Exercise Your Way to Thin - Part 1
Starting towards Fit
You have been extraordinarily diligent in sorting out what you need to do in order to lose weight. We have talked about food, feelings, thyroid, and insulin resistance. You have worked your way through each one. Now we are down to exercise. And this one is big.
All of you have heard that “exercise is good for you.” Most of us assume the basics. We think, “exercise is good for you” means exercise will make you lose weight because more exercise means you burn more calories. If you burn more than you eat, you will lose weight. But for many of you, this equation hasn't worked.
We attribute this problem in getting the weight off to a change in our metabolism. We think we are slowing down because we are older, or because our hormones have changed. Sometimes, we might notice that we don't get out a lot, but generally, we will attribute gaining weight, or having a hard time losing to slower metabolism.
And factually, it is very likely true that we are not “burning” the way we used to. But ironically, our basal metabolic rate (BMR) may be very similar to what it once was. The problem is more likely due to our decreasing ability to mobilize fat for burning and to have the oven going hot enough so it needs the fat to burn.
Those of us who are most in need of exercise are either unfit or fat or both. Getting out and exercising seems totally unrealistic. There may be huge shame at being “seen.” “I could never go to the gym, Kathleen. I would be way too ashamed to be around all those athletic young people!” “Are you kidding, I can't even walk for more than 5 minutes without being out of breath!"
It is a circular process. The less fit you are, the less likely you are to exercise . The less exercise you do, the more your fitness level drops. Round and round and you get rounder. But the good news is that this cycle works in reverse as well. The fitter you become, the more you will want to exercise and the more fit you will become. And take heart, the worse you are to begin with, the more dramatic the results will be.
The hardest part is getting started. Feeling out of shape may overwhelm you. You may feel fat and ugly and don't want anyone to see you. You may feel you don't have money to join the gym, or have no clothes to wear for exercise. You have no time, you don't want to get sweaty and have your hair get frizzy before work. It is too much bother.
Exercise sounds like a great idea but you never get to it. You will just work on the food. You know if you do the food just right, you will lose weight and things will be fine.
It is possible for some people to lose weight just doing the food. For some of us, though, we cannot and will never lose weight just doing the food. We can go through every “trick” in the program and if we don't exercise, we will not only fail to lose weight, we will actually GAIN weight even though we are doing the food perfectly.
If we want to change the life long pattern of dieting and gaining, we absolutely, unequivocally have to exercise. This is not an optional part of your healing plan. It is central to it.
Now, I am the first to admit I am not the fitness queen of the universe. Like you, I have struggled with my exercise program and motivation. I have tried something for a few weeks and then get busy and forget to exercise. And would revert to my slug ways. Finding my way out of inertia took:
1. Coming to grips with the fact that I HAD to exercise no matter what
2. Understanding WHY exercise was so important to my program
3. Finding an exercise plan that fit my style and body
4. Getting mobilized to start
As I started to learn about exercise, I discovered that most of what I thought was erroneous or very incomplete. I was stunned. I think of myself as being reasonably smart. But on the exercise line, I was a dummy. In these articles, I want to take you through the process that got my attention, got me mobilized, and got me moving. It woke me up to fitness and continues to motivate me to move.
You can't move in your program without moving. Moving your body will tell your muscles and your cells that your are SERIOUS about this. It is time for you to have a body that reflects who you really are. Let's go back to the exercise to remember the “look” of your body. Check out your shape, your clothes, and your style. Imagine too, how s/he moves. First, watch from a far in your imagination. Then step in and feel from the inside. What is it like to move?
You may experience a sense of fluidity and grace when you step in. Or you may get really discouraged because you cannot even imagine how that person might move. Fluidity and grace may be so far from how you feel, that you can't even make a mental image of yourself.
Don't be alarmed. Stay with me on this one. If you don't have an image, I guarantee one will come. You will have the most profound change of any of us. As you connect with your body through exercise, you will begin to feel, and through one tiny little change at a time, you will remember the moving self. And if you can already remember or imagine that self, the image, the feeling will guide you when you get tired or bored or impatient with the process.
First you will get fit and then you will lose weight. Read that again. Fit comes first, then weight loss. ARGHHHHH! You say. More waiting. More slow. Can't we just roll ahead with it? Nope. Fit first, then weight loss. Just as in learning to “do” the food. Until you could shift from a weight loss mentality into being in relationship with your body, the program cannot work.
Your Last Diet is not about your final diet; it is about stepping out of diet mode. The exercise continuum is just like the food part. First you master changing your metabolism back to fat burning and then we apply that change to specific weight loss goals. It is slow, boring and incredibly effective.
But before I walk you through the changes you will make, I want to walk you through some of the “why” of it. I want you to understand in detail, the body changes you are going to make. Blindness and ignorance about our bodies have availed us of nothing. This time, we will start from the inside out.
You body uses two types of fuel to drive your muscles. Sugar and fat. It converts all you eat into these two fuel sources. Carbohydrates (sugars, white things, brown things and green things) convert to glucose, the basic sugar fuel of your body. The fats you eat convert into a whole range of fat servers in your body. These include fatty acids, monoglycerides, triglycerides, low density and high density ch..... Now these may make your eyes glaze over. Whenever I used to get the too "fat" story, I would go unconscious. It seemed way too complex to get. I couldn't even remember which cholesterol was the “bad” one, let along grasping monosaccarides and fatty acids. The good news is you don't have to remember all of them right now.
