When surgery becomes the preferred method of weight loss we are in trouble. In this article from the New York Times doctors are suggesting that those with a Body Mass Index over 40 should have this elective surgery. I personal know what it feels like to have a BMI over 40. That is what I started at about 4 months ago now. So I am not being critical of something that I have no experience with. So hear me out on this if you have been considering a surgery to help with weight loss. In this article they state that I should have had surgery because I was over 40 on the BMI – clinically classified as morbidly obese. Now that obese part is true – but surgery! give me a break. This new procedure says that will help you lose 40% of the excess weight in 1 year – and that this is better than diet and exercise! Heck I have lost almost 75% of the 100+ lbs that I needed to lose and I did it in less than 4 months. So in a year they expect most people to have lost 1/2 as much weight. That just does not seem like a good plan to me After the surgery you have an increase risk of disease, hernia, staff infections etc. And there is a 1% chance of dying in surgery. Gee. Let me think. Sure let’s do that! Winning a slot machine in Las Vegas is a 1/250,000 change. And people think that is good odds – can you imagine 1/100! Do you really want to gamble with your life? Amazing. And at the end of the surgery – you took on all the risk and are no more healthy right after than you were before. Same habits, same lungs, same heart etc. It is all the same. So why not achieve an actual change and avoid the $25,000 surgery and the possibility of death. Personally I would rather really live. Kind of a random post, but important to consider I hope. Be Health – Enjoy Life! Matthew Stearmer

Where has all the weight lost gone? Start singing that to “I need a hero”

In some of my posts I have mentioned not only that I am losing weight, but that I cannot account for where it is all going. I can only see the evidence that what I am doing is not losing helping me lose weight, but it is also helping me do it faster than I can account for.

My friend politely asked for an accounting. Which I did not mind at all. He is right. The body is part of system and systems must be balanced. There is no magic that makes fat just disappear contrary to what all the late night infomercials might say.

So let me share what I know, and what some possibilities might be.

The body has 3 primary systems for generating energy. Phosphagen (short burst sprints), Glycogen (0.5 to 20 minutes) and Aerobic (longer than 20 min). Each has it own purpose to helping the body function at its best.

The last two are where we lose weight during workouts so I will focus on those. In the first 20 minutes 95% of he energy expended is from glycogen – 5% from fat.. Then up to 4 hours of Aerobic exercise will burn up to 60% of the energy from fat (the rest from glycogen), and after 4 hours, if your even more insane than I am, your body will be burning 85+% of energy from fat.

The body can store 1-5 lbs of glycogen depending on how big you are. An average around 2 seems normal based on what I could find. And for each pound of glycogen there is 3-4 lbs of water.

Let’s take as an example a workout that I did the other day. I jumped on the elliptical machine and went for a solid 2 hours at a sustainable pace. I bumped up the resistance and just went a little slow than normal – about 130 revolutions per minute (for comparison on my sprint workouts I will alternate between 150 and 200 revolutions per minute). I burned off a little over 2500 calories. Let’s just say for this simple purpose that the calories were burned consistently through the workout. Here is how it works out

2500 calories divided by 120 minutes = approx 21 calories per minute.

At 20 minutes I burned off 420 calories – but 400 of those calories came from glycogen and only 20 from fat. At this rate, unless it was a really intense 20 minutes to boost the metabolism, I will not make much progress in weight loss.

But I still put in another 100 minutes. That was another 2100 calories and up to 60% of that came from my fat stores. That is 1260 calories directly out of my fat. If I do that 3x a week, then I will be losing a pound of fat every week. Even if I do nothing else over the course of a year just about anyone can lose all the weight that they need just adding a good long power walk to their workout.

Now, over all weight loss at the time of exercise is different. Calories from glycogen are not quite as dense as fat. So, there is not a 1 to 1 comparison in their calories. 400 calories of glycogen will give you about the same amount of weight as 1200 in fat. Plus you add to that the water loss of 3-4 times more weight than the glycogen itself and viola! I lost 5 lbs.

Only about 1/3 of that may be fat. So I will gain all of that back after eating. But that is still 1/3 of a lbs in fat. The point is to weight yourself under as close to the same conditions as possible each time. So you do not catch the swings, but the incremental process. You can also see that it would not help very much to constantly look at the scale and the mirror. That can just lead to disappointment as you see the weight go up and down.

This type of fluctuation is perfectly normal. It is not part of the yo-yo effect that you have to worry about.

Now, I have also mentioned that I cannot account for all of the weight loss that I have had over the last few months. Even taking into account all the variables that I can I still appear to be losing more weight than the energy expended. Granted, I have no proof of that, it very well could be a measuring error. I have to concede that point. But there does seem to be some evidence in my life to support an alternative medicine theory.

I’ll just give a brief overview here and will post more on it later.

The fat in your body stores energy and tries to contain free radicals (this is not disputed). Alternative medicine approaches claim that if you can beat back the free radicals then you can coax the weight to come off easier, and the body will just release the fat into the excretion systems to get rid of it without having to burn all the calories.

I’ll provide some more evidence of that in my other posts, but I’ll just conclude with my results that show that have lost about 2x as much weight as I can account for. So I either have some really serious accounting issues (just call me Enron), or there is something to be said for alternative theories.

Hope you enjoyed this.

Matthew Stearmer

This weekend I gained some practical knowledge about the term “starvation mode” and weight loss.

Starvation mode basically means that your body thinks that you’re trying to kill it, so it stops listening to the weight loss signals you’re giving it – like eating less, exercising more etc – and starts to consume muscle and store fat. It makes since when you think about it. If your body has to survive why keep muscle that uses more energy when it can be used for energy now? So you begin to cannibalize yourself. Pleasant. At least it doesn’t use a fork and a knife!

By losing muscle and preserving fat your body can make sure that you go 30 days without eating food. Which is a pretty amazing feat when you think about it.  So you will lose weight – but it will be all the wrong stuff. Muscle first – fat last. And the metabolism slows down so anything you do consume gets stored in favor of burning muscle. Not exactly the way you want to go.

Saturday I ate too much pizza (Conner’s birthday party), then I did a true fast for 24 hours, and the end result is Monday my weight is basically unchanged – but my body fat percentage has gone up. I can correct that easy enough, so I am not disappointed. This is just another experiment for me to figure out. But now I know how things work a little better by my own experience.

Cleansing on the other hand allowed me to eat less food, but food that was good for me, and lose more weight -while at the same time just dropping the fat. Seems like a good deal to me!

On my goals.

I succeeded on the miles one. I put in just shy of 15 miles. So I feel good about that one.

I drank lots of water. I did not measure it as well this time, but taking into account the true fast on Sunday I feel that I did good here.

As noted above – my weight loss goal was not met. But it was part of an experiment as well, so I’ll mark it up as a success, because I did accomplish something here (knowledge wise). Just not 100% what I wanted.

And I failed miserable with sleep. I’ve been trying to help get some products launched with work, and there are been some extenuating circumstances that have contributed to me getting even less sleep than I usually do. So, I went backwards on this one. Not good. Sleep is critical to weight loss. So I will HAVE to do better on this if I’m going to keep losing the right kind of weight.

I’d give it about a B in performance for the weekend.

How did you all do? I’d love to hear your success (and struggles even) as well. We’ll all work on it together.

Make it a great week!

Matthew Stearmer

I am soooooo glad to be eating food again. 2 days is a long time to eat a few veggies and water. I fixed the Chick Pea recipe posted here on the blog and ate that several times. It makes 4 servings and I ate it all over the weekend. Besides that, it was all ice water.

I drank a little over 3 gallons of ice water (16 – 24oz bottles of water: which adds up to almost 400 extra calories burned heating the water). I was peeing like a racing horse. I’m sure you wanted to know that!

With the workouts that I did, lots of yard work, a little walking, and a half hour on the stair climber mode of my elliptical I burned a total of 1800 calories over the weekend.

I consumed approximately 600 calories each day with the Vegetables. The Isagenix Cleans drink and the Isagenix “snacks”.

I’m not 100% sure what my stable metabolic rate would be, but the FDA estimates that the average body needs 1800 calories each day. I think that I need less than that because of my sedentary life style in front of a computer all day. But we’ll go with 1800 for arguments sake. So, that means that I was short 1200 calories each day that my body needed to get internally instead of from food, and that tallies 2400 short fall over the weekend.

So, total calories expended is

400 – water heating

1800 – workout

2400 – diet shortfall

4600 – Total Calories burned over the weekend.

That means I should have lost just 1.5 lbs. And just about any one would tell you that most of what I would have lost over that amount would be muscle or water.

Here is what happened to me.

I lost a little over 8 lbs and the body fat measurement dropped by 2%.

Basically my body was able to give up more fat than the standard mathematics would have otherwise suggested would have happened. To me this is further proof that one of the many reasons we have a hard time losing weight is because of toxins in the body that the fat is required to store away to protect us. As we cleans our bodies of the toxins our bodies are able to release more fat simply because it is not needed any more. I highly doubt that it was water weight give the total amount of water I ingested. I could be wrong, but I would have had to peed about 11 gallons of water over 2 days. That seems even less realistic to believe possible than just losing 8 lbs over the weekend.

Now, I’m not a doctor so I cannot give an official position or recommendation on this, but it sure works for me and it makes sense to me.

I also found that despite the very hard weekend (stress wise), I was able to stick to the cleans a lot better because I knew I was going to have to report it today. So thanks for your help! You kept me honest.

To our future success.

I know this is going to sound insane, but I am going to fast from food for 2 days over the weekend.

I told you I’m crazy. But there is a method to the madness.

You can watch a video here on the benefits of cleansing, what I want to talk about is just my personal experience with it. As I always say on this kind of advice. I’m not a doctor, just a practitioner of what I am talking about. So consult with a real expert befor joining me on a cleans.

The first time I did a 2 day cleans I lost 7 lbs. Now, I know that you have all heard that it is not good to lose more than a few pounds a week, and if you do you’re losing water weight or muscle along with any fat lost, so you’re really doing more harm than good. I know. I’ve heard it too. But I’ve got a scale that measure body fat, and it would disagree under certain circumstances.

For this post, let it suffice that my results proved the old adage wrong in at least my case.

So here is what I am going to do over the weekend. Check back on Monday and I’ll give you a progress report.

Saturday.

Water consumption: (I increase this) 1.5 gallons – that is 8 glasses of 24 oz of ice cold water

Cleans Drink: This is the power behind the cleans. I get the energy I need to make it through and my body gets all the nutrients it needs to effectively let go of the fat cells and help me lose weight.

Vegetables: Ok, so I told a little fib in the title. Made you look though didn’t it? Here is what I will be skipping. No milk, no meat, no bread, no sugar, nothing unless it is a whole vegetable and a few small pieces of fruit.

That’s it.

In addition to this I will be working in my yard most of Saturday morning. That will be my weekend exercise. I will walk a few miles each day (at least 3) and on Sunday I’m going to attempt the great feat of having enough time to actually take a nap.

Check back on Monday and I’ll tell you how I did.