Deconstructing the Meme

I’m one of those anal food journaler types. It started way back when I did Weight Watchers for the first, OK well, probably 5th time, first time I stuck with it to the end.

So, I still have my food journals from when I started losing weight what is now less than a month away from 2 years ago! I started Weight Watchers on March 6, 2006. When I switched to doing South Beach in June of 2006, I simply wrote food down in a notebook or occasionally tracked in the online version of Fit Day.

So, who cares about my anal food journaling tendencies? Probably no one but me. Here’s why:

I’ve been able to do some calculating to determine my approximate metabolic rate and it’s fluctuation over the past two years. I can illustrate just how detrimental to my weight loss low calorie dieting has been.

I wanted to make pretty graphs and detail how I did some calculations but I don’t have the patience for that right now. Here’s what the numbers look like:

Weight Watchers
87 Days
Average Calories: 1360
Exercise: 40 minutes cardio 4-5 days a week
Fat Loss: 13.26 lbs = 533 average daily fat burn calories
Average Daily Metabolic Rate for Maintenance: 1893
Average Weekly Fat Loss: 1.06 lbs
Scale Weight Loss: 19.6 lbs
Lean Body Mass: -6.34 although I suspect much of this number to have been fluid loss a result of having to give up my typical lunch, dinner and desert - Hostess Cupcakes.

I should say here that I actually stopped losing on Weight Watchers after 67 days. This is important to know given what happens next:

South Beach Diet - I didn’t do this properly. I ate grains maybe 3x a week on average.
386 Days
Average Calories: 1325
Exercise: 40-90 minutes cardio, 20 minutes light resistance 4-5 days a week.
Fat Loss: 32.29 lbs = 292 average daily fat burn calories
Average Daily Metabolic Rate for Maintenance: 1617
Average Weekly Fat Loss: .58 lbs
Scale Weight Loss: 26.5 lbs
Lean Body Mass: +5.79 - I assume this is just a regain of the fluid loss during Weight Watchers. I wasn’t eating enough to gain LBM! Then again, any day over 1617 calories, which I certainly would have had on occasion (I’m not perfect), I could have gained.

So after going low low cal on Weight Watchers and getting stuck, I switched to South Beach. I never lost the whatever 7-10lbs they promise in the first 2 weeks. I think I lost 4 or 5, and then of course, because I’d sent my metabolic rate to hell, I got stuck again for about 5 months. I lost the same 2 lbs for 5 months. I have no idea how or why I kept going!

So, totals for the low calorie, dirty (not clean like the plan I follow now) diet:
473 Days
Average Daily Calories: 1343
Fat Loss: 45.55 lbs: = 337 average daily fat burn calories
Average Daily Metabolic Rate for Maintenance: 1680

Also note that metabolic rate INCLUDES exercise. Here are the numbers, or what would be my approximate basal metabolic rate based on the Harris Benedict formula:

Weight Watchers: 1551
South Beach: 1155

Here’s what my BMR should have been based on the same formula and my average weight for the respective time frames:

Weight Watchers: 1654 - so to start I’m close to what I should have been
South Beach: 1549 - that’s 394 less calories burned at rest per day. Here’s how that adds up over the 386 days:

394 calories x 386 days = 15,2084 calories / 3500 calories per pound = 43.45 pounds I could have lost but didn’t because I wasn’t eating enough.

Thanks to long term low calorie, not even super low starvation level calories, but the calorie range most women think they should eat to lose weight in, 1200-1400 calories, I actually succeeded in slowing down my weight loss by over 50%! Why the hell would anyone want to starve themselves fat? Maybe because they don’t realize they’re doing it?

If you are one of those people that hates to journal, you may want to reconsider. At least know for sure what you are consuming and what you are expending. I use Diet Power to track my nutrition and exercise. Try it free for 15 days.

I don’t see how this fat loss thing can be done, long term, any other way. We have to know how our bodies are responding to what we are doing. How can we know if what we are doing is working, or not, if we don’t know what we are doing in the first place??

Check back tomorrow for what happened in September ‘07 after a few days of being sick and not caring about what I put into my body. Look at my BMR and well, anyone who can tell me what happened gets a gold star.

I fell asleep with the TV on last night. When I woke up there was some hot minister guy in jeans, quoting cool R&B lyrics, talking about how to pray. I like to watch these guys sometimes. He was hot, so I watched. After the sermon, or whatever it is they call it, they go to an audience member who talked about how he’d lost 70 pounds after taking part in some program offered by the hot minister dude. Then comes the sales pitch….

The viewer is told that in return for a gift of $30 or more, they would receive the complete sermon/program on DVD, a cookbook, and a creative exercise DVD.

That’s how my day started. With a laugh.

A while later I come up here to my computer and on the front page of Yahoo is a link to an article about weight loss, I forget what the hook line was. So, like the idiot I am, I click on said link to find an article by a woman who claims to have invented spinning. Maybe she did? I wouldn’t know. Here’s something she said:

Our bodies are built to survive, so when you exercise for long periods of time (often and consistently) your body thinks it needs to hold on to fat for energy.

