[Note: This post is long. And it's not particularly amusing or entertaining. It's just my attempt to quantify a technique I'm using to lose weight that I think may benefit others. If you're looking for amusement, skip this one.]
I don’t really get too into the specifics of my diet here, because my diet is very much a product of me as a person. And while I think I could tailor it to some other person, it would then be suitable to that one other person, and just as useless to everyone else reading this. However there are some aspects of what I’m doing that I think can be applied universally. This post is about one of those techniques I call Island Hopping. (I’m not a big fan of made-up diet terminology that you see a lot in books and websites (usually with the TM symbol after it). But I just need an easy way to refer to this technique and Island Hopping makes sense, so that’s what I’m going to use.)
There are three main benefits to this technique:
- It makes it easier to start your weight-loss program.
- It eliminates or at least lessens the impact of plateaus in weight loss.
- It will help prevent the situation where a person loses a bunch of weight, then gains it all back. (At least, I speculate that it will help with that.)
This isn’t something revolutionary, in fact it’s probably fairly intuitive. But I think it’s probably the opposite of the way most people attempt to lose weight.
For you young’uns who haven’t heard the term before. Island Hopping was the technique the Allied forces used in WWII to attack Japan. You couldn’t just fly to Japan and drop some bombs and fly back. So the US needed to take over Japanese occupied islands one by one until the Japanese mainland was in the range of American bombers. This strategy (also known as leapfrogging because the US would skip over the most strongly held Japanese islands along the way) presented a series of smaller goals that needed to be accomplished in order to reach the main target, and gave them a series of fall-back positions along the way.
You see where I’m going.
So the weight loss idea is to set up mini-goals along the way to your big goal. That, of course, is nothing new. But the problem I see is that most people just set arbitrary mini-goals that are essentially just sign-posts along the way to their main goal. I don’t think that’s super helpful. I think these goals need to represent a shift in the methodology you’re using to lose the weight. They need to have some significance.
Here are the things you need to know to set this up.
- Your weight
- Your goal weight
- The calorie limit you want to stick to
- The maximum amount of exercise you could realistically do per-day for an extended period of time.
For our example, we’ll use a woman named Carmen. She’s 5 feet tall and weighs 150 pounds. Her goal weight is 100 pounds. (I’m just making this lady up, and chose these numbers for the sake of making the math easy. Please don’t write me and tell me 100 pounds is too low. Please.) Her calorie limit is 1200 per day. And if she juggled around her schedule she could make time for 2 hours of exercise during the day. (We’ll say an aerobics DVD in the morning, a half-hour walk on her lunch break, 30 minutes in the gym after work, and a half hour walk at night.)
Now, when most people get motivated to lose weight, they immediately drop their calories and work in as much exercise as they can get. That sounds great, but I think it has its flaws, and I’ll explain why later (I’ll refer to this as the Traditional Method).
For Island Hopping, you need to come up with multiple levels of attack that increase in intensity. The first level is diet alone. The second level is diet plus 30 minutes of exercise. The third level is diet plus 60 minutes of exercise. And so on until you reach your limit of time you can devote to exercise per day.
So, Carmen would have 5 levels of attack:
- Diet of 1200 calories per day
- 1200 calories plus 30 minutes of exercise
- 1200 calories plus 60 minutes of exercise
- 1200 calories plus 90 minutes of exercise
- 1200 calories plus 120 minutes of exercise
Okay, next step. We take the number of pounds Carmen has to lose (50) and divide it by the number of levels she has (5) and subtract that answer (10) from her current weight, and that new number becomes the first goal. Her current weight is 150 so her first goal — or island, in this analogy — would be 140.
Now we’re getting somewhere. The last bit of planning that needs to be done is Carmen has to come up with a realistic amount of time she wants to give herself to reach her first goal. Her first goal is ten pounds, so let’s say she gives herself a month to do so. That seems like a doable challenge.
So, all Carmen has to do is spend the first month at Level One on her levels of attack. A 1200 calorie diet. No mandatory exercise.
Remember the three benefits I said about Island Hopping?
Benefit 1: It makes it easier to start dieting.
- In the traditional method you are pushing yourself to your limit from the start with diet and exercise. That’s great when you have that initial burst of motivation. But when that fades you may be tempted to not just exercise a little less, but throw the whole plan in the trash.
- With Island Hopping you are simply cutting calories at first. And any exercise you choose to do is a bonus.
