The following is a chapter-by-chapter review of Chris Hardwick’s The Nerdist Way: How to Reach the Next Level (In Real Life) [Amazon] [The Nerdist]
Lester Burnham: I figured you guys might be able to give me some pointers. I need to shape up. Fast.
Jim Olmeyer: Are you just looking to lose weight, or do you want increased strength and flexibility as well?
Lester Burnham: I want to look good naked!
– American Beauty (1999) [IMDb]
Today, I am doing an entire section: Body. There are just three chapters and one is almost entirely dedicated to step-by-step exercise instruction. The first two chapters are more or less encouragement and motivation chapters. I agree with most of what’s said, but I can’t help but feel that they miss something. They miss evaluation and strategy.
The previous section spends a great deal of time helping us come to terms with who we are and shedding light on areas that could use improvement. I felt that the section on the body could have used some of that reflective and inflective thought, too. More importantly, the Body section feels like it isn’t really addressing the nerd audience. The strategies and motivations presented are really about satisfying vanity. Most nerds I know (myself included) are generally not vain people.
Again, Chris is very candid. On more than one occasion in his podcasts, he has admitted that the main reason for losing weight and exercising was that he did not want to continue to look like an amorphous sack of fat that couldn’t move more than few feet without a hit from an 02 tank. In the book, he also warns of the health issues associated to obesity. While vanity and health are both good reasons for dropping weight and getting into shape, neither really addresses how to coax the mind into believing those reasons.
Chris does write about the growing feeling of well-being to comes with becoming healthier. He even discusses how you can go about finding the right kind of support mechanisms. But these are the things that worked for him. Will they work for everyone? I don’t know. Breaking out of sedentary patterns that can put health at risk has more than strategy for success. So I am going to spend this post providing a couple of strategies that worked for me.
Hey, Norm!
Most overweight people (myself included) will go through yo-yo periods of weight loss and gain. I thought that if I just dropped the weight, I would be healthy and be able to return my normal sedentary life. The weight I lost would just magically stay away. Nope. It comes back with a vengeance. I wondered about this for a long time. Why does the body reclaim the lost weight so happily?
Then it occurred to me – My diet was rich and heavy and larger than my needs required. The diet I would go on to lose weight would be a complete denial of all of these things. I threw my body from a state of over-abundance to starvation. The body did drop the weight, but when I started to return to my regular foods again, the body took that as an opportunity to replenish its stores. So the weight just piled on again. This is a natural reaction to drastically changing conditions. What I needed was to acclimatize my body to a new norm where it relied on less and it also needed to store less.
I started to take a look at several things about my life. First, how long had I been over-weight? Next, what was my current diet like? And third, what was my current activity like? Together, these represented my current homeostatic condition. I had gained weight steadily since I graduated college. In 2007, I topped out at 225lbs. I spent a great deal of time at fast food places. Foods I cooked for myself often were sans vegetables and heavy with grains (breads and rice). I went from a cross-country runner in high school to a guy that can’t get off the couch without grunting. All around, I had really let myself go. Sigh.
First thing that crossed my mind was that it took me 15 years to get to that condition. Why should I expect that to change quickly? And if I could change my current state quickly, why should I expect my body to accept the new changes? I had already spent 15 years programming my body to carry extra fat. I should expect that reprogramming the body to carry less fat will also take time. That’s when I got up out of my own ass and cut myself some slack. Healthy weight loss that sticks takes patience. The body needs time to adjust to its new state. If you go all-out with exercise and diet, you will not only burn yourself out, but the lost weight will return.
Dieting and exercise shouldn’t just be done to achieve a short-term goal, it should be done because you are trying to change your life.
Before I began to diet and exercise, I wanted find out what my current norm was. How could I change anything, if I didn’t fully understand the conditions I needed to change? For two weeks, I recorded what I ate and my activities daily. It was a real eye-opener. I was consuming between 3000 to 4000 calories a day and burning less the 1500. You might ask how I managed to learn this information?
I put my nerd powers to use. I treated myself like a lab rat under observation and just recorded statistics. No judgment. No omissions. Spreadsheets are fun. With a simple spread sheet, I listed every meal and snack. The Internet helped me fill in the calories consumed. Then I added my daily activities. Again, thank you internet for the calories burned. I included in my activities list things like sleeping, number of steps walked at worked, hours standing and sitting. We burn calories constantly. The more thorough the picture, the better the diet and exercise plan will be. After two weeks, I had a very illuminating picture of my current norm.