Yeah, that make sense. Most marathon runners are like really fat, right? So we shouldn’t exercise too much if we want to keep fat off. Maybe I should just go sit on the couch?

Oh wait, no, no couch potato for me today. She does say we need to do resistance training. Hmm….does she want me to lift weights?

Nope.

Nobody wants to exercise more - and we don’t want to train our bodies to need more exercise to stay fit. So exercise efficiently – two short, very intense (relative to your level of fitness) training sessions weekly, like a 15-minute fast run/walk or fast cycling sprint intervals, and two moderately long, moderately intense sessions (30-45 minutes) of strong walking, cycling, or yoga, with one long day (60-90 minutes) of a moderately paced walk/hike. That’s a great five-day/week training schedule.

4. Instead of adding more days to your workout schedule, add a weighted vest to your training. I have said this before, but this is the most efficient way that I know of to build muscle while burning calories. For more information, go to (I will not link big fat lies from my blog)

So, she’s selling a weighted vest I am supposed to wear while I walk. It comes with eight half pound weights - so, according to my bad math, yes, I had to use a calculator, that’s four pounds. Here’s what the website states will be accomplished with four pounds:

Walk in the comfortable (insert name of big fat lie here) and see dramatic changes in your body quickly.

• Lose Weight
• Build Bone Density
• Sculpt and Tone
• Increase Cardiovascular Strength
• Reduce Stress and Anxiety

The sickest part is that there was over 1100 comments from readers, the vast majority agreeing with the article, saying that it was exactly what they were doing; they are exercising less and it is working.

OK. Whatever.

When we consistently expend significantly more energy than we take in our metabolic rate slows - whether we are exercising or not.

If you exercise less without altering calorie intake and you lose weight faster without exercise, you were likely not eating enough calories to sustain the activity level. In effect, (not actuality) your body will react to the continued calorie deficit created by exercise as starvation - the same way it would if you stopped eating!

Or, it could be that if you’ve increased intensity but decreased overall time while keeping calories the same, you probably weren’t working out hard enough to create an energy deficit.

If you’ve read this far you’re probably wondering where “Fast Weight Loss Tip #1″ is aren’t you? I already gave it to you.

Pray. Pray for a miracle.

Here’s what no one selling fast weight loss solutions will ever tell you because if they did you wouldn’t buy their product:

There is no fast/easy way to shed fat. It takes time, effort, patience, loads and loads of patience, and sources of unbiased information. Most of those are things you can’t buy but you can certainly pray for.

Spending some time in quiet meditation praying will at the very least reduce stress levels which reduces cortisol and adrenaline, which in turn can sometimes enhance fat loss. And, as those of us trying to shed fat know, especially after the scale hasn’t moved for days or weeks on end, fat loss can certainly feel like a miracle.

My “next” post, err uhm this post, was supposed to be about my current motivation for losing weight. I’ll get to that later. I’m irritated today. I’m irritated by the plethora of misleading, erroneous, and sometimes harmful information I keep reading online. Some of this disinformation is being passed around by self proclaimed experts. Of which I am one. I am an expert at cutting through the bullshit. It’s the Scorpio in me.

I was going to write up an “about this blog” sort of page. This will be a rough, probably too bitchy first draft. In case you missed it, the title of this blog is “Deconstructing the Meme”.

First, my definitions:

deconstructing: Breaking down, taking apart, getting to the core.

meme: Ideas spread from one person to another; commonly held beliefs, or bullshit that many accept as fact.

Here are some “official” definitions. I particularly like the one for meme:

de·con·struct (dē’kən-strŭkt’) tr.v. de·con·struct·ed, de·con·struct·ing, de·con·structs
1. To break down into components; dismantle.
2. To write about or analyze (a literary text, for example), following the tenets of deconstruction.

meme philosophy
/meem/ [By analogy with “gene”] Richard Dawkins’s term for an idea considered as a replicator, especially with the connotation that memes parasitise people into propagating them much as viruses do.

Memes can be considered the unit of cultural evolution. Ideas can evolve in a way analogous to biological evolution. Some ideas survive better than others; ideas can mutate through, for example, misunderstandings; and two ideas can recombine to produce a new idea involving elements of each parent idea.

The term is used especially in the phrase “meme complex” denoting a group of mutually supporting memes that form an organised belief system, such as a religion. However, “meme” is often misused to mean “meme complex”.

Use of the term connotes acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has become more important than biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.

OK. Now for the rant…..

Over the past two days I’ve seen discussions online regarding weight, diet, nutrition, and fitness that are infected by parasitic, harmful memes, i.e. bullshit).

First there was a question asked on a fitness forum about whether or not the person should do yoga more than once a week. The poster was concerned by the fact that after three weeks, which means three sessions, they could not get into some of the asanas.

