Things you learn in the grocery store: 3 common mistakes made in the gym

I have a knack for choosing the longest, slowest line at the grocery store (please tell me I’m not alone in this feat).  This rainy, dreary afternoon was no different, but I did overhear a couple discussing their frustration with weight loss and how exercise just "doesn't work."  I tried not to eavesdrop, but honestly I was hanging onto every word they said.  I wasn't getting any closer to checking out, so we stood in line, they discussed, and I listened. 

There are several different directions to go with this topic, but I chose to tackle (in my own head of course) the top three mistakes people make in the gym with exercise.  First, the body responds to change, and it is all too common (and easy) to start an exercise program and the next thing you know time has elapsed and you are doing the exact same thing over and over again.  Not only is this monotonous and mundane, but you won’t be optimizing the many benefits of physical activity.  There is a term in exercise world referred to as the 'overload principal' that simply states you have to be constantly thinking ahead and looking for the next step.  Take for example, walking for 30 minutes on a treadmill.  You will get a lot more out of this activity if you give yourself permission to push buttons.  Try mixing up the speed/grade/intensity.  Try a different exercise all together.  You may find you can decrease your time while increasing intensity, and who wouldn’t want more time on their hands. 

Second, one of my favorite adapted sayings in the gym has become “you have to straighten before you can strengthen.”  I find this especially true of people beginning an exercise program.  Keep in mind we learn to crawl before we walk and walk before we run; the same holds true with focusing on proper form and technique.  This statement encompasses a broad spectrum, but if you are not completing full range of motion on a bicep curl or maintaining proper posture on the elliptical machine you may be in fact setting yourself up for injury.  Maybe even more common, I run into a lot of people with back and neck pain.  There could be a lot of reasons for this, but if you are not addressing the potential postural problems with flexibility, and proper weight training, you could end up aggravating a problem.

Third, when I finally made it out of the grocery store, I hear my new friends say, “I want to get rid of these love handles and I do over 100 sit-ups every day.”  Wow, where do I start?  They have the strongest abs of anyone I know but it’s all behind a layer of fat.  We all know what love handles are, and we all want to get rid of them.  The question is how do we do it?  The ‘love handle’ is basically a build up of fat around the waist, and all the crunches, twists, and sit-ups in the world won’t get rid of them.  The answer to getting rid of fat throughout the body requires a combination of cardio, resistance training and a solid diet plan that leads to a calorie deficit. 

While exercise is something that feels natural (at least to some), there is a right way and a wrong way to approach it. Set yourself up for success by staying informed. Let’s get moving together!

Hurry up!

Sometimes our patience can wear thin, especially when our expectations aren't met. In the process of losing weight, patience truly is a virtue.

When most patients come to our program, they focus on what they want at the end of the process. They have a specific goal in mind which is usually a certain number of pounds they would like to weigh. The idea of reaching that goal is often singular in their mind. By this, I mean that instead of seeing a number of different behaviors that have to be done to achieve the goal of losing weight, they think of it as one simple thing.

However, anyone who has done it successfully knows that losing weight is a function of doing several things together. And, if you're doing it correctly, there is benefit from each of the things that you are doing even if they don't individually lead to weight loss. For example, being physically activity on a regular basis is good for your weight, but also lowers blood pressure, cholesterol, and improves your mood. All of these are beneficial for you, even if you don't lose a pound from being physically active.

The process of losing weight is not linear-- you can't predict with any consistency what will happen with your weight on a day to day basis even if you repeat the same exact behaviors every day. If you are not patient, this can be frustrating and you begin to wonder, "What did I do wrong?" If you have been maintaining the healthy behaviors that are part of your new lifestyle, you've done NOTHING wrong. In fact, you've been practicing the behaviors that are going to keep you healthy lifelong. When you take this perspective, your weight loss is a nice by-product of your healthy lifestyle, not your singular focus.

Now you can save your patience for something else...like traffic on highway 280!

Rethinking Exercise

-Brooks Wingo, PhD

For many people, the thought of exercise brings up of pictures of pounding away hours on some form of immobile gym equipment while staring blankly into a TV screen that you can’t really hear.  How can anyone love exercise so much that they spend an hour a day on the treadmill; especially with having to work, raise a family, and maintain some form of social life?  This sounds like a bit of an exaggeration, but my point is that many times the thought of exercise is more difficult to overcome than the physical exertion we dread so much.   In this post, I want to address 3 common mental errors that people often have when trying to initiate a new exercise plan.

