PSA: Scales Measure Gravity, Not Health, Happiness, Success, or Effort

Just a periodic reminder that scales measure the gravitational pull of the earth at a given moment in time - nothing else.

Scales don't measure the presence or absence of health.

Scales don't measure happiness.

Scales don't measure success.

And scales don't measure effort.

Too many people believe scales measure things other than gravity, and for some, those beliefs lead them to abandon their best efforts.

If you're ever curious about how you're doing, consider the fact that the answer to that question has to do with the doing.

Are you cooking more frequently? Minimizing your liquid calories? Decreasing your restaurant reliance? Not drinking to excess? Cultivating sleep? Exercising as much and as often as you can reasonably enjoy? Keeping a food diary of some sort?

The answer to those questions (and of course that list isn't exhaustive, nor will all questions apply to all people) are how you're doing.

Please don't confuse what you weigh with how you're doing. Though there's often overlap, they're definitely not one in the same.

Real Life Weight Loss: Are You Up 2, Or Down 30?

It's something I see all the time. Someone's done an incredible job at cultivating a new lifestyle and has also lost weight.

Then life throws them a kick of some sort (illness, injury, mood disturbance, holiday, birthday, vacation, promotion, etc.) and things go a bit awry and those new behaviours slide and some weight is regained.

Really, that's real life. Our efforts, our motivation, our stressors, our responsibilities - they're not straight lines.

And with most areas of our life, we're cool with that. We appreciate that our best efforts will vary.

But not so much with weight management.

Often times with weight management, slight, real-life related slides in behaviours and rises in weight, lead people to quit altogether. Suddenly they're up two pounds, frustrated, and worse, considering themselves failure and their efforts impossible.

It's times like these that I tend to remind people, like I did yesterday in my office with the patient whose chart is up above, who has lost over 30lbs over the past 16 months and recently regained 2, that it's their choice whether they want to perceive their outcome as being up 2, or down 30.

If things aren't going your way, if you're unhappy with what you've been doing or not doing, rather than beat yourself up about it, reframe, respect reality, and them remember that the best question you can ask yourself is, "What can I do right now that will help a little", and then do it.

Real Life Weight Loss: 3 Years, 3 Kicks at the Can, 38% Loss

Sometimes it takes more than one swing at change to make it stick. The key to success in anything at life is perseverance. The whole if at first you don't succeed try, try, again adage really is true.

Whether it's relationships, school, work, and yes, weight management and lifestyle change, you're going to have swings and misses. You're also likely to have bad weeks, bad months, and potentially even bad years. If you want to see long term success however, dusting yourself off, picking yourself up, and trying again is key.

Take the graph up above. It's from a lovely real life patient my office has been working with for the past 4 years (and who has kindly agreed to allow me to write about her). As you can see, her path has been anything but straight.

Her first two kicks she was mired in diet-world. She punished herself with all or nothing style thinking and number-centricity, and struggled with self-monitoring as it led her to feel defeated by imperfection.

But then something clicked. She stopped using her food diary as a means to punish herself, she stopped trying to always be "on" her "diet", and instead embraced two things - consistency in self-monitoring, and imperfection in her efforts.

All told she's lost 38% of her peak weight (graph's in kgs) and has seen her BMI drop from 35 to 22.9. It's been two years now with her current approach and she denies that she's "dieting", allows herself regular dietary indulgences, doesn't beat herself up if real life gets in her way, keeps a non-judgmental food diary, and has cultivated a love affair with cooking.

Though I've no doubt she'll have some ups and downs with weight and life in the future (just as I will), I'm not worried about her long term success as the approach she's found that's working for her doesn't involve suffering.

Nothing Will Change If You Change Nothing

There's no denying the fact that change is difficult.

Whether you're hoping to improve nutrition, weight, fitness, relationships, work, school, parenting - truly whatever - change itself, and not necessarily the actual changes, is the real challenge.

Finding motivation is also relatively easy, at least when compared with maintaining motivation, and therein hunting for small victories, building a system that reminds you of the changes you're trying to adopt and why you're trying to adopt them, these can go a long, long, way.

Recently my friend (and husband to the world's greatest literary agent) Brad shared a video with me about a man, his dog, and sustained change.

It's definitely worth a watch.

This Is What 7 Years of Real-Life Weight Management Looks Like

It isn't a straight line.

The graph up above is from a patient of mine that I've been seeing since the fall of 2007 (for you Americans, the weight axis is in kg).

