WHEE (Weight, Health, Eating and Exercise) is a community support diary for Kossacks who are currently or planning to start losing, gaining or maintaining their weight through diet and exercise or fitness. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are working on your weight or fitness, please -- join us! You can also click the WHEE tag to view all diary posts.
First, an introduction, since this is the first WHEE diary I've done, although I've commented on some previous ones. I'm a 60 year old guy, 5'10", and never had a weight problem until I was nearing the age of 30. After that, I gradually gained weight, with one sustained period of losing about 30 pounds when I was doing some walking/running on a treadmill. But then I started having knee problems, pretty much stopped the exercise, and regained that 30 pounds plus another 20 pounds.
At my heaviest, about 2 years ago, I tipped the scales at 280 (although the heaviest I ever was in the doctor's office was 277). That convinced me that I had to improve my diet, so I drastically reduced the fast food, and largely eliminated cookies and Hershey bars from my diet. That was enough to get me to the point that I was fluctuating between 262-265, but there I stubbornly got stuck.
Then, last January, I got a new primary care doctor who took the time to really lay down the law about the fact that I was killing myself, and that I really needed to lose a lot of weight. He said that while he realistically doubted I'd ever make it to the ideal weight range, he'd be very happy if I got to the point that I was merely overweight, and not obese, which according to the BMI tables is 204 pounds or less for someone of my height. At the time of that visit, I was 265, and he set me a goal of losing 20 pounds in the next 6 months. In response, I joined the online version of Weight Watchers, began counting my "points," kept forgetting to record what I ate -- and had lost all of 3 pounds when I saw the doc again in July. His comment was, "Well, it's better than GAINING three pounds, but you really need to do better than that."
A couple of days after that doctor's appointment, I happened to see an article online showing before and after pictures of Valerie Bertinelli, and although she's getting paid by Jenny Craig (or one of those diet companies), she attributed much of her success to getting a pedometer and setting a goal of 10,000 steps per day. I figured that walking was one thing I knew how to do, and that if it worked for her, it might work for an even more overweight 60 year old guy.
The first thing I did was to get a pedometer at one of the big box sporting goods stores, and to put it mildly, it was a piece of junk, counting maybe 40% of my steps (but not even being consistent enough that I could simply multiply by 2.5 to get my real steps). I then did some online research, and found that pretty much the "gold standard" for pedometers was the Omron brand, and that the one that consistently got the best reviews was the Omron HJ-112, which I got through Amazon.com for $24.95. I've been using mine for about 2 months now, and it's BY FAR the best $25 I've ever spent.
It's very easy to set up -- you just input the time, your weight and your typical stride length (which you get get either by measuring 10 strides or by walking a measured distance such as 400 meters on the local high school track and then doing the math). It records your total steps, your "aerobic steps" (which it defines as at least 10 consecutive minutes of 100+ steps per minute), your minutes of "aerobic walking," your calories burned, and your distance walked. Best of all, you don't need a fancy belt clip or anything, since it's quite accurate simply by being stuck in your pocket. It keeps 7 days of history of everything except the minutes of the aerobic walk for each day, so you can look back and see how you're doing for the week.
I've set up a spreadsheet on which I record the data for each day. At the end of my aerobic walk (or walks) I record that data, and then I record the rest of the data the next day so that it's complete. I've also set up a column on the spreadsheet that shows my aerobic steps per minute, since I want to be gradually increasing the speed of my walks. I'm finding that whereas at first, I was generally walking at a rate of 105-110 steps per minute, I now typically walk at about 115 steps per minute (except today, when I've got a miserable cold and slowed down to 107 steps per minute).
It uses an inexpensive CR-2032 battery, which is supposed to last about 6 months. I've walked a measured mile at the local community college track, and found that it was astoundingly accurate in its distance measurement. So why do I think this was such a great investment? I weighted this morning, and my weight was 245 pounds, which is still a lot more than I SHOULD weigh, but less than I've weighed in many years. Even before the pounds started coming off, though, I could tell that the walking was having the effect of decreasing my abdominal fat, because I had to get out some belts that I hadn't been able to wear in years in order to keep my pants from falling off. And now, I'm clearly going to have to invest in basically completely new pants. Also, at my heaviest, I was at the point where a 2XL t-shirt was getting a little tight. On Sunday, I participated in a local fun walk with a t-shirt giveaway, and figured that since the biggest size available was an XL, I'd have to lose some more weight before I could wear it. It fit fine, however, and it's probably been 15-20 years since I could wear an XL t-shirt.
I also found, while I was doing a couple of weeks to see what my baseline walking was, that I was far more sedentary than I'd thought. There were actually some days on which I took less than 1,000 steps (about 1/2 mile for the average person), and many of them where I took less than 2,000 steps. One thing I've found is that by doing regular aerobic walks of 30-70 minutes several days per week is that I'm also, entirely unconsciously, increasing my non-aerobic walking. Basically, I think I've got more energy and am lugging around less weight, so it becomes much more automatic to walk a couple of blocks. Unless the weather is really miserable, I actually look for parking places that AREN'T real close to where I'm going. (And note, aerobic walking is important for cardiovascular fitness, but for losing weight, walking a given distance even very slowly, or only for a few minutes, does almost as much good as if it was on a planned "fitness walk" at a much more rapid pace).
I feel so remarkably much better that I'm thinking about establishing a goal of walking a marathon before then end of 2010 -- and that's something I never would have even dreamed about a couple of months ago. In all seriousness, if you'd like to lose weight, I think you could do yourself no bigger favor than to buy a GOOD pedometer for $25 or so, and start walking -- just a little bit at first, but then gradually increasing your mileage and speed. It's easy, you'll lose weight if you just maintain the same eating habits you've had, and you'll feel remarkably better.
And finally, a big "thank you" to my new primary care doc, and to all the other primary care docs who take the time to really encourage their patients to do something about controllable health risks such as obesity, even though they're paid a lot more under our insane system for treating the consequences of those conditions than for taking the time to be pro-active about eliminating them. I know it's supremely stupid that I wouldn't have gotten serious about this until my doc was very assertive about it, but there have been numerous studies demonstrating that when docs get pro-active about things such as obesity and lack of exercise, patients DO change their conduct. So at least I know I'm not alone in my stupidity. Hopefully, before too much longer, we'll come up with an incentive system that actually encourages primary care docs to do this kind of thing, rather than just treating their patients after they get sick.
Edit:
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