The first mental error is failing to plan.  The old adage “failing to plan is planning to fail” definitely holds true for establishing a good exercise routine. One of the most common reasons people fail to get in enough exercise is time.  Most of us have so many responsibilities that it feels like there is no way to fit in one more thing.  Sit down on a Sunday afternoon and look at your calendar for the week.  Find any available blocks of time and plan your exercise during those times.  Write it on your calendar, just like a dentist appointment.  Then each evening, pack your bag for the next day’s work out.  10-15 minutes of planning ahead can lead to hours more exercise, and much less guilt about missing workouts. 

The second mental error is all or none thinking.  If I can’t spend an hour exercising, it’s not worth going at all, right? Wrong.  When it comes to weight loss, a calorie is a calorie.  You can burn calories by taking the stairs instead of the elevator, walking around the block during a 10 minute break or walking across campus rather than driving around looking for a good parking spot.  There are all different levels of activity and exercise, and each has a role in weight loss and health.  To lose weight and establish a healthy lifestyle you don’t have to spend hours in the gym, just find a healthy balance between daily activity and a few longer exercise sessions during the week.

The final mental error brings us back to the treadmill (or mouse wheel, as many of us think of it).  When it comes to exercise, think outside the gym.  Go for a walk, or a hike, sign up for a flag football or kick ball team.  The point is to find something you enjoy.  I have never met someone who enjoys the treadmill so much that they spend hours a day on it.  I have met many people who love running, cycling or hiking so much that they spend hours doing these things.  Look for something that you can do with family or friends to make exercise more social.  Or if you need to relieve stress, take up yoga or Tai-Chi to help calm you mind. 

The take home message here is that if you can begin to think of exercise as something you plan to do for yourself-rather than one more thing you have to get done, it takes much of the drudgery out of the process.  

Is that ALL I lost this week?!!!

If you have tried to lose weight before, you probably uttered the dreaded "P" word-- PLATEAU. A plateau, otherwise known as the lack of weight loss after doing a plan for a period of time, is not inevitable, if you're working with someone who knows how to guide you.

But this post really isn't about how to beat the plateau. It's more about how to not freak out if you think your weight loss is slowing down. Many of my patients anxiously compare week to week weight loss numbers, calculating every ounce of lost weight since the last encounter with the scale. I encourage everyone to weigh themselves regularly, especially if you are attempting to lose weight. Once weekly is good enough in my opinion. However, I don't want my patients to get overly concerned about the week to week difference.

Why not? The patient's job is to focus on implementing the weekly plan; my job is to focus on making sure we have the right plan that gets results. Try as you might, you can't control the number on the scale. Even if you do the same thing every day from one week to the next, the weekly weight loss will be different. This is due to a number of factors that are out of your control like how much water you retained that day, various hormonal levels, and metabolic changes occurring as a result of your ongoing weight loss. Unfortunately, losing weight is not a linear process.

As long as the average weight loss remains good, you know you're doing the right things. And those are the things you should continue to focus on-- daily food journal, consistently meeting your exercise goals, and achieving a good eating structure.

Don’t Let that Gym Membership Keep You from Being Active

Is your gym membership holding you back? Have you ever considered this question…it could be keeping you from being active on a regular basis.

Don’t get me wrong; having a gym membership is a perfectly reasonable way to gain access to a place that will allow you to exercise. But having the membership does not automatically imply that you will use it. The gap between ownership and usage is pretty large. There's a large group of people who are nodding their heads in agreement with me on this. These are the people who started 2012 with great intentions of getting into better shape and losing weight. Their first move was to jump on that local gym membership special. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, and it worked out well for the first month.

Then there was the change in the schedule for the daughter's dance lessons; or there was the unexpected job assignment that required some later hours; or (you fill in the blank).

Now it’s been 3 weeks, and you pass by the gym on the way home but haven’t graced them with your presence. In the meantime, you opt to do nothing until you can get back on track. After all, you are paying for this membership and you plan to use it…sometime. One of my patients once explained it to me like this—why go out and walk around the neighborhood or do something at home when he had this perfectly good gym membership that he should be using. He would feel guilty for cheating on the gym by exercising elsewhere.

Physical activity and exercise need to be SIMPLE, structured to MEET YOUR LIFESTYLE DEMANDS, and ENJOYABLE enough for you to look forward to the time. Trying to do the latest fitness craze won’t be successful for you if it’s too complicated for you or you loathe the idea of turning on that DVD. Feeling that you have to meet a pre-conceived idea about what physical activity or exercise is can hold you back from doing anything at all. If the gym membership isn’t working for you, don’t be afraid to drop it and find something you can do. Invest that money in a good pair of shoes and start a walking program or a Couch to 5K program.

