctual approach to food if I had never stopped accepting it. I would have gone around unable to eat on dates or company dinners because the food felt repugnant and "this is just what It's like to be me." I understand people in the fat acceptance movement, and I think the un-nuanced acceptance part is bad for them. I think the right way is to see your ideal weight as a destination you may not be right now, but to have some self compassion and not blame yourself for not being at the destination.
I don't usually feel like eating more than I do. After I'd overcome my pickiness, overeating was a response to stress. I'd need something (rest) and not have the time (or ability), so I'd throw food into my system instead. I'd feel recharged, but I suspect that was mostly placebo in the classic sense: have this sugar pill (Snickers) and your symptoms of fatigue will abate! Replacing snacks with exercise not only helped manage weight, but exercise helps a lot with stress, and improving sleep when it's time for bed.
"So far as I can tell, Cubicle Farmer is always on a diet."
That's not how I'd put it though I guess it depends how you interpret the idea that "I am usually eating and drinking a bit less than what I want (because I am surrounded by delicious food and drink that is calling to me). A day where I do what I want (a plate of pub food and a couple of pints) is a cheat day, allowed only on occasion. I've lived this way for a few years now, and it feels like something I can (and have to) do forever.
If I am not "on a diet" in this way, my weight *will* start creeping up (as it does for many people).
That's rough. I mean not as bad as, say, being totally unable to eat gluten (Mrs. Apple Pie is coeliac), but having to do that all the time would be frustrating to deal with. Cheat days would be a big help four dealing with the monotony. Partly I think I escaped that by regarding certain things as just not food: McDonalds, Starbucks, and that Chinese restaurant which I Shall Not Name.
Then again, thinking about it, maybe experiencing food the way you do would be absolutely wonderful, because it would mean you're living in a sort of garden of earthly delights where pleasure is perpetually around the corner! My experience of most Western culture is reminiscent of a man wandering around in the local landfill, not just culinarily, but in terms of reading, movies, poetry, video games, television...
Having to abstain from too much of a good thing is a great problem to have... It is indeed a garden of delights...I live in a city with an exotic array of quality food choices and I live around foodies in a foodie culture... Food and drink with friends and family is considered the highest of pleasures. I haven't been in a McDonald's in 20 years and when offered some subpar mass market beer or junk food it's easy to demur. "I'm not wasting cheat day on this." That goes for everything else too. I ignore 80% of movies/etc and there's still plenty of great stuff out there. I'm just a positive guy, what can I say?
back then I walked everywhere and never thought about what i ate (it was bad), I didn't put on weight until children+full time sedentary work required me to ride less, & drive more I have a little middle age spread now... (tl;dr don't buy a car; ride a bike) (I can only 'exercise' if it is something else: commuting, digging out a dam, weeding, cutting fire wood etc etc, gyms are for the borderline orthorexic.
Don't knock gyms - they aren't the way I do it, but I can only presume that having a bunch of sexy ladies around is likely to boost testosterone while you lift. (What the ladies get out of it I'm not as sure, but hanging around the gym bros is probably fun at least)
Thank you for writing this. Improving the world's health, a gross at a time.
If one is inveterately lazy, as I am, the optimal form of exercise is rucking. Carrying a backpack for a couple of hours, up and down hills (or stairs, if your town is flat), three times a week. Maintains cardio fitness, core and back chain muscle condition, joint health, and balance. Start with ten percent of your body weight and work up to a quarter, more if you like. Water bottles are handy units of weight, especially if you use metric: a litre of water is a kilogramme. Rucking is strongly recommended by Peter Attia in "Outlive", amongst others.
I like tramping (NZ word; it's like hiking, but with much more mud, rougher tracks (trails), and steeper hills) so I get my rucking in bursts in the weekend.
On diet: in my youth, I one day told myself, "I'm not the kind of person who likes sweet things". Somehow that has mostly worked. A few years ago I had to add "or pasta".
I'm so lazy that I quit my desk job and now work a job that requires me to be standing up and doing moderate exercise eight hours a day. My step counter regularly records fifteen thousand steps or more, but I think it overcounts. If I were younger I would retrain as an electrician. Rucking as a job, with extra joint mobility exercises built in.
I read somewhere that men respond well to regular weighing, but women much less so. Social proof is more important for the fair ones, apparently. When weighing yourself remember to allow for recent intake and removal: half a litre of water and two cups of tea (my normal morning routine) is a kilogramme. And don't worry about single numbers; the trend is the thing. Don't start worrying about that extra kilogramme until it's been there for a month.
