[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:

1. Diet of 1200 calories per day
2. 1200 calories plus 30 minutes of exercise
3. 1200 calories plus 60 minutes of exercise
4. 1200 calories plus 90 minutes of exercise
5. 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.

1. Determine how much weight you have to lose.
2. Set the number of levels of attack you have, like I’ve shown above.
3. Divide the amount of weight you have to lose by the number of levels you have.
4. Subtract that figure from your current weight. That is your next goal.
5. Determine a reasonable amount of time to reach that goal in.
6. Commit to that level of attack for that amount of time.
7. 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.
8. Eventually get to your goal weight.
9. Celebrate!
10. Clean up from the celebration.
11. 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.

Heroes and Villains

Hello again. What have you done today to make you feel proud? (I wrote this blog post, so get off my back.)

The Biggest Loser bounced back from last week’s turd with an excellent episode last night. Thanks in large part to the emergence of Tracey, as no longer just the person who is hospitalized after walking a mile but now the one contestant who is clearly bat-shit crazy.

Just a tip for people going on reality shows. Just chill out for the first 50% of the time you’re there. I know you think it’s smart to make big game moves and power plays, but all that usually does is make you the outsider. Especially in a game like Biggest Loser where you start making your moves and everyone is like, “What the fuck? I thought we were here to learn how not to eat Malomars.” And now you’re a target. And Bob and Jillian are bitching at you. So cool it.

Other thoughs:

• It was “Would You Rather” week this week. This sounded promising. I’ve played this game with my friends. You know, “Would you rather drink a quart of your own urine or eat a tablespoon of your own crap?” That kind of thing. Sadly the Biggest Loser didn’t follow this model.
• I would love to be the person who scores the Biggest Loser (by that I mean the person who writes the music, not the person who counts how many times they jump over the swinging pendulum). If you ever listen to the music without paying attention to what’s going on on the screen it’s very misleading. The music sounds like it should accompany someone saying, “Mister President, the missile intercept didn’t work. In a matter of minutes every major city in the United States will be destroyed.” Instead it accompanies someone saying, “I ate a cupcake.” Duhn, duhn, duhnnnnnnnn!!!!
• This week’s product placement was for Yoplait Light. Well… that makes sense. That’s a perfectly compatible sponsor for this show. I mean, the only way they could fuck this up is if they used Abby to shill it in the scene directly following the one where she breaks down crying while remembering the heartbreaking deaths of her husband and two young children in a car accident. Oh wait, that’s exactly what they did? Classy.
• It was actually really nice to see Antoine and Sean sacrifice themselves at the end of the episode. They seem like genuinely good guys, especially in this episode where their actions were implicitly compared to Tracey’s bug-eyed manipulation. And it seems they were cosmically rewarded for their goodness. Antoine found love in the house in the form of previously booted contestant, Alexandra. And Sean is about to have a new baby girl. I’m not sure if you caught it in the text at the end, but Sean and his wife plan to name the girl, “Jillian.” That’s a very sweet gesture. It would be extra awesome if the baby came out with 3% body fat and rippling abdominals.

I have no real plan for the blogs I’ve written, I just tend to write about whatever I think is entertaining or interesting at the time. So a lot of the important information I think you need to know about yourself in order to lose weight is scattered over the three blogs. (One day, when I write my book, I’ll be able to organize it all better. (The book will be based on this post and called Jizzercise.)) For instance, I think it’s important to have a list of the low-calorie foods that you naturally enjoy and the high-calorie foods that you would never be able to give up. Easy access to the former and learning to eat the latter in moderation is, I think, the huge key to losing weight. I also think you need to find the physical activities that you naturally enjoy doing and then find ways to increase your participation in them. There are other facts about yourself that I think are important to figure out if you’re trying to lose weight and a big one is what your eating rhythm is. And what I mean by that is, if you are on a 1500 calorie diet, what is the best way to disperse them throughout your day?