So, Carmen has been at level one for a month. She’s watched her calories and that is all. No mandatory exercise and no need to step on a scale all month. Let’s say she gets on the scale at the end of the month and she has reached her goal, she’s at 140. Excellent. She gets to stick with that level of attack (Level 1) and set a new goal for herself. Remember, to set a goal we take the number of pounds we have to lose and divide it by the number of levels we have available to us. She has 40 to lose and still has 5 levels. So her next goal would be an 8 pound weight loss to get her to 132 pounds. Let’s say she gives herself another month.
At the end of the next month, if she reaches her goal, she just does the same thing again. She still stays at level one and still divides the number of pounds she needs to lose by her 5 levels to set her next goal weight.
But let’s say she doesn’t reach her goal. Let’s say she gets on the scale at the end of the month and weighs 136. Well, it’s just like the war analogy that’s been established. If the goal hasn’t been reached then you need to increase the intensity of your level of attack. And that is what Carmen needs to do. She jumps to the second level in her weight-loss program which is 1200 calories per day and 30 minutes of exercise. But now, when she sets her goal she only has 4 levels of attack left. She loses the first one because it stopped working at the rate she wanted. So she would divide her 36 pounds to lose by 4, to get a goal of 9 pounds.
Benefit #2: It eliminates or lessens the impact of plateaus
- With the traditional method, when you reach a plateau in your weight loss, there isn’t much you can do. You’re already pushing yourself to the limit with diet and exercise, so it can be very frustrating. So you just either continue on without seeing results, or you toss your hands in the air, say “F this” and hunt down a buffet.
- With Island Hopping you always have something in reserve. If you don’t reach your goal, no problem, you just go to the next level. That’s the point of having the levels. And the fact that your intensity level increases as you go means that long-term plateaus are not really an issue.
So that’s pretty much how it works.
- Determine how much weight you have to lose.
- Set the number of levels of attack you have, like I’ve shown above.
- Divide the amount of weight you have to lose by the number of levels you have.
- Subtract that figure from your current weight. That is your next goal.
- Determine a reasonable amount of time to reach that goal in.
- Commit to that level of attack for that amount of time.
- If at the end of that time period you reach that goal, then stay at the same level and go back to step 3. If you don’t reach your goal, then the level you’re on disappears. Go to the next level and go to step 3.
- Eventually get to your goal weight.
- Celebrate!
- Clean up from the celebration.
- See what’s on TV.
What if you’re on your last level and you fail to reach your goal weight? Well, that depends, did you make significant progress towards your goal but just fail to reach it by a little bit? Then just stay at that level and try again. The fact of the matter is, if you give yourself more than an hour a day of exercise, and you’re sticking to your calorie limit most of the time, then you will probably reach your final goal weight before even getting to the last level of attack, so you should be fine.
And when you do get to your goal weight, I think this should help keep you in that area.
Benefit 3: Less chance of backsliding
- Let’s say there’s a guy who went from 280 to 200 pounds using the traditional method. So often what happens is that they’ll gain it all back. If you don’t have significant milestones along the way toward your goal, you’re not going to have those same milestones to help register how far you’ve slipped from your goal. A pound is a pound. There’s no difference between 207, 229, 254… these are all just pounds you lost along the way so no one really means much more than any other.
- With Island Hopping you really see your progress slipping away. You will see these goals which represented significant changes in the intensity of your weight loss regimen passing you by the wrong way. So when 207 comes along you say, “Oh shit, this where I started exercising 2 hours a day to reach my goal. I need to get back on the ball. ” When you have these significant landmarks which represent real changes to the way you were losing weight it’s hard to let them pass by unnoticed. Backsliding in weight loss is like driving the wrong direction down the highway, away from your goal. If you’re just driving through Kansas with nothing on either side of you, you don’t register each mile because they all blend into one another. But if you’re highway takes you from the city to the plains to the mountains and along the ocean you pay more attention. I think a big part of weight loss and keeping it off is just paying attention.
Damn, this is a long post. I know that some people will say this is stupid. That people should just work as hard as possible from minute one in order to lose the weight as quick as possible. These people are dumb, and should listen to me because I’m smart. Yes, it’s true, if you lower your calories and exercise the maximum amount you can right off the bat then you will lose weight faster than if you follow this system. But here’s where I’m smart: I know human nature. We’re not programming robots here. And these benefits I’ve listed above are legitimate. But obviously if you don’t see any reason to do things like this then don’t bother with it. It’s just one path of many.
Speaking of programming robots, if this all seems too complicated to you — with the adding and subtracting and division and all that — just know that this is the dissected version to make it clear what is going on. And to spell everything out for people who like things like that. If you don’t like having everything mapped out for you, if this all seems too regimented, then I give to you:
Simplified Island Hopping for Weight Loss
Start slow. Set interim goals for yourself. If you reach those goals, keep doing what you’re doing. If not, increase your intensity a little. Repeat as necessary.