Finally, what really matters for health is fat around the viscera. This is most directly measured by waist to height ratio. Measure around your waist and divide that by your height. The healthy range is 0.4 to 0.5 (two fifths to one half, for devotees of old number systems). Works with all body plans, with amputees, and with all ages above infant, apparently.
"Statistical evidence supports that WHtR is a better predictor of cardiovascular, diabetes and stroke risk than the body mass index (BMI) because it accounts for the distribution of abdominal fat, which is known to increase the aforementioned risks.
"Abdominal fat affects organs like the heart, liver and kidneys more adversely in terms of cardiometabolic risk, than fat around the hips and bottom.
"In a comprehensive study by Lee et al. that revised 10 studies, BMI was the poorest discriminator for cardiovascular risk factors whilst the WHtR was the best discriminator for hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia in both sexes." - https://www.mdapp.co/waist-to-height-ratio-whtr-calculator-433/
Edit: I see that page has written "WHtR" where they mean "WtHR".
Yeah, now that you mention it, I'd seen a guy rucking years ago, but he did it in a military context with a specifically designed weight, and he was already young, fit, and trim. Lugging weight around in a sack, or on your back, is probably something ordinary people took for granted as part of their daily experience chopping wood and carrying water over millennia (or even tens of thousands of years of evolutionary time). Water bottles are probably a good idea too, although I have so many weights around I'd probably just toss a couple into the bottom of a bag and go.
I've also read about waist to height ratio; I just tried and got 0.47. You can probably tell that when I wrote this article I was mostly trying to be anecdotal rather than clinical - most people don't measure themselves that way. I'll also say that I'm used to noisy measures and don't mind them much; it's obvious that BMI can't be a perfect measure of health because muscle is more dense than fat, and muscle is healthy while fat (at least above a certain amount) is not, so you could be a bodybuilder and register as "overweight" by BMI. Most people are not bodybuilders, though, and I don't think even Cat Pause would have been confused into thinking "My BMI is high but it doesn't matter because bodybuilders also have a high BMI." (Then again sheesh, who knows)
I personally use an app called Cronometer to track my eating habits in order to get the appropriate intake of calories, carbs, proteins, and fats my body needs, especially because I lift weights. Ideally, this means having a high protein and high fat diet, though, because I love coffee and tea (natural hunger suppressants), sometimes I ingest about 900 calories some days when I'm supposed to be eating 1900!
Gen Z will have an app for it, yep! But I'd never heard coffee or tea were appetite suppressants before, but the headlines at Google Scholar seem to corroborate. Possibly that's why while I'm dieting I can get by with a very small breakfast and a cup of tea.
Hello Apple Pie,
I’m one of your devoted gross of subscribers and I always read your blog with great interest. This is the first time in my life that I make a comment to a blog post and I suppose there are many others like me, for whom this problem has occupied a lot of life energy. It would be devastating for your blog to dwell to much on this topic, I agree.
I have read an uncountable number of books on the subject since 1968, when I was 16 years old. Less calories than the body needs to sustain it’s weight is what is necessary, they all told me, and provided recipes for for calorie-low fat-low food. It was tragic to follow these diets, always hungry and miserable. As with Weightwatchers (they have probably modernized their diets by now).
Then came the low carb awareness and changed the whole game set-up. Low carb works. New books in the book shelf. I don’t feel well on a very low carb diet in the long run though, so after a few initial days to tell the body it’s time to start burning the excess fat I add some more vegetables to get about 30-40 g of carb each day.
A low carb, high fat diet works on it’s own if you are a person with well regulated apetite and hunger feelings that are adequate. That’s not me. I have never been like that, always overeating.
I have come to realize that for me it’s impossible to keep my best weight without keeping track of my calorie balance.
But as you point out, counting calories really sucks. So I have made myself a simple but useful Excel workbook that makes it a lot easier. It was a lot of fun to make it and since it’s my own baby I love it. It takes some minutes each day to use it. This is why I only use it, when I’m not overly busy with my main interest, which is and always have been gardening. So when gardening starts taking all my time I put the excel sheet to rest for half a year and inevitably gain around 1 kg per month in spite of all the exercise I get in the garden. And when the garden goes to rest, the workbook has to be awakened. And enough exercise must also be incorporated. The Excel workbook accounts for that too. It’s quite accurate now, so that I can see just how the present day’s calorie balance have influenced my weight. This is important and takes away the guessing and wishful thinking, like ”Now it seems that I finally can eat anything I like, without adding weight”. There are plateaus both in gaining and loosing weight. Without exercise it’s virtually impossible to lose weight. A pedometer is a good device.