Of course, as is far too typical, a yoga hater immediately jumped in with a snide comment all but outright stating that the question was stupid. They told poster to do something more useful - without stating what that more useful thing might be, much less why yoga was not a good idea.

The “expert” stated, “trust me, I do this for a living”, and then proceeded later in the thread to tell the poster to buy a book on weight training. I own that particular book and it is a good one. However, the program in the book does not address flexibility training aside from a few pre-workout stretches and a later heads up to yoga’s potential benefits.

The poster wasn’t asking about weight training, they were asking about flexibility! And, anyone who “does this for a living” should know that full range of motion, flexibility that is, is required for safe, effective weight training.

The funny thing was, some of the workouts in the recommended book “The New Rules of Lifting for Women”, include the yoga asanas cobra and plank. And, it’s not the first popular workout to include yoga asanas. They just don’t call it yoga. And it’s a good thing they don’t call it that because yoga is more than asanas, or the poses.

What irritated me was that the so called “expert” was snide and put the questioner on the defensive. For what reason? Because they asked about yoga specifically? And how much does the “professional” actually know about yoga other than it’s for girls who are afraid to get “bulky” and gay men?

All the trainer succeeded in doing was making the poster feel stupid. He does that for a living? Good for him. I hear karma’s a bitch.

There is a large contention of bodybuilder/strength trainer yoga haters. Yes, there are certainly risks involved in yoga, especially these days when you can get a mail order cert no better than the online certs many Golds Gym trainers have. From what I’ve seen, none of these yoga haters are aware of how a safe yoga practice can enhance the effectiveness and safety of a weight training program. More on that in another post on my list of things to do!

Then there was another discussion that Billy was a part of where the people involved in the discussion were basically disciples of the blog author and strict followers of the very low carb lifestyle craze. The discussion was a perfect example of a meme. Some, not all, people, get this idea into their head, find a diet change or lifestyle change that worked for them and assume because that one thing worked it is the one and only gospel truth for all; fact. Anyone who does not follow scripture, in this case Billy, is a heretic doomed to failure. People become blinded by their beliefs.

In that particular discussion, many were basically giving up personal power and self control; believing that it’s carbs that make them eat too much and/or gain weight. Carbs and carbs alone. Yes, too many carbs can do that to some degree or not, depending on your particular metabolism. It’s an individual thing. True for some. Untrue for others. That’s just the way life is.

Yet, according the some of those folks, making the personal choice of whether or not to eat carbs plays no role in weight loss maintenance - at least according to low carb scripture anyway. They are seemingly giving all their personal power and ability choose what to eat over to carbs and maybe food marketers.

Uhm, excuse me but please do not pass the Kool-aid, even if it is sugar free and will earn me a free pass to hang out with the 72 virgins.

3. kool aid

“…The term was popularly referenced in the 1993 film, “The War Room” by George Stephonopolous when he states, “I’m afraid we’re all going to have to drink Kool-Aid.”

The term references the Jonestown massacre in 1978 when all of its inhabitants were directed to ingest cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. “

And then there was this.

I don’t have the steam left to type all that is wrong with the discussion in that thread. It was in the top results of a Google search for “why do I keep gaining back weight”. There is just too much in that thread to pick apart. The kicker was the last person who said:

“A lot of the advice being given here is good, but a lot of it is, really, really bad. In particular, the line of thinking which says to “exercise, and eat when you are hungry” almost certainly will not work for you. Fortunately, I can tell you why it won’t work and what you can do to end your cycle.

This is how your body works (you may already know this part, so I apologize if this basic explanation is unnecessary for you): when you take in more calories than you burn over time, you gain weight. When you burn more calories than you take in, you lose weight. One pound of fat is equivalent to 2500 calories, so if you take in 2500 calories more than you burn over the course of a week, you will gain precisely one poind of weight.”

Uhm, not quite. It’s actually 3500 calories in a pound, but eh who’s counting? It only gets worse from there. I guess I should be laughing but jeez, who knows how many people will read that top Google result and try to make healthy lifestyle choices based on it?

And that, in a nutshell, is my issue today. People are not being helped. People are making efforts to get themselves healthy and you’ve got idiots all over the place spewing bullshit and that bullshit gets #6 in a Google search. I mean even my own doctor spewed bullshit at me. She didn’t do it intentionally. She did it because there is this meme that has infected far too many of us. The meme is that fat people just eat too much.

I was fat. I ate too many calories and yes, that’s how I got fat no doubt. Eating too many calories was NOT the reason I couldn’t lose the weight. In fact, I was eating too few. My weight loss stalled and I was told by a medical doctor to eat less, which in the end made it even more difficult for me to lose weight. She didn’t even believe me when I told her how much I worked out - 90 minutes a day at the time. She just told me to eat less.

So, my aim here in this blog, is to expose many commonly held ideas for what they are; bullshit.