I think if I am going to keep weight off, I’m going to have to live as a hermit in a cave in the mountains from Thanksgiving to New Year’s, because I cannot withstand all the tasty holiday treats. I did pretty well over Thanksgiving, since we went to my mother-in-law’s where the food was not as great a temptation :P , but by Christmas I wasn’t doing so well. The combination of holiday stress and ready availability of cookies, brownies, candy, and nuts was too much to resist and I munched a lot more than I wanted to.
Until then I had been slowly and steadily losing fat by a combination of weight training, rowing, and portion control. I didn’t really change the makeup of what I ate, just tried to eat a bit less than my stomach thought I should, especially in the evening. My opinion is that weight training is the best exercise for weight loss, because it provides multiple benefits: First, the exercise itself burns calories, but more importantly, it accelerates your metabolism for at least several hours afterward, which increases your caloric consumption. Second, working the muscles to complete failure releases hormones into your system that tell your body to build up your muscle mass, which protects you from muscle loss due to dieting, and force your body to rely more on stored fat.
For me, the physical demands of a weight-loss and/or exercise regimen pale in comparison to the psychological demands. The hardest things for me to do are to motivate myself to work out, and to abstain from snacking when I am unhappy or tired. So, mental tricks are very important for success, like the brushing your teeth in the early evening trick. Refraining from eating before bed is a good policy not just because extra calories eaten right before sleeping are more likely to turn to fat, but also because under-eating before bed lets you sleep through 8 hours of hunger pangs and wake up with your stomach shrunken and “reset” to be satisfied by a normal breakfast. This is much more productive for me than if I try to skimp on lunch or breakfast, which makes me over-eat at the next meal. If I absolutely am famished to the point where hunger pains are keeping me from falling asleep, I’ll eat enough raw veggies to fill me up, so that my stomach stops rumbling long enough for me to fall asleep and I am asleep by the time it realizes it was tricked with stuff that take just as many calories to digest as it provides. On nights like this I find I often dream about eating, but dream-food doesn’t count, unless you are in the castle of Morpheus.
I found this excerpt from the Bulletin 1 above funny, because I have experienced it:
Watching a man working out properly is almost frightening - and it is frightening to some people; the intensity of effort is so great that the subject’s entire body is shaking, his face will turn dark red - or even purple - and both breathing and heart action will be increased at least one-hundred percent, and frequently far more than that.
There is a middle-aged guy at the sports complex where I lift weights who is definitely a subscriber to this method. I call him “Orgasm Man” because at the end of every set he sounds like he is popping a nut, seriously. It’s quite distracting, but more power to him, I guess.