Cutting down a lot on carbohydrates is essential. Exercising is essential. And not overeating is essential. So eat enough at meals and eat low carb. Eat enough fat so that you can feel that ”almost full”-feeling.
And exercise. I need at least 9000 steps om my pedometer in order to be able to eat a reasonable amount of food and still lose weight.
Having such an engineering approach to the problem of losing weight is really not something you can show people that you want to regard you as a normal person. I have tried to give it to some people I know well, and who know me as an otherwise sound person, but none of them have been able to take it on, despite a desperate need to lose weight. And even they got a little suspiscious of me, seeing that I have such a trait that they couldn’t relate to... Since you seem to be a rather engineering minded person yourself I seems safe to tell you about it. To me it has been a real game changer.
There are a lot of similar solutions to buy at the Internet. They have never worked for me. It must be tailor made. I have used my Excel sheet for many years now. It’s built on the Swedish Food Councils big database and completed with the facts of other foodstuff that I like to eat, not included in their database.
To simplify life, I have a rather standardized manner of eating, with a couple of breakfasts, ten different lunch alternatives and a few evening meals. The main meal is lunch.
I have always had the ideal that eating should be instinctual and just work automatically. But I’m not that way and I suspect that most people overweight is not either. After I accepted that I have a handicap not being able to control this well and made my Excel solution, life has become much easier. And I have indeed, little by little, come to better understanding of what to eat and when I have eaten enough and when not to eat.
The Excel workbook consists of three sheets.
The recording sheet, where I record everything I eat. It has a simple LOOKUP function and yields the total amount of calories and macros of the day. It's easy to use.
The data sheet for the LOOKUP function
The result sheet, that gives peace in mind. Here I put the totals from the recording sheet and the reading of my pedometer and here I write every days morning weight. I totally agree with Cubicle Farmer that this is essential (for me). I also think, like him, that it is essential to have "sports-perspective" on the whole thing. It must be fun.
What a thoughtful comment! You're quite right that I'm familiar with spreadsheets (I made the second image in this post) and if I were to track my calories or weight, that's probably the way I'd handle it to easily get plots and trends. Have you tried fitting polynomial curves to your weight over time to see the seasonal changes, or analyzing the weekly changes in weight to see whether variation in calories or steps on your pedometer better predict weight loss?
For me personally I find that I *can* eat what I like in winter so long as what I like includes plenty of vegetables. The hardest times for weight gain for me are the humid continental summers and it's too warm to really push on exercise. I don't exactly live in Montpelier, but it's a good stand-in for the northern area of America's New England region, and this is what the climate there is like: https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/84156~25716/Comparison-of-the-Average-Weather-in-Stockholm-and-Montpelier
Autumn is lovely when it hasn't rained and the roads are dry enough to go running, spring and winter are cold enough to go out and exercise in the garage and winter will absolutely dump snow out of the sky by the bucketful. But I'm not much for swimming, which is the thing I'd have to do all the time if I wanted to get good exercise in the muggy summer heat!
Excel is really handy and I use it a lot, but I’m not very advanced. I use it for lists of plants in my extensive garden, lists of my according to some people too many belongings (packed in numbered banana boxes and easy to find by this system) and I have even used it to make drawings for various small building projects in lieu of a better design program.
I have found out, with the help of very simple formulas in Excel the ratio between exercise (in the form of number of steps) and the intake of food that keeps my weight constant. The calorie comsuption of each step on the pedometer I found out by walking known distances couning steps and maesuring time and using different info from the Internet on energy consumption for walking. And it seems I have got it right. This has resulted in a table (in another sheet in the same workbook) which makes it possible for me to know how much I must restrict food intake when I’m unable to get enough exercise. I have a couple of knees that are not always on my side, unfortunately. I used to do a lot of running in the beautiful forrest around here, but had to give it up long ago. Walking mostly works quite well, though. Swimming and cycling not.
In winter it’s rather dull here and a lot of time to indulge in dubious interests like diving into Excel and one’s own metabolism.