Let's just focus on the little fatty acids. Imagine them as tiny little tubbies swimming around your blood stream, They want to be useful. They have their hands up to be called on. “Take me, take me,” they cry. And if the muscle doesn't pick em, they swim on off to a new site hoping for their chance at muscle burn.
When they get tired of swimming, the fatty acids go rest in the fat cells. When they do this, they hook up in teams of three. When the little fatty acids join together, they are called triglycerides (Three fats). So your fat cells are filled with little triglycerides. When the fat cell gets full, the little fat buddies (now known as a triglyceride) spill back out into your blood stream, now joined together.
When doctors measures your triglyceride levels, they are measuring the spill over of the fat buddies. “High triglyceride” means your fat storage is overfull and you have lots of the buddy chains floating around. If your fat storage is full, you are fatter than your body needs - your fat closets are overflowing.
Your body was set up to store fat because fat is the best and most efficient fuel you can get. You were originally designed as a fat BURNING machine (not a fat storing machine). You are meant to burn fat to sustain movement. Long ago, there were no fast foods, no grain storage silos. You ate what you caught or gathered. Food came at infrequent or unanticipated intervals. When rabbits and roots were available, you ate em. When they weren't, you depended on your fat stores. Getting fat was not an issue. You burned what you stored and you used what you ate.
Our bodies have long since forgotten how to be efficient fat burning machines. We need to help them remember. The cells know and will work with us if we activate the cellular memory of moving. We retrain them by exercising.
There are two types of exercise. Aerobic and anaerobic. I used to think that aerobic exercise was something the Jane Fonda's did at the gym. Body shaping tights, loud music and slim young women sweating together under the tutelage of an aerobics instructor. This was not something in my frame of reference.
This is NOT what aerobic exercise means. It simply means burning WITH oxygen. If you are gonna burn fat, yah gotta have oxygen. If you get “out of breath” and the amount of oxygen you take in goes down, you will burn glucose, not fat. To burn fat, you need to exercise less strenuously than what we have been conditioned to think is necessary to “burn calories.” But you have to do it for more than a few minutes.
The problem with most couch potatoes is what I call the “forget factor.” Our muscles forget how to burn fat. They only know how to burn sugars because that is most of what we give them (sugar and white things). The sugars also satisfy the level of exercise we are most likely to do. We never get to the fat burning stage.
How long it takes to “remember” to burn fat depends on the level of fitness we are in. High level athletes start almost immediately. In fact, they may start to burn even with the “idea” of exercise. Anticipation and whoosh, the burner turns up. Moderately fit people's burner ignites at about 15 minutes of aerobic exercise. Out of shape people don't start burning until about 30 minutes of exercise. Our muscles don't really believe us. They think we are kidding and figure they will hold out till we stop.
Now I know, I know what you are thinking. THIRTY MINUTES!!! The idea of thirty minutes may seem so far away from where you are that you will never start. The task is too big.
But let's backup. We are going to do a two-phase process here. First we are going to do fit and then we are going to do fat burning. Fit means being able to walk a mile in about ten minutes without getting out of breath.
Realistically, when you start, you may be able to only do five minutes. You may only be able to walk one block. The important thing is to simply work with where you are and START. If you can only do five minutes, then walk 2 1/2 minutes out and 2 1/2 minutes back. But do this three times a day.
People who are less fit need to exercise in smaller, more manageable increments more often. Start walking. Write it in your food journal. Sneak a morning walk in, plan a lunchtime walk. Once you master 5 minutes, move to seven and then to 10. After you master 10 minutes, go to fifteen. After you are really comfortable with 15 minutes of walking, shift your focus and see how far you can go in your 15-min time slot. Count telephone poles, notice houses. But PAY ATTENTION.
Pay attention because your fitness level is going to change quickly. You want the fun of knowing how much it shifts. Once you can do fifteen minutes at a reasonable pace (enough so you feel brisk, but not so much that you get out of breath), slow down the pace and extend the distance. Make up a little chart so you will know whether you are working on time or distance.
The changes in interval and intensity will alter your fat burning memory. We are getting an old, rusted and dirty machine from the barn. First round cleans it, then we scrub with steel wool and then we oil it. And then, after all that, we sharpen it before we use it. We get it ready. If you try to take it out, crank it up and expect it to run perfectly, you will be sadly disappointed. You and the machine will get into trouble. It will break, jam or freeze up. Take care and you can restore it to its full use, with the patina of age. Do your exercise the way you have been doing your food. Build with small increments and pay attention.
Remember that the goal for this phase is getting fit. Getting fit means reminding your body that it knows how and wants to burn fat.
The hardest part of this phase of the program will be the first day. Everything in you will resist starting. Your will forget, you will be horrendously busy, you will have a deadline, a doctor's appointment. It will suddenly be cold, or hot, or raining outside. The kids will need to go to soccer practice, you will need groceries. You will be sleepy. Anything, anything to not go on the walk. Day one is hard beyond imagination. Day two will still be hard. But day three will bringing a twinkling of change. Keep at it. Check in with the forum, check in with the lists. Share with us what is happening. Use your support system to help you get started. But most important, get yourself moving.
The next article will strengthen your fitness level and then move you into fat burning.
(c)Kathleen DesMaisons 2006. All rights reserved.
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