The fact that her loss is anything but a straight line is pretty damn normal because truly nothing in life is a straight line.

What's not normal, or at least what isn't common, is that year and a half segment from the fall of 2008 through the spring of 2010 where her weight pretty much stayed the same. Not that people's weights can't or don't stabilize, but rather that most folks who are trying to manage their weights tend to give up if the scale doesn't keep going down.

Of course had she given up back then she probably wouldn't have gone on to lose 50 more pounds and may well have regained the 35 or so she had lost before her weight first stabilized.

Weight loss is about embracing your own personal best. At the time she wasn't losing her job required a great deal of travel and consequently she was reliant on many more restaurant meals and far less organization in her dietary life. When that changed, she started to lose again.

If you look carefully at the graph you'll see a little uptick in her weight over this past holiday season. She's not sweating it. Her experience has taught her that if she tries decrease her intake too quickly, it'll lead her to binging and so instead she's cutting her calories back down a little bit at a time.

All this to say, and I've said it before, success is about consistency, embracing imperfection, and being proud of your best, where your best is the healthiest life that you can enjoy living, not the healthiest life that you can tolerate.

Her best, and yours, are great, and scales can't help you to determine what your best is.

What's Your Most Valuable Relationship?

I love my wife.

We've been married now for 11 years, have 3 wonderful children, and I'm regularly and truly awed by what a tremendous human being, mother and wife she is.

But that doesn't mean we never fight.

We probably fought more often at the beginning of our marriage than now. Usually our fights are better described as disagreements and more often than not they last just the course of a heated discussion. Sometimes however, they last an evening. And on extremely rare occasions, they've been lengthier, weeks even, with the impact of our frustrations interfering with the very nature of our relationship and causing us to take real steps backwards.

Eventually though, we find our way back together.

Now if we'd decided to throw in the towel after our first major blowout (which if my memory serves believe it or not somehow began with us arguing over how to install an in-window air conditioner), we'd have been done our first year in. But the reason we haven't thrown in the towel when times have been tough is because we consider our marriage and one another to be tremendously valuable and worth working on in times of need.

I'm guessing you're seeing where I'm going with this.

Living healthfully is tremendously valuable too, and like a marriage, it's a long term commitment. It may be more difficult that first year or two as you truly get to know one another. There are going to be regular ups and downs and out of the blue fights and disappointments. And some of those fights might well last week or months leading you to slide back to towards less healthful living, but if health is something you value, you're going to need to work on it, to nurture it, and sometimes, especially after a major blowout, it may require very slow, gentle, purposeful baby steps, before you find your way back.

All or Nothing Thinking Will Always (Eventually) Get you Nothing

Is there an area of life that is more all or nothing than dieting and weight management?

Truly everything else in our lives we'll happily accept our personal bests as great, and more importantly, we're realistic about them. We appreciate that while we can no doubt always do better or try harder that there are fair limits to how hard we can try.

I remember trying to get into medical school. Boy I spent a lot of time in the library and when I didn't get in to medical school on my first try, following my rejection I didn't wish I'd truly eliminated every last ounce of my social life to study - I was disappointed, but I was sure that I had done my best knowing full well that at the expense of real life no doubt I could have done more.

Bests aren't perfection. Bests are affected by real life. Bests need flexibility. And bests change depending on circumstances.

Those folks who head into weight management thinking their bests need to be perfect, that they need to always be on? No doubt in my mind for the vast majority it's just a matter of time before they've frustrated and disappointed themselves often or badly enough that they'll quit trying altogether.

All or nothing almost always gets you nothing.

If You Need Something Uplifting To Watch - This Is It.

It sure has been an ugly week.

Rather than Funny Friday, this week's video is a testament to good people out there.

I'm not going to describe it - just watch it, and feel good about humanity.

Have a great weekend!

(email subscribers, head to the blog to watch)

Do You Confuse How You're Doing With What You Weigh?

It's certainly what society teaches.

If you're trying to lose or maintain your weight the scale will tell you how you're doing.

Bollocks.

The scale never tells you how you're doing. The scale only tells you what you weigh.

How you're doing is what you're actually doing. Are you cooking healthful meals? Are you organizing your dietary timing, calories, and proteins? Are you minimizing meals out? Are you being thoughtful? Are you keeping track of your choices and intake? Are you exercising? Are you consistent in your efforts?

Boiling it down even further ask yourself,

"Am I living the healthiest life that I can honestly enjoy?"