In summer, spring and autumn people in this country are much more social and this makes the input to the Excel sheet much more difficult. Eating is very much part of being social and I’m a very social creature. I try to guess the amounts I’ve eaten as well as the probable ingredients, but this is of course not enough satisfying to my scientific soul, so it soon ends up with parking the spreadsheet for it’s summer holiday. When the grey and dull winter arrives, everyone in this country seems to go into a collective mild depression (probably due to the lack of daylight) and sociability is not impressive. Then introspection can get it’s time again and keeping track of eating and exercising can be taken up as an interest, even though it takes some time to realize that the feasting days are over and the bleak winter reality has come to stay for a while. In the southern part of Sweden winter is just four months. Relaxing is also welcome after the many months of hard work. When Christmas approaches I have taken the spreadsheet to my heart again and I’m able to tackle the Christmas challenge in a constructive way.
Perhaps I should be flattered that you bother to talk to me at all when there are so many better things to do! I have long insisted that walking was an excellent way to exercise (long before I really had any business telling people what to do). It's just about my favorite way of exercising, so long as there is something to see, whether good architecture, or greenery, or a good sunset, or stars. Arcturus and Antares are my favorites, and while Antares I doubt is visible from your latitude, Arcturus is probably nearly circumpolar, and easy to find high in the sky right now, so long as the weather is good. I seldom bother to write about them, because there's little enough to say that can't be found on Wikipedia, YouTube, or apps that can help you find them, but I spend a lot of time looking at the sky.
I'll go out and find Arcturus. Not many people know the names of the stars. It's easy to impress, just by showing where the Polar star is. I used to walk in the late evening when I had a dog, but nightly walks are not to be recommended here nowadays, since the forest is now full of wild boars. They can be encountered also in broad daylight (I met three sows and countless piglets one afternoon), but when darkness falls they really step up.
Wow, that's more than I've had to deal with! I've encountered moose and deer at the side of the road, but they're herbivores and pretty placid most of the time.
Good luck spotting Arcturus! It won't be too easy lately as the moon is waxing and hangs in the sky nearby (not to mention the extremely short nights where you are). And who knows what the clouds will do for you. But it's the brightest star in the Northern hemisphere, a big red bear you'll find chasing the sunset for the next several months.
I don't think diet is easy for anyone. I've met people who claim "not to like food" but they are rare. I am much less picky than Apple Pie, I love everything. The world is conspiring against us, with a massive supply of tasty calorie rich food and drink that our ancestors would have marveled at. IMHO, an "instinctual" approach is unwise, our instincts evolved for an entirely different environment. As a 200 pound male I have it pretty easy actually, my base metabolic rate gives me more leeway with calories and I can just kind of wing it without counting calories (just bending my diet to be 30-40% towards eating a bit less and a bit better than it was before is sufficient). Keep up the good work!
I'll put this here for posterity, an N=1 success story for anyone it may help. I'm a 55 year old man, 6 foot 3. (190cm). I currently weigh 200lbs (98kg), so I'm right on that "happy boundary between normal and overweight". I've been as heavy as 230. My main activity is cycling, I can ride 100km in 5 hours (counting all stops) without undue discomfort. (I seemingly don't have much genetic potential for power or VO2 max, so even among local riding clubs I'm a bit slow. Oh well, I can do it.).
How did I lose 30 pounds and how do I keep it off?
1. Q: Is it diet, cardio, or weights? A: Yes. Some people swear that one or the other of those is most important. I don't know who is right because I do all of them.
2. I found activities I like and exercise most days (mostly cycling either outdoors or on the trainer, rucking, the occasional swim, and weights 2x per week with a Youtube video by Hasfit. I used to run but I developed foot problems so now I ruck with friends instead). That's something I do all the time and will do for the rest of my life. Sorry, if you have hobbies, exercise has to be one of them. We are made to be active.
3. Diet. You know what to do here. Eat less, eat better, drink less alcohol. (And I LOVE yummy high calorie foods and I LOVE alcohol - fun and delicious! ). Add more salads to your diet. Pick your spots to cheat a couple times per week and enjoy those things mindfully and in moderation. Get used to the idea that you can't have what you want whenever you want, but on Friday you can have a pint or two.
4. Weigh yourself every day and write it down. Do this every day for the rest of your life. If someone tells you not to do this, ignore them, they want you to fail. I find it maddening when people say "I lost weight but then I put it back on", like the extra 30 pounds was a mugger that jumped on them in an alley. FFS. I promise that if you weigh yourself every day, the weight gain will not "sneak up on you". If your habits start to slide a bit (it has happened to me a few times, nbd) you can see it happening, and you can do something about it before 5 pounds turns into 20.
