That’s right; I got nothin but a scale that won’t budge! On the other hand the diet is going well so go figure. I won’t bore you with all the potential reasons but a primary one is something called adaptive thermogenesis which is the body’s response to what it perceives as starvation causing metabolism to slow down while dieting. This is a great feature if we are indeed heading into a famine but not so good for those of us who want/need to lose a few pounds. So what can one do about this?
The typical answer is to eat less and exercise more but there are limits to what one can do on this front and the body often still won’t respond in a way that causes the scale to budge. In my earlier years, I would eat gruel and live at the gym and was still 10 pounds overweight. One thing that is supposed to help is interval training (slow/fast exercise cycles). Studies show metabolism stays elevated longer after shorter interval training sessions than longer sessions of walking/running/cycling sessions and I’m all for saving time, lessening monotony and sparing my joints. Yesterday, I did my first interval session on the stationary bike alternating between 30 seconds fast and 60 seconds slow (10 cycles) with several minutes of warm up and cool down on both ends for a total of about 20 minutes. Sounds easy, right? No, it was hard which means it was a more intense workout than my usual 30 minute peddling routine but if it keeps my energy (calorie) burning engine reeved up longer than the slog I will stick with it.
On the diet side of the equation, there is a newer trend out there called metabolic confusion which means rotating caloric intake by eating more calories (carbs) on the days you work out and fewer calories on the days you don’t. This supposedly confuses your metabolism (is a famine coming or not) keeping it more elevated than it would be with daily caloric restriction (yup, famine is upon us so I’m hunkering down). I foolishly ordered an online program for this that may/may not assist with this endeavor. I added a fat burning supplement to the order that has stuff in it (capsicum, green tea, caffeine) known to jump start metabolism so stay tuned.
Another current trend is something called intermittent fasting which translates to increasing the hours in a 24 hour period you don’t eat and decreasing the hours in the day that you eat. After all my research, basically if you don’t eat after supper and sleep through the bulk of the fasting hours you end up with a 12-14 hour fast which is a good start. Duh, we have known about this easier said than done trick forever, right? For even more weight loss, they suggest a 16 hour fast/8 hour eating window which, as a night owl, I don’t think I can do. For those of you who are disciplined enough to skip a bedtime snack and sleep regular hours you can do it if you just skip breakfast. Of course, this goes against breakfast being the most important meal of the day. The theory is that the longer you fast, the more stored fat you will burn leading to more weight loss. Neither of these trends has a lot of science behind them so do your homework and/or consult with your health care professionals before embarking on either plan. If you are sick of all this dieting talk you are in luck because you won’t see my column for a couple weeks. I am having surgery on my arthritic left thumb so will be out of keyboard commission for a while. It’s a common surgery with a 96% success rate that has been done successfully for