If the answer's yes, you're doing great - scale be damned.

The fact is sometimes you weigh more than how you're doing even when you're doing great.

What's Your Best Worst Choice?

In any given week I bet I hear the phrase, "I fell off the wagon", at least 5 times.

Makes me think the folks who are uttering it are on the wrong wagon.

If your goal is simply to do your best, there's really never any need to fall off any moving objects.

Sure, you might for various reasons make nutritionally or calorically frightening choices, but so long as you asked yourself those two ever important questions, "Is it worth it", and, "How much do I need to be happily satisfied", there can't be a wrong choice.

Sometimes your best may be a basket of chicken wings but perhaps a smaller basket than normal and one less beer, or a fancy coffee with whip just ordered less frequently, or Chinese take out minus the calorie-insane General Tsao's staple, or a bowl of ice-cream instead of a pint, or a small bag of chips rather than the giant bag, or a full-sized chocolate bar rather than a Blizzard.

What I'm getting at is that sometimes we make choices that are less than ideal, but that so long as you've made your best worst choice, you're still doing great!

Make Sure Your Inches Aren't Actually Miles

It's human nature, isn't it? If you give yourself an inch, you're liable to take a mile.

Skip your workout for no good reason, rely on boxes for your family's nutrition, have a "write-off" vacation, a regularly scheduled "cheat" day - there are no shortage of inches out there just waiting to get turned into miles.

Now of course, there will be times where real life does preclude your best intentions and inches are necessarily and understandably taken, but it's the inches for no reason that I worry about.

I blogged once that there are times when suffering's warranted. Another time I blogged about how healthy living requires effort. Both are true, but I can't help but wonder how many folks' best intentions were waylaid by the simple fact that they bit off more than they could chew - that their inches were in fact miles.

Better to take small careful steps of change than to require huge bounding leaps as this race never ends and you really best try not to get tired.

The Truth? Healthy Living Requires Effort.

(I want to preface this post by explicitly stating it isn't about weight. Healthy living isn't determined by your weight and this post applies to everyone regardless of their weight - being skinny is no more automatically synonymous with living a healthy life than being fat is with living an unhealthy one)

I need to expand a bit on my last few posts.

The unfair truth is that living a healthy life requires effort. It requires making time to include regular exercise. It requires making time to cook real food. For most, those two things will require reorganizing schedules, taking long hard looks at after school and work obligations, and for many it will require developing new skill sets involving both fitness and cooking.

It wasn't always this way.

Once upon a time many jobs were physically demanding. Once upon a time eating out and processed meals simply weren't an option. Once upon a time calories weren't cheap. Once upon a time we had more time.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting life was idyllic 60 years ago. Human nature being what it is I'm sure many still didn't prioritize exercise, and that many more, while cooking, certainly weren't cooking healthful meals.

That said, if someone wanted to improve their health 60 years ago, cooking wouldn't be a foreign concept, and their after work and weekend time for things like fitness would likely not have been taken up with after school chauffeuring or the electronic tethers to which we've all grown accustomed and dependent.

What you need to do to improve your health may not be in and of itself complicated, but finding the time and skill to do so in this current environment undoubtedly is.

But it's only a hardship if you make it one. Attitude's crucial to winning a healthy living fight. Exercise isn't about day to day suffering, it's about living a longer, better, more functionally independent, literally less painful life. Cooking's not about being a time consuming chore, it's about improving the health of your family and perhaps becoming less reliant on medications.

And one thing's for certain. It does require effort, and if anyone (including yourself) ever tells you differently they're either ignorant or they're liars.

Like anything valuable in life - education, marriage, parenthood, work - you get out what you put in, there are no shortcuts.

So what do you need to do? First I'd recommend you ignore the minutia and remember that there's no perfect diet (for health or for weight management) and no one way to go - and please ignore whatever the latest study they're trumpeting in the news. And then?

• Cook more frequently from whole ingredients (eating out less frequently and eating fewer processed meals).
• Move more and intentionally include as much exercise as you can enjoy into your life (your toothbrush level of exercise).
• Live the life you want your children to live and include them in all of your health living endeavors (teaching them the joy and value of cooking and exercise)
• Be a quitter if you need to.
• Never ever forget that the best you can do varies day by day and that your personal best is always great.

Is it fair?

Never.

Is it easy?

Definitely not at the beginning, and certainly not always after that.

Is it doable?

Absolutely.