5. Set a goal and be patient. Write the goal down in your calendar, literally, what you want to weigh every week until you reach the target. Aim for 1 pound per week, that's plenty. More than that and you risk losing lean mass. Nobody loses "30 pounds", they lose one pound in a week, and do it for 30 weeks in a row. Presto, you just lost 30 pounds.
5a. Yes, your weight fluctuates up and down a couple of pounds each day based on fluid retention, what you ate, what you um, evacuated, etc. Don't be disheartened by putting 2lbs on in a day because it will come right back off the next day. Look at 3 day or 7 day moving averages. Make a game of it: sportscaster voice: "can he get under 203? Can he do it! He's been so close. Is this the day? Yes he can!"
6. Being active and fit feels wonderful in daily life. Being able to carry groceries, help a friend move, go for a long walk in a new city without a second thought... priceless and totally worth it. Your clothes look a lot better on you when you're trim. They look better off you too.
7. This all depends on having your life together and having the emotional bandwidth and spare willpower to care about this. I've been lucky in that regard.
Good luck!
Yes, yes, yes, hilarious, wait:
> Weigh yourself every day and write it down.
OK no, I'd say this is unwelcome work and effort if you're off of a diet. If you're not specifically trying to lose, I'd say weigh yourself every Sunday, and be ready to start restricting your calories if you hit your boundary. You're not going to get mugged for 10 pounds if you're weighed yourself every 7 days. In fact, if you even get mugged 2 pounds in 7 days, something is seriously weird; that's abnormal weight gain, even if you're 6'3"
YMMV, but I don't agree *at all* that this is "too much work and effort". It is the most important thing I recommend, and also the easiest. It literally takes 5 seconds every morning. Get up, yawn, scratch balls, take a leak, stand on digital scale, write number down in a notebook. You're done. I routinely "put on 2 pounds" in a single day, and then lose it the next day, due to fluid retention, what you ate, what you, um, evacuated, etc. A single number can be misleading, so the trend over a few days is what matters.
If the day to day fluctuation isn't important, why do I say weighing yourself every day is important? Because it is a daily ritual that focuses you on the choices you are going to make that day. Doing a 40 minute exercise video instead of sitting on the couch and scrolling twitter is *a choice*. Having a second glass of wine with dinner is *a choice*. Even though most of the fluctuation in the next day's weight is noise, it doesn't feel like noise, it feels consequential, so weighing yourself every day matters. A weigh in six days from now is too distant to feel consequential.
Anyway, YMMV. I share what I think works for me.
It takes a certain mindset to have a scale in the same room where you sleep, along with a pencil and paper, and do the same thing every day, even on weekends, even when you're not trying to lose weight. Personally, I work best on inspiration, not routine - that's pretty normal for people high in Openness. Habits are good, but I've been successful, and I simply had no need to weigh myself every day.
Probably like you, I have the scale in the bathroom (next to the bedroom), and the notebook/pen on a shelf next to the bathroom door. I'm having trouble imagining a lower effort undertaking than this one. If you don't have the mindset for this you can forget about a five hour bike ride :)
I suspect you don't weigh yourself daily because you don't know that weight varies by as much as five pounds in a day (that's not typical of course but I've seen my own vary by as much as 4lbs). https://greatist.com/live/why-your-weight-fluctuates-5-pounds-per-day#daily-fluctuations A single weekly weigh in will have too much variance IMHO compared to a moving average of your last several daily measures.
Yeah, if I'm in the mood for it, a five hour bike ride is five hours of fun. I'm not going to do that every day. I'm not even curing 50 pound dumbbells anymore, because now that I proved to myself I could do it over the course of a week without injury, I lost interest and am now on pushups and chinups (and my abs are sore; evidently they hadn't been exercised in a while).
What really got me to understand why you is this comment: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/trouble-losing-weight/comment/58955628
"The world is conspiring against us, with a massive supply of tasty calorie rich food and drink that our ancestors would have marveled at. IMHO, an 'instinctual' approach is unwise, our instincts evolved for an entirely different environment."
If this is the way you experience food, and weight, OK! And all right, maybe that is truly and genuinely the experience of the overwhelming majority of Westerners in the modern world. But I'm the kind of guy who eats watermelon rinds and banana peel bacon: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/watermelon-stir-fry
For me, my set point has pretty much taken over, there's no need to step on the scale except every week or so out of curiosity, and not really any surprises when I do. If I forced myself to endure this 20 second commercial "that literally takes 5 seconds" every day, I'd regard it the way I do any other commercial I can't click through. Hating components of your fitness regimen isn't conducive to maintaining that fitness regimen.
Yes, I think the experience of food you and I have is very different. For me, limiting my consumption of yummy high calorie food and drink is a constant practice of mindfulness and self-discipline. To maintain my weight, energy levels, and health, I must make it a habit to generally move a bit more than I want, and eat/drink a bit less than I want. I don't hate this, I've simply accepted that this is how it is. (It does get a bit easier over time as your tastes change and fast food becomes less appealing... but I would never ever say no to a bacon-wrapped filet mignon).
I think that's true of a lot of people. I reread the part of your piece about laboriously working your way up to being able to eat scrambled eggs... wow no, I cannot relate to that *at all*. Scrambled eggs with feta are delicious. Banana peel bacon? LOL oh god no. (you'd have a pretty easy time maintaining weight though, so more power to you!)
you remind me of a friend I have who recently stopped drinking alcohol entirely. he said "why do I do this? I get a very slight buzz which I don't find particularly interesting, and I feel awful the next day." My experience is very different: I *love* a few delicious alcoholic drinks and I feel fine the next day. If there were no consequences I'd drink all the time, it is only by a constant exercise of self-discipline I don't have 15 drinks a week.
As I say, whatever works for you… but it seems to me that getting to (and maintaining) a healthy weight is a matter of routine, not inspiration. Inspiration is for writing songs, where the momentary flash of insight is all you need. Good health is just the accumulation of a thousand mundane daily choices: routine. There’s nothing “inspiring” about lifting weights for 45 minutes 2x week, week after week, or having water instead of beer with dinner 4x per week…. after a while it’s just the thing you do and it feels weird not to do it. Habit. I found the “weigh yourself every day” thing to give lots of useful data but even more useful as a morning affirmation: I am the kind of person who thinks this is important enough to spare 5 seconds every morning to do it.
I don't experience making music as a momentary flash of insight, but rather a long teasing process of listening, playing, changing, and listening, which has to be sustained perpetually by inspiration. Good health with me is the same. When the dandelions bloom, they inspire me to eat them. When the sun sets, it inspires me to go for a run. I have no interest in eating dandelions every week, nor running in the heat, the snow, or the rain. Come to think of it, there are no dandelions most of the year, and I've hurt myself trying to run when the weather was wrong for it. You are interesting to talk to, but manifestly a very different sort of person from myself!
high iron same... marrow 'stem cells' they mutate, a lot of those mutations causing high iron are known, we tested, not mine
What advice to you have to give to the borderline underweight young men of today? If you knew what you know today when you were 18, would you have done anything differently?
Sometimes it’s just down to having a ridiculous metabolism in youth. My middle brother, a keen first grade rugby player, could not gain weight for the life of him until he hit 25. From 15 he did all the things, ate a stupid amount of balanced calories, supplemental protein, the extra training and got to a measly 65 kg soaking wet by the time he was 18. It was a liability when he was 40 kg lighter than some of his team mates. But he was a good player and the strategist for the team. By 22 he’d had 2 ACL reconstructions, worked construction, and stopped stressing about gaining, and then hit 70 kg. He’s a happy 75 kg at 30, after a third ACL done playing for Italy in the Tag Rugby World Cup.
Sometimes it’s a matter of aging a bit and the mid 20s slow down that helps.
My advice to younger me would be to have a gap year or two, working a physical job that involves carrying things. Construction, or farming, or forestry, or something.
I actually did this: I worked for a central heating/air conditioning firm straight after secondary school. Carrying 50 window-unit air conditioners up four flights of stairs in a half-built building is still a memory.
And join a sports team: football, volleyball, something like that. BUT, importantly, listen to the coach and do the conditioning exercises if you don't want to be crippled in later life. I didn't play team sports, being somewhat schizoid. But there are semi-solitary pursuits like rock climbing, hiking or hunting that help too. But being around other men is good psychologically for young men.
Possibly give them targets, if they respond to numbers: join a gym, focus on the big four exercises (squats, deadlifts, pullups, overhead press). Targets: squat, 1.5 times body weight; deadlift 2 times; pullups, four muscle-ups in a row, overhead press, 1x body weight. An 18-year-old male could get there in nine months, probably - ah, youth is wasted on the young.