You could have 5 300-calorie “meals.” Or you could have 3 500-calorie meals. Or you could not eat anything all day and then have a Carl’s Jr. Double Six-Dollar Burger. A nutritionist might not recommend it, but hell, I don’t care what you do.

I’ve found that my rhythm is to have a small breakfast, a small lunch, and then a good sized dinner. I don’t generally eat any snacks. And yes, I’m usually pretty hungry come dinner time but I also tend to fill up pretty quick.

I know you’re thinking, “But don’t I have to eat a big breakfast and then many small meals throughout the day to keep my metabolism up?” No.  It’s true that eating raises your metabolism, but by that logic, why not just eat a plate of nachos every hour to keep your metabolism up? Just because something increases your metabolism doesn’t mean it will be a net benefit to you in losing weight. (Beating an orphan with a tree branch will raise your metabolism as well, but you don’t have to start the day with it.) If I were to eat a 500 rather than a 200 calorie breakfast, my metabolism may increase, but it wouldn’t increase enough to overcome the 300 extra calories.

When I first started watching what I was eating, I would usually eat three meals of about the same size. I found myself eating much more in the morning than I wanted to and not nearly enough at night. But once I switched around when I at the calories, I found myself a lot more satisfied, despite the fact that the total number of calories hadn’t changed.

I’m not saying that three meals that are small, small, large,  is the way to go. I’m saying that’s what I found worked. The key is to find your own rhythm. It’s not just to determine the number of calories you want to eat each day, but also to find the distribution of calories that leaves you feeling most satisfied and least likely to break the diet.

I’m dead.

Ugh. I’m sick. A cold and fever. I don’t get sick very often, so when I do, even if it’s relatively mild, I’m a big baby about it.

I do find that when you’re congested like this, food doesn’t have the same appeal it usually does. This makes me think that an effective diet tool would be a set of spongey nostril plugs that you insert in your nose every morning. There’s something to this idea isn’t there? I guess there is probably some snot considerations to be had, but I’m convinced this could work. I mean, come on, we live in a time where people get surgery to get a band put around their stomach, and we haven’t explored the nostril plug technology yet? Oh, and how about a spray that you put in your mouth that temporarily deadens your taste buds. Does that exist? Yes, I realize this all kind of goes against my position that you should lose weight by learning to enjoy the food you love in smaller portions. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t put out a line of nostril plugs and tongue spray for some fast bucks from the people who are looking for an easy way out.

I’m feverish. Ignore these ramblings.

The Biggest Loser starts tonight. I will post my thoughts on Thursday.

Stay well.

Hey, what’s cooking, good lookings? Good lookings? I’m not sure how to pluralize that. I thought maybe it was one of those things where you say “attorneys general” not “attorney generals.” But “goods looking,” doesn’t seem quite right either.

Well, regardless, I’m in a good mood. Labor Day has passed which means my reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder is kicking into gear. It’s not that warm weather makes me sad, but cool weather definitely makes me happy. So we’re getting into the best time of year, in my opinion, which is the time between now and New Years. It’s not just the best because of  the great weather, and all the holidays,  but it puts me in a more productive state of mind too. In this post on my Faddist blog I may have coined the phrase “autumn is the springtime of the mind.” (I don’t think I did, but I’ll be damned if I can find it anywhere. If anyone else can, let me know.) I still feel this way. I don’t think of New Years or spring as a time of personal renewal, to me that always feels like autumn. Maybe it goes back to the feeling of starting school. You know that feeling. “This is the year I keep all my looseleaf paper neat and my binder organized. I’m going to write all my papers weeks before they’re due and I’m going to study my vocab words every night.” Cut to three weeks later and 70% of your time in school is occupied with doodling a cityscape on the brown paperbag cover of your geometry book, and the morning bus-ride is spent trying to cobble together a book report on Johnny Tremaine based on the back cover.

I got an iphone last week.  Well, I got a new iphone, I mean. I had the original one for about two years. The new one is truly is a thing of terrifying beauty. I know I sound like old man Caruthers over here, but having something in your pocket the size of a deck of cards that not only can make calls but also holds all your music and your pictures, plays movies, shoots movies, takes pictures,  and you can play games and get online with is still pretty crazy to me.

And to make this post weight-lossy, let me recommend an iPhone app. It’s called Weightbot and it does what it’s supposed to do (track your weight) beautifully. The interface is easy and intuitive, and personally I find it helpful to carry around a reminder of my progress.

The only negative is that to erase an entry you need to shake your iphone. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I’ve found that to erase it you need to shake it at a baby-killing level of intensity. But beyond that it works great.

And it’s only 2 bucks!

Well, plus a few hundred for the iphone.

Oh, and a couple thousand for the AT&T contract.

And tens of thousands in lost productivity to your employer as you sit in the bathroom at work playing Ms. Pacman.

That is the message I want to give you today.

Oh, I don’t mean it in the “you don’t deserve it” sort of way. You may very well deserve it. Knowing you, I’m sure you do.

Here’s the thing, I like to check out a couple of different diet related message boards and social networking things and I often see people beating themselves up for their transgressions the weekend before. Just talking shit about themselves and saying how weak they are and how they have no willpower and how they’ll always be fat. Then the next week rolls around and there they are again explaining how someone left an ice-cream cake in the freezer and they accidentally swallowed it, and isn’t it awful how worthless and stupid they are and how nobody will ever love a fatty like them and so on. And it’s always the same people prostrating themselves in front of everyone. This, I think, is a bad idea for someone who is trying to lose weight or accomplish any lifestyle change.

Stop beating yourself up because you shouldn’t feel like you paid the price for your transgression. I know it seems like the woman who looks in the mirror after a binge and says, “You’re disgusting. You’re a big, heinous slob. You are hideous and no man will ever love you,” is being cruel to herself. But in reality she’s being kind to herself because she’s evening the score in her mind. The subtext of beating yourself up is, “I screwed up by eating what I shouldn’t have. But now I’ve yelled at myself and cried and made myself miserable about it. So now we’re even.” You’ve paid your penance. The slate is wiped clean and we’re back at equilibrium.

But you don’t want that. You don’t want to feel back to even. This is the bane of every frustrated dieter who is constantly “starting over.”

When you fall off the wagon you want there to be a disparity in your mind between where you are and where you want to be. That disparity is uncomfortable and that discomfort provides motivation to not screw up again. Beating yourself up and apologizing doesn’t provide motivation. There is no apologizing. You’re not forgiven. There is no starting over. Every second you waste chastising yourself you are falling behind. So suck it up and get going.

Here is my final post on Jack LaLanne’s 1960 book, The Jack LaLanne Way to Vibrant Good Health.

This is his Magic Reducing Plan Number One. It’s a seven day menu. It has a lot in common with other diets you see floating around from this same time period. If anyone ends up trying this, please let me know. There’s actually a part 2 and part 3 to this as well which you can read about if you track down the book.  For now, you have this:

Magic Reducing Plan Number One

No Alcohol – No Soft Drinks – No Salt – Little Seasoning

Breakfast (have the same breakfast every day for all seven days)

2 eggs — Grapefruit — Coffee

Monday

Lunch – 2 or 3 eggs — Tomatoes — Coffee

Dinner – 2 eggs — Combination salad — 1 slice of toast — Grapefruit — Coffee

Tuesday

Lunch – 2 or 3 eggs — Tomatoes — Coffee

Dinner – 2 lamb chops — Sliced tomato — Raw carrots — Cucumbers — Celery — Coffee

Wednesday

Lunch – 2 or 3 eggs — Spinach — Grapefruit — Coffee

Dinner – Steak (top ground round) — Tomato — Lettuce — Celery — Grapefruit — Coffee

Thursday

Lunch – 2 or 3 eggs — Spinach — Coffee

Dinner – