Unqualified Offerings

If I lean way back on the scale, I can get it all the way up to 169 pounds before I fall off. Meanwhile, Mrs. Offering has officially defined my waist as a circumference passing through my belly button. That metric comes in at 33.5″. The weight in particular looks like a big drop from last week’s 173, but the 173 was part of an uptick anyhow, and I’d been down around 171 in various unofficial measurements within the last month. (I don’t do the Hacker’s Diet weighted average thing, but I take unofficial scale readings throughout the week as a sanity check against the official Sunday measurements. For the waist we have no true comparison since the measurement standard is new.

Anyway, I’ll confess to being pretty darn pleased. In 1987 I weighed 170 pounds, according to my doctor’s records. This is the first time since then. I played with the Halls BMI Calculator and determined that I’m kind of average weight for twenty-year-olds as tall as I am. I’m also greedy. I still have not a “six-pack” but more of a two-pack. I can easily identify another five pounds of flab that needs to go. And if the pattern holds, I’ll plateau here in the 170-pound range for a few weeks.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about you, or anyway, your letters. Jean Lansford writes:

BTW, I’m one of those people who lost a lot of weight on the old WW plan and then gained it back. Not by going off the plan, but by switching to the new Points plan when they introduced it. When my pre-paid weeks ran out, I decided I didn’t need to pay them to help me gain weight. *rolls eyes*

I thought it was Jean, but apparently not, who wrote that she found it almost impossible to get enough protien on Weight Watchers without going over her point allotment. Mrs. Offering has started WW, and begins her exercise regimen tonight, so the protien situation will bear watching. Mrs. O will try Bill Phillips’ “Body-for-Life” weight and aerobic plans, but finds his list of permitted foods unappealing. (Phillips is also all about pushing his EAS Myoplex products, but remember, you are a customer, and that means deciding what not to buy into and to buy.)

This week’s topic: How to go off Atkins. First, why you might want to: because you just can’t stand the food any more; because your LDL cholesterol isn’t improving enough; because your maintenence-level carb intake is too close to induction-level. I’m convinced that Atkins got a lot right, and I wouldn’t have lost fifty pounds if his program hadn’t gotten me started. He’s right about the metabolic evils of processed sugars and starches; the centrality of exercise; the goodness of fiber and the merits of vitamins. That said, he was militantly agnostic about fat type, and I’ve come to accept the “good fats/bad fats” distinction. (Your low-fat gurus got this completely wrong too, from the other end. You could argue that they got the fat-v.-carbs question more wrong than Atkins did.) Some people’s metabolism is such that, even on Atkins maintenance, they need to keep their “net carbs” under 30 a day or so to avoid weight gain. That really may be too low. And maybe you just want a freakin’ fajita now and then. (I scarfed down about a half can of Pringles at gaming Wednesday night. That’s not the same as scarfing down a half can every day.)

Regardless of the various reasons why, evidence suggests that people do feel compelled to go off Atkins, for whatever reason. So how to avoid the upswing on the diet yo-yo?

Fellow Atkins veteran Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s experience tracks mine:

It’s been some weeks since I was on the Atkins diet in any meaningful sense. And yet, in that time, my weight appears to have been stable — and down 35 pounds from when I started Atkins many months ago.

Probably because, in fact, although I’m no longer doing Atkins, I’ve continued to avoid massive single-meal carb loads, and I’ve cut sweetened soft drinks out of my diet entirely. And although the weather hasn’t been great for it, I do try to commute to work on my bike–five miles, door to door–whenever I can. (My answer to the question “Do you have an exercise machine?” is “Actually, I have two. One runs from Boerum Avenue to Park Row, and the other connects Flatbush Avenue to Canal Street…”)

I probably need to take up some new regimens of both diet and exercise, but I agree with you that the “you’ll just gain it all back” canard mostly serves to discourage people from small-scale effective action. I’m not doing Atkins at this point, but I give it tons of credit for breaking my addiction to huge doses of carbohydrates and getting me back to eating reaonable portion sizes. These days, when I do indulge in pounding down too many carbs, I immediately feel bloated, which is a fine discouragement from doing it again any time soon.

In line with what Patrick said, here’s Jim’s Plan for a Graceful Post-Atkins Landing:

1. Free days. Take one day a week where you allow yourself to indulge in whatever cravings you have. Free days may even help you lose weight. How? They convince your body it’s not really starving, and it doesn’t have to go into shutdown mode.

2. Exercise! Apart from any weight loss and body-shaping goals you still have, you need to push your metabolism to the point where you can metabolize upwards of 50g of net carbs a day.

3. Portion Control. Start paying attention to the “Serving Size” line on nutrition labels. You miss that one and none of the rest of the numbers mean anything. For things without labels, assume a “portion” is about the size of your fist or what will fit in your cupped palm. (A cupped palmful of shelled nuts is a good match for the one-ounce serving size on the can.) Once you’re off Atkins and eating more fruit and whole grains and occasional bad-carb treats, you can’t eat the whole T-bone any more. Chances are that during Atkins you’ve found yourself eating less at one sitting anyway, but now is the time to be conscious of it. Portion control goes hand in hand with

4. Eat often. I eat five times a day: breakfast, lunch, dinner and a morning and afternoon snack. I’m still trying to lose weight, so my portion allotment runs as follows: 2-1-2-1-3, sometimes 2-1-3-1-3 or 2-1-2-2-3. Every session includes some fat and protien.

5. Fat-shifting. I have no reason to believe you should really restrict your total fat intake to 25-35 grams a day or whatever. But you should try to get more fats from nuts, oils and fish and less from beef. Those one-portion snacks of mine are almost always nuts. And I don’t stint the (low-sugar) salad dressing either.

6. Consider Calories. Heresy! Anyway, I’m not talking about counting calories. A portion (as we’ve defined it) of most anything will probably fall somewhere in the 100-300 calorie range. A pound is 3500 calories. If during weight loss, I’m dropping an average of a pound a week over time, that means I’m running a 3500/7=500 calorie/day deficit. That means that when I want to maintain weight, I can increase my food intake by two or three portions per day. More than that and I’ll probably start to gain, depending on the state of my exercise regimen.

7. Keep your good habits. If you’re like me, you eat more real vegetables (the kind that don’t get renamed “freedom fries” during jingoistic spasms) under Atkins than you ever did before. Keep it up! You went off Atkins most likely to get more variety in your carb intake, I realize, but your base should still be leafy greens and yellow-to-red fibrous veggies. Along with the fruits and - god help you - breads, make sure you get 2-3 servings every day of something your mother and the FDA would count as a vegetable.

That’s what I’ve figured out so far. Picking up some unused weight plates from my sister and brother-in-law so I can try the leg extension attachment to my bench. Fortnightly Fitness Fun once again gets jiggered around - I’m lifting weights two weeks in a row. My back is healing, but I want to give it more recovery time. Next week I’ll be on vacation, and I sure can’t take my bench and such with me, but a mountain lake will be perfect for lots of Heavyhands work.