Off topic: Why do you self-identify as "somewhat schizoid" instead of "somewhat aspie"? Is it a generational thing or does it carry different meaning?
On topic: My son, about 18 years old, doesn't like to eat a lot of food. He isn't picky, but he tends to feel full like someone on Ozempic. Nothing strange in that, except that he is very thin, like BMI 18-19. He says he would prefer to eat even less, but eats to keep his body from thinning out totally. He bikes a lot and works hard when asked to, but he is not overly interested in building muscle mass for the sake of it. Any advice for this rather specific case?
On the one hand, BMI 18.5 and above is still technically "normal." On the other hand, everything that I've read suggests that it's better to be on the higher side of normal, and if he's not naturally able to maintain weight, 20 kg/m2 would be much safer.
Unfortunately in most cases, being Mom means there isn't that much you can do unless there's motivation on his part. But if he's already eating more than he's hungry for, I can see there may well be probably some motivation there, which means you might be able to initiate a genuine diet.
Plan and discuss things with him, try to get him on the scale every morning, and find ways to give him food that has low satiety but high calories, especially right before bed. Think peanut butter & chocolate milkshakes, fatty cuts of meat, that kind of thing; if he can drink a shake every night before bed in the way anyone else would take their medicine, he's going to gain. I'd also talk about limiting caffeine.
But as I mentioned, for a typical 18 year old man, his own motivation will be a major factor, and if he's not really interested, things may not go anywhere.
For me, there is the complicating factor that he probably inherited that sense of satiety from me. I absolutely hate overeating. In an environment of plenty, that is a great advantage, because I never have to worry about keeping my weight down.
So I'm afraid to ask my son to eat much more than he likes, because I'm afraid to ask him to suppress an instinct that is also very good to have. It is just that in him, that instinct seems to have a dosage problem. He is very health conscious, partially because he doesn't care about tastes anyway (and he follows his parents' in abstaining from caffeine). But we are losing track of what is really healthy and what is not.
Oh, I wouldn't be too worried about suppressing an instinct he inherited from you, since it likely will never go away. And honestly I wouldn't be too worried about his weight at this stage, either; he's barely underweight, if at all. But good luck, Tove!
>>And honestly I wouldn't be too worried about his weight at this stage, either; he's barely underweight, if at all.
Yes, that's the question I'm after: How much should a good mother nag, really? So I'm searching input from you formerly very thin men to get some data - something like a table of what different men who were very thin at 18 did, and how that turned out. Now I have three cases. That is better than the single one I had previously (the one of a thin man called Anders).
I was similar as a youth, BMI under 20, although it was running rather than cycling. I was never interested in building muscle for looks. But strength is worth having, I discovered.*
There is a certain type of man that likes to play dominance games, such as trying to crush your hand in a handshake. I had this happen fairly often as I looked scrawny. Swinging a hammer and carrying things for eight hours a day meant that I could hold my own and sometimes turn the tables.
Being strong helps a man be confident; others react to that.
And working with other men in something physical, developing a male persona, is good for being able to connect to men later in life. The difference in young men between those who can connect and those who are only comfortable with their peers is quite noticeable.
Schizoid: I like to think I can be sociable when required, and that I don't have aspie traits such as repetitive actions or words. Last night, for instance, I had quite a good conversation with my emergency department nurse, talking about her kids and mine, food, preferred exercise, her work as "peer support" for younger nurses in E D, and several other things. (Don't worry, it was only a small heart attack; I should be home in two days.)
Most of the time, though, I prefer to be quiet and ideally alone.
* If I knew then what I know now, I would have chosen gymnastics as a sport. Not so easy in a rural area, I know.
Parenthetical topic: total time in care: 48 hours. Heart surgery: under 30 minutes, including the diagnosis stage (pinpointing where to operate).
We are living in the future.
I would have done many things differently if I knew at 18 what I know now, but the major issues would have related to religion, love, and education. Weight would have been very minor compared to those.
Just speaking of weight, though, I think I simply would have gotten things together faster if I knew by 18 what I know now. By 18, I was already sort of getting it; I just didn't work as fast as I could because I wasn't really sure about things. The simple lessons I was missing were:
* Being skinny isn't like being short or tall. It's very hard to change your height, but weight is something you *can* control,
* Good sleep will help with absolutely everything in life, and sleep is seriously easier if you turn off blue lights at night and have something like melatonin or doxolamine to fall back on, and
* It may be hard, but the way to gain or lose fat and muscle is through effort habitually sustained over time. If you form habits, the effort will come much more naturally, and those habits can carry you very far in just a few years.
If I'm getting you right, you are more or less always on a diet. That is admirable, but it is not enviable. Do you think you could have developed a functioning instinctual approach to food, if you accepted your thin build as a teenager?
In general, do you feel like eating more than you do? Is not putting on weight a sacrifice to make on a sensory plan? Or is overeating just a response to stress that is not really pleasant?
I'm less on a diet than I could be - the diet is "Always buy vegetables," "don't waste food," and "if you're restless, exercise." These are a trio of habits that feel easy, fun, and don't register as work for me. So far as I can tell, Cubicle Farmer is always on a diet.
I was indeed mostly accepting my thin build as a teenager, much like anyone in the fat acceptance movement accepts their obesity. And no, I don't think I could have developed a functioning instinctual approach to food if I had never stopped accepting it. I would have gone around unable to eat on dates or company dinners because the food felt repugnant and "this is just what It's like to be me." I understand people in the fat acceptance movement, and I think the un-nuanced acceptance part is bad for them. I think the right way is to see your ideal weight as a destination you may not be right now, but to have some self compassion and not blame yourself for not being at the destination.
I don't usually feel like eating more than I do. After I'd overcome my pickiness, overeating was a response to stress. I'd need something (rest) and not have the time (or ability), so I'd throw food into my system instead. I'd feel recharged, but I suspect that was mostly placebo in the classic sense: have this sugar pill (Snickers) and your symptoms of fatigue will abate! Replacing snacks with exercise not only helped manage weight, but exercise helps a lot with stress, and improving sleep when it's time for bed.
"So far as I can tell, Cubicle Farmer is always on a diet."
That's not how I'd put it though I guess it depends how you interpret the idea that "I am usually eating and drinking a bit less than what I want (because I am surrounded by delicious food and drink that is calling to me). A day where I do what I want (a plate of pub food and a couple of pints) is a cheat day, allowed only on occasion. I've lived this way for a few years now, and it feels like something I can (and have to) do forever.
If I am not "on a diet" in this way, my weight *will* start creeping up (as it does for many people).
That's rough. I mean not as bad as, say, being totally unable to eat gluten (Mrs. Apple Pie is coeliac), but having to do that all the time would be frustrating to deal with. Cheat days would be a big help four dealing with the monotony. Partly I think I escaped that by regarding certain things as just not food: McDonalds, Starbucks, and that Chinese restaurant which I Shall Not Name.
Then again, thinking about it, maybe experiencing food the way you do would be absolutely wonderful, because it would mean you're living in a sort of garden of earthly delights where pleasure is perpetually around the corner! My experience of most Western culture is reminiscent of a man wandering around in the local landfill, not just culinarily, but in terms of reading, movies, poetry, video games, television...
Having to abstain from too much of a good thing is a great problem to have... It is indeed a garden of delights...I live in a city with an exotic array of quality food choices and I live around foodies in a foodie culture... Food and drink with friends and family is considered the highest of pleasures. I haven't been in a McDonald's in 20 years and when offered some subpar mass market beer or junk food it's easy to demur. "I'm not wasting cheat day on this." That goes for everything else too. I ignore 80% of movies/etc and there's still plenty of great stuff out there. I'm just a positive guy, what can I say?
back then I walked everywhere and never thought about what i ate (it was bad), I didn't put on weight until children+full time sedentary work required me to ride less, & drive more I have a little middle age spread now... (tl;dr don't buy a car; ride a bike) (I can only 'exercise' if it is something else: commuting, digging out a dam, weeding, cutting fire wood etc etc, gyms are for the borderline orthorexic.
Don't knock gyms - they aren't the way I do it, but I can only presume that having a bunch of sexy ladies around is likely to boost testosterone while you lift. (What the ladies get out of it I'm not as sure, but hanging around the gym bros is probably fun at least)
I've reproduced and this advice is now unecessary. This applies to leaving the house in any capacity really.
Aha, but testosterone is not unnecessary to building muscle:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1948550609352807
"The Presence of an Attractive Woman" is basically free steroids
but I could just stay angry, that's cheap too, just listen to some shockjocks complain about the court costs of something while weeding