It's about priorities and choices. That doesn't mean you're a bad person or parent if you don't choose to live with a healthy lifestyle - we're all entitled to choose the way in which we live our lives - but if your desire is a healthy lifestyle and you simply think it isn't doable then I think you're shortchanging yourself.

Health is incredibly valuable.  It requires effort.  There's just no way around that.

The Debt Snowball Method of Lifestyle Change

Have you ever heard of the debt snowball method of debt reduction?

It's somewhat counter-intuitive in that the method recommends regardless of differences in interest rates you pay off your smallest debt first, pay only the minimum on your larger debts, and then slowly work your way up your line paying off your next smallest debt.

While it may not make sense mathematically its theory suggests you'll pay off your debts faster consequent to the more frequent psychological benefits of seeing debts disappear. It's about accumulating "quick wins" and then using the pride generated therein to fuel forward momentum.

For some people, the same may be said to be true about lifestyle change.

The thing about trying to improve lifestyle - change is difficult, and sometimes, almost like being deeply in debt, people feel that there's so much in need of changing that they get overwhelmed even thinking about it.

If you're struggling with the sense of an overwhelming amount of change, why not try the snowball method? Spend some time this weekend with a good cup of coffee and make a list of as many specific changes you'd like to make, and then rank them in order of ease.

Put the list somewhere prominent and then one by one, start working on crossing them off.

Pride builds a mean snowball.

The Beauty of a Single Second

Life's fleeting.

Today's Funny Friday video isn't so much funny as it is astounding in its ability to demonstrate how much beauty can exist in even a single second.

Thanks to my wonderful wife and my delicious children, I'm blessed with many such seconds.

Have a great weekend!


Seconds Of Beauty - 1st round compilation from The Beauty Of A Second on Vimeo.

Life's not a straight line (and some runs stink).

Further to my post on accepting your personal best as great, one more point.

Life's not a straight line.

Pick anything in life - education, relationships, work - they'll all have their ups and downs. Sometimes for obvious reasons, but sometimes for no good reason at all. Life includes its fair share of inexplicable funks.

As with any real funk, the most important thing is recognizing it for what it is and soldiering on through to the other side.

Running's a great example. From my office I have 3 set running routes. One's 4km, another 5km and the last 7km with the amount of time I have at hand in part determining which route I take.

A few weeks ago I ran my best 4km. I felt strong, breathing was easy, my strides natural. All in all feeling really great allowed me to push. Fast forward a week later, same route, same time of day and within 1km I knew I was in for a crummy run. I hurt, my breathing was laboured, and I spent the last 3km mentally forcing myself to finish. It was anything but a fast and easy run.

Was I upset that my run stunk and my time was markedly slower than just a week earlier? Nope. I was proud as hell I finished because that run. It wasn't about speed. It was simply about finishing despite not really wanting to, and doing the best I could while feeling crummy.

Whatever your aim, whatever you're trying to accomplish, some runs will feel great, and some won't. Your job (and yes, I know I'm a broken record)?

Do your best, and love it!

You Can Always Do Your Best!

Ever have a write-off day?

Where stuff happens that leads you to feel like the day's a write-off and there's no point in even trying?

There's no need for that if your best is your goal.

What do I mean?

Although we'll all have days when our great intentions go awry, that should never preclude the fact that you can still do your best.

Your best when things have gone awry may well not be the same as your best when all systems are go, but it'll still be your best.

If your goal is to do your best, and you remember that your best changes by the hour let alone by the day, it'll take the pressure of perfection off your shoulders.

And really, other than weight is there any other area of your life where you wouldn't accept your personal best as great?

The best you can do if you're hungry or have cravings will be different than the best you can do when you don't. The best you can do on your birthday will be different than a plain old Thursday. The best you can do after a really crappy or stressful day will be different than a boring one. And so on, and so forth.

Perfection's an awful goal.

Do your best.

Enjoy every sandwich!

Do yourself a favour. Watch this video, and when it's available, consider buying the book.



[Hat tip to my inspirational friend and colleage Dr. Derek Puddester]

Are you Trying to Qualify for the Boston Marathon of Weight Loss?

This year I turned 40.

In so doing, it bought me an extra 5 minute cushion for my Boston Marathon qualifying time.

But here's the thing.

I'm an incredibly slow runner, and I've yet to run a marathon. That said, I'd like to run one, and I figure a realistic time for me will likely be somewhere around the 4:30 mark.

But let's say I get it in my head that my goal isn't just to run a marathon and try my best, but rather my goal is to run a marathon and qualify for Boston.

The way I see it, there are only two possible outcomes:

1. I qualify.
2. I don't.

Unpacking outcome number one, qualifying sure wouldn't come easy. In order to qualify, in a best case scenario it would likely involve me killing myself training for nearly a year. And I mean killing myself. I'd have to neglect my family to the point of my wife threatening to leave, I'd have to abandon my patients and I'd have to hurt all the time from the insane amount of running I'd be doing.

Here's something else I'm pretty sure of. If I did qualify after killing myself training, I'm certain that when I finally ran Boston my time would be slower than my qualifying run. Why? Because why would I sustain a level of training that very negatively impacted my quality of life if I already achieved my goal?

Unpacking outcome number two, if after killing myself training for a year I didn't come anywhere near qualifying, chances are I'd just stop, because after all, what'd be the point of continuing to try if my goal was qualifying for Boston and I came up way short after all that incredibly hard work?

I think you probably see where I'm going with this.

Setting a massive numerical weight loss goal simply isn't wise. If you have to kill yourself to get there, you probably won't stay there, and if you kill yourself only to fall short, you'll probably stop killing yourself.

For me, my running goal will simply be running. Yes, a marathon is actually on my bucket list, but if every time I started running distances I began to hurt too much, or simply hated it, chances are I'll just take it off my list. Really, at the end of the day, my running goal is to be able to look back upon my training and feel like I did my best. Not the best I could tolerate, but the best I could enjoy.

That's not so strange. Generally we accept our personal bests as great at most everything, and if I feel I tried my best, I'll be alright with that.

What's truly strange is that somehow, when it comes to weight, people tend not to want to accept their personal best as great. Somehow when it comes to weight, everyone seems to think the goal isn't their best, but rather it's to qualify.

Well I'm here to tell you, your best is great, and whatever weight you reach when you're living the healthiest life you enjoy, that's damn great.

So if you qualify for Boston, well that's a heady bonus, but your real goal? Just enjoy your running, pace and time be damned.

Do you need a Weight Loss Bookie?

I read a fascinating piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago. It was about a new online service that allows you to place monetary bets regarding your ability to meet your own specified lifestyle goals. Bets may range from quitting smoking, quitting drinking, spending less, studying more etc., but one of the most popular categories are weight loss bets.

Every week you fail to meet your goals the site bills your credit card and then holds your money in escrow until the end of your challenge. Who gets your money then is up to you. You can of course set up bets whereby you've challenged a friend and the winner takes all, or you can allocate it to charity but more interestingly you also set it up so that the money goes an "anti"-charity (someone you'd hate to see your money go to).

The site, StickK.com is the brainchild of Yale professors Dean Karlan and Ian Ayres who had done research on how contractual committments helped with both smoking cessation and weight loss and with the help of a graduate student of theirs, set up the site.

I think it's a brilliant website and certainly for some may help them getting that last little bit of motivation to finally do whatever it is they've now entered into a binding contract to do.

Who'd be your "anti"-charity. Not too tough to figure out who mine might be.

Jamie Oliver's Latest Great Idea (Must See TV)!

Right now it's only airing across the pond (in the UK) but thanks to the magic of the internet, with a bit of effort, you can watch it in North America.

It's Jamie Oliver's new social experiment, The Ministry of Food.

So what's his big new idea?

Go to a city of 250,000 people in Northern England, a city with one of the highest obesity rates in the nation. Once there harness the power of social networking to try to teach the city to cook.

Teach 8 cooks 10 recipes in return for a promise that they each teach two people and each of them two people and so on and in less than 6 months, all of Rotherham ought to be able to cook.

The show provides a fascinating snapshot into the lives of some working class folks out in Rotherham and the pressures surrounding making home cooked meals (do you spend your welfare check on the bus tickets it takes to travel with your two under 6 year old kids to purchase fresh produce or do you save yourself the time and energy and go to a "take-away"?) and it's also a fascinating social experiment.

So far I'm completely captivated by the first two episodes and can't wait to see more.

For a sneak peak, here's a youtube clip of the show's first 10 minutes (sorry, can't embed it).

Find it, watch it, you won't regret it and until then, head over to his website and you 'll find that already his social experiment has sprouted wings as there are 612 bloggers currently blogging about their newest cooking escapades and literally thousands of posts in the forums.

Great job Jamie! Wish you were Canadian!