Diet is ‘Die’ with a ‘T’
“Diet” is really an ugly word. It is buried under bad baggage. If the word had a flavor, it would taste like Robitussen. Hell, a diet is medicine for most. You only take it for as long as you need it. What we really want to do is change the way we live. Up to this point, our lifestyle has had negative effects on us. So we are making a lifestyle change. We are not merely dieting.
The formula for losing weight is pretty simple: less food + more movement = weight loss.
Our body chemistry depends a lot on thermodynamic processes. After all, we are exothermic beings. The more heat our body produces, the more fuel it is consuming. The question is wether that fuel is coming from stores in the body or recently acquired sources like the burger and fries we ate. What we really are trying to do when we diet and exercise is to get our bodies to make use of the fat stores in the body. However, if we eat more fuel than our body can burn, then our body will just convert the remainder to fat.
Now that we have a clear profile of what were are eating and what kind of cost it has on our bodies, we can make changes to the diet portion of our lifestyle. I knew that my 3000+ calorie a day was not good for me. Moreover, it was way to much for me. The average calorie intake daily should be around 2000 to 2500 calories. Because, I wanted to lose weight, I needed to operate in a slight deficit to that. Most of what I was eating was heavy in sugar and starches, and it was way too much in regard to proportion.
Knowing that, I started to consider what I was eating more carefully. Nutritional value became more important. After all, if I was going to eat less, then I was going to be damned sure that it provided the most value per calorie. Paying attention to nutrition helped to curb most cravings. It became a game. How much could I consume by volume and still remain within my calorie budget?
The effects of this change was quick. I didn’t feel weighted down after meals. Instead of fighting off carbo comas after meals, my body was busy working it’s way through a decent salad. My heartburn subsided. My fingers were no longer covered in a thin layer of chip oil. And I was becoming more regular. Okay, maybe TMI, but it’s true. Regular meals that satisfied nutritional cravings over pleasure cravings meant that I was consuming more fiber. Hence, a 7AM BM every morning.
That spreadsheet started earlier came in handy. I was able to set over/under marks on my diet. The spreadsheet would notify me if my budget was exceeded. It reinforced good behavior and kept me aware of my targets. Now, all diet and no dessert makes Jack a dull boy. So once a week, I threw the diet out the window. If it was edible and within arms reach, I could eat it. Funny thing was, even with this allowance, I rarely stepped out on my diet. When that started happening, I knew that I had changed an aspect of my lifestyle.
Move it, Pudgy!
If you have spent much of your life being sedentary, then dieting alone won’t help much. Chris and I agree that exercise is a necessary component to losing weight and increasing health. We just disagree with how to approach exercise. Our experiences are similar. Gyms just feel like this forced environment. There are bunch of sweaty, grunty, self-involved (admit it, so are we) people walking in place and making the rounds on machines. It feels forced, because we have all come from other places and put on uniforms to exercise. Basically, we have all left our day jobs and went to our gym jobs.
A routine like this is just spirit crushing. So few people maintain their memberships (that’s why gyms like to sell annual packages). Chris’ solution was to find a trainer. This trainer sounds like a great person that keeps the workouts varied and rigorous. Again though, I see that option as just me leaving one job to go to another.
Chris also has different goals than me. I want to lose weight and get trimmer. Chris wants these, but he also wants to get much fitter too. He is working to satisfy his vanity. For me that may come later, but not until after I lose the weight. One thing I learned while researching diets was that muscle weighs more than fat. If I do exercises that increase my muscle mass more quickly than I lose fat mass, then I will never feel that I am losing weight. I decided to set aside improving my physique for a time after I had gotten down to my desired weight. This didn’t mean that I could just not exercise.
Now, I had to figure out how to exercise without it feeling like I was going to a job. First, gym clothes are just another uniform. Going to a gym was also like going to a job. It was elsewhere other than home and I had to integrate going to the gym into my life. Time spent driving and changing meant that I was losing time working on projects or just vegetating in front of the boob-tube. I eventually settled on walking.
Walking didn’t require special clothes (no matter what the other people on the trail thought). I could leave my front door and circle back round to it so it didn’t require a special place. And it only took about thirty minutes out of my day. Hell, I could start a load of laundry and by the time I got back from the walk be ready to move the load to the dryer. That thirty minutes a day burned an additional 100 calories. More importantly, it helped to strengthen my heart and gave me an activity. Eventually, I was walking faster and/or longer. While the activity of walking burns 100 calories, the body will continue to burn calories after the walk.
G’night, Johnboy!
Chris talks about making sure to rest muscle groups before exercising them again. Also, he discusses timing meals. His prescription is to eat 3-5 small meals a day with 3-5 hour interval between meals. And when exercising, give muscle groups a 48 hour rest period. Both are good if you a fairly open personal schedule and are looking to build muscles respectively. But they can be difficult to manage if your have a 9-5 job and are looking to lose weight, also respectively. He also misses a very important point – get plenty of rest.
First off, everyone’s daily routine is going to be different and need some adjustment. Figure out what time of day exercise is good for you. For me, it was always after work. I’m not one of those bounce out of bed type people. The after work walk actually helped me psychologically, too. It drew a clear line between my day job and my night job (running my website and designing apps with a friend). I used the walk as a way to let my mind wander. The physical activity sheds nervous energy built up by the day job.
In regards to meals, I wholeheartedly agree with Chris about breakfast. Do not skip this meal. Your body has just spent 6-8 hours without taking in food or water. Eating breakfast helps to stoke the fires before heading out to a busy day. It will also keep you from dropping your face into a trough full of junk food later.
If you need to snack between meals, choose foods that will give you the most nutrition with least caloric impact. Rice cakes satisfy hunger, but nutritionally they have little value. Also, don’t forget to record snacks. They count against your calorie budget.
Also, try not to eat anything during the two hours prior to going to bed. This gives your body a chance to process those foods while it will still need them to provide you with energy.
For me, a normal day is a lite breakfast before work. Then a decent lunch during work. Finally, a lite dinner or snack in the evening. It sounds spartan, I know. However, I am still relatively sedentary. I do not need a lot of food to sustain my systems. If I still feel peckish after dinner, I grab a lite snack.
What’s really important is that I make sleep a priority. Getting a good block of rest each day gives the body a chance to process foods from the day and repair muscles. Actually, the most important part of a diet is getting rest. Keeping erratic and short sleep periods keeps the body under stress. The body’s reaction to stress is to store whatever it can as fat until it is no longer under stress.
Progress
One of the big mistakes that people make is to set an expectation of losing weight everyday. It’s a good goal to have, but it shouldn’t be a measure of the diet’s success. For starters, a body’s weight can vary from day to day. Hell, you can gain as much as three pounds between morning a night. That’s just from the meals you have eaten. The odd thing is that much of that weight will be gone by the time you get up. Also, you exhale a lot of moisture while you sleep.
Everyone hopes to lose a pound a day, but that can be physically dangerous. A more reasonable expectation is to lose one or two pounds a week. At first, you will lose weight quickly, but that will plateau because your body will think it’s under stress. So keep the expectation reasonable. Remember, you are trying to reprogram your body to operate with smaller fat stores.
This is where you can game the weight loss system. Everyone weighs themselves daily. The trick is to remember that the scale is an instrument not an enemy. Weigh yourself in the mornings. If possible, wait to do this after you have used the toilet and are naked. You have just spent 6-8 hours without taking in food or water. Your body is now at its lightest. This is what I call my dry weight.
I plug that weight into my spreadsheet and think nothing else of it. What I want to observe over the week is a trend toward losing one or two pounds. This way, I can make small adjustments over the week. Then on Saturday morning, I record my weight for the week. Also, Saturday is my free day. Time for the coffee shop eggel sandwich and 20oz Molé Mocha.
Final Thoughts
I’ve spent a lot of time writing in the past tense today. To be honest, I fell off the wagon a while back. One thing I can say about being off the wagon is that because I changed my eating habits, I have not put back on the weight I lost. As of today, though, I am back on it. I still have twenty pounds to lose. I want to be down to 170lbs. by my 42 birthday next May.
Reading Chris’ book and given me the outside encouragement I need to make a set of sweeping changes to my life. Many of these changes were already in progress when I picked up this book, but still other like my diet had stalled. There is no better time than now to begin or begin again. I am almost the man I want to be.