This week, devise the simplest plan you can think of to get some higher levels of physical activity. It could be a 10 minute walk at work or a quick loop around the block before you head in the house upon your return home. Let's work on this for the week. Continue your daily journal and keep track of your activity levels. We'll come back with more on exercise this week.   

Smoke and Mirrors

Ok, the third week of our program is here. Now it's time to talk about food.

You've completed a food journal on a daily basis for the past 2 weeks and are starting to recognize some patterns by now. You understand that for every ACTION you take, your body responds with a REACTION that should be fairly predictable, now that you have some data. If you skip breakfast, you're starving by 1 pm. If you wait too long to eat, you make poorer choices. If you're really tired, you graze to keep yourself awake.

So what should you be eating? I'm going to suggest that for now, we ignore the number of calories that you should eat. Again, I'm not crazy, just evil. Here's the rationale for ignoring calories for now. I want you to focus on how to fix the structure of your eating, and this is NOT dependent on calories. As you may have noticed, the days that you consumed fewer calories and didn't starve yourself, you were more regular in the timing and spacing of your meals. Your portions were probably more consistent, and you likely avoided extremes of hunger and fullness.

We've become so calorie focused in our efforts to lose weight that we lose focus on what's important. We begin to implement smoke and mirror tricks to say we can eat whatever we want as long as we don't go over the calorie limit for the day. We trick ourselves into saying that we're "saving up" calories like we're about to make a down payment on a new car. As a numbers game, it may work for a while. Then the weight loss stops and no amount of manipulating those calories from the candy and ice cream will work to get it going again.

Rather than give you a calorie target to manipulate, I want you to use a simple method to get started with your plan of what to eat. Start by adding fruits and vegetables to your day based on the table below. 

Current number of fruits and vegetables per day	Number to add per day
< 2	2
2-4	3
5+	4

Add the fruits and vegetables in place of the highest calorie items you consume (for most of us, it's fried potatoes, juices and other sugar beverages, and desserts). Ideally you should have 5 eating episodes per day. If you have spaces in your day where you were not eating, add the fruits and vegetables there as well.

If you start here, this will naturally lower your caloric intake and keep you more satisfied throughout the day. You are simply swapping higher energy dense foods for lower energy dense foods, reducing calories without trying to cut the amount of food you are eating. Simple how it works...almost like magic!


Keep journaling to see the results...

Never Enough to Lose Weight

Routinely, I ask my patients what they need to be successful with losing weight. Invariably the responses include two things you will never have enough of—motivation and willpower. If you're banking on this to help you make a lifestyle change, you're setting yourself up to fail.
Why do I feel this way? Motivation can be misplaced and fleeting. Willpower by its very nature is inconsistent at best. When these two factors are the things you call upon to help you make better decisions and make changes in your lifestyle consistently, you will find that consistency is hard to achieve.

Let's deal with willpower first. The battle of willpower is something you will always lose. It's like gambling…you may get on a good roll, but if you do it long enough you lose. A misperception I hear all the time is that some people must have incredible willpower to stay thin or not eat certain foods. More likely is that these individuals manage their environment and avoid tempting themselves repeatedly with the things they are trying to limit. If I like to eat chocolate cake (and I do), and I only want to allow myself the option to eat it once a week, it makes no sense for me to bake a cake and leave it sitting on my counter top all week. Every time I walk past the cake, I'm going to think about it and have to expend mental energy to not have some. I may be able to do this when I'm at my best, but the next time I'm upset or really hungry or tired from working all day, I'll probably give in and make an exception. However, as soon as I finish that last bite, I'll resolve to NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.

Motivation is necessary, but only as a means to get you to reorder your priority list. Your motivation becomes sustained when you can recognize how the benefits of your lifestyle change outweigh the benefits of doing your default. When this happens, you make time for meal planning or exercise. You find ways to pack your exercise clothes for the business trip. You spend your time and effort doing the things that you care about most. If doing the things that are needed to make a lifestyle change and lose weight isn't important enough, you won't do it. The key phrase here is that you need to care about DOING THE THINGS. You have to care about the PROCESS just as much as you do the OUTCOME.
Losing weight is a challenging proposition for many, but very doable. Set yourself up for success by valuing the benefits of the small lifestyle changes you make (walking, eating better choices, journaling, good sleep) and by managing your environment.