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

Well, today I’m supposed to review a supplement, but this is not going to be a regular supplement review. It is partly going to be how to overcome obstacles to weight loss. Yesterday I hurt my back. ouch! And I was making such good progress.

Now, in the past this has been bad new for weight loss. Typically I will get depressed. Eat badly and just give up. But not now. I know that people are looking at these results and I do not want to let anyone down let alone myself. I’ve come to far to stop now. And I do not want to go back to where I was.

Now, add to that, I had a business breakfast meeting this morning. So I had a double whammy. Little exercise, and high fat/large portions of food.

Now, let me first say that if you get injured don’t just take my advice. If you do not get a doctor’s opinion you could really damage things. This is just what I did and remember that I an not a physician.

Next, let me say that Aleve is a miracle pill. It will not help you lose weight, but it will help you work through minor injuries that might otherwise keep yo down. It has been a life saver.

The other day when I was doing my snatches I knew that I was pushing myself. I could feel my butt and hamstring really tighten up. So I knew that was going to wreak havoc on my back. Whenever those muscles tighten up it puts a strain on my back until they loosen up (48-72 hours later). Now, 2-3 days is too long to be out of commission for me.I took the aleve before the swelling an tension started to preempt the pain. It sort of worked. I also started to stretch out the muscles as best I could to try to get them to loosen up as well. And then I laid out flat on my back and tried to sleep that way for most of the night.

When I woke up this morning things were tight, but I felt that I could do a little exercise on the elliptical. It is a very controlled movement and not jarring at all. So I got on for some sprints before going to breakfast. I knew that I would need to burn some extra calories to make up for the breakfast. As I got going on the elliptical machine I could feel things start to loosen up and I was able to go faster and faster with each passing minute.

I decided to not go very long since I just wanted to get the metabolism going, and not kill myself and make the injury worse.

I drank an extra 24 oz of ice water and then went to breakfast. I ordered a breakfast food of Ham, Eggs and Rye toast. There were some cheesy potatoes there as well, but I did not eat much of them. I gave one of the slices of ham away and ate only a few potatoes, the ham slice and 1 of the slices of rye bread. It was a sensible meal, and with the extra water I had taken in I felt full. So, crisis one – successfully navigated.

Now, on the back injury. I cannot move fast or turn easily, but I can move. So I walked a little more this evening as well, and even with the injury I have still put in a few miles today.I guess the point of all of that is, an injury is what it is. I cannot change that. But I can look at what can be done and without causing more harm than good, I can look for ways to still progress.

Also, knowing that I am going to be burning fewer calories, I made a conscious choice to consume a lower amount of food to match my expenditures.

Bottom line, if you need pain relief, try the aleve. I think that is just great. But most importantly, do not give up. There are may ways to beat the weight back if you plan a head. I knew this was going to happen, so I thought through everything that I would do. If I had not been able to walk well enough I was going to go to the pool. Nothing was going to stop me.

So, think it through

Plan ahead the actions you will take to over come an injury

Seek medical help

Execute the plan to the best of your ability

Aleve

first off, let me say that I am not a doctor. So take this with a grain of salt. I do not want to talk nutritional specifics. I think they are boring for most people and hence do not make very interesting blogging topics.

What I do what to do is talk about my real weight loss experiences with this Isagenix products.

If you want the nutritional details you can read them here.

Here is the bottom line. I lost weight, and was not hungry. And it even tasted good.

I know, I know, now you know I’m lying. Until I said that last one you were willing to believe me but now I must be lying. So let me qualify that by saying that it is the best shake that I have tasted. And I have sampled dozens.

It is extremely thick. The fiber soaks up so much water that if you do not add enough it will look like one of those DQ Blizzards that they used to turn upside down just to show you how thick they were. I kid you not, I have done this once with an Isagenix shake. I added a little less water than called for because I had added some ice. By the time I was done blending the shake was so think and so cold that I had to eat it with a spoon!

Anyway, the fiber in the shakes is really great at filling up the stomach. I can drink one and not have any food cravings for hours. That to me is the real test. Some of the shakes I have had are so low on fiber that they are practically just protein water. Not only do they not taste that great, but within an hour I’m hugery again.

I supposed if I were a huge body builder and needed to pack in the protein this would be a great idea. But for those of us who need to lose the weight needing to eat again is not an ideal position to be in.

But the shakes are not just about filling up the stomach  – even though they do a great job of that – they are about total health and wellness. They are packed with all the right proteins, vitamins and nutrients needed in order to sustain a healthy weight loss regime and keep it off.

All of this makes them my product of choice for a meal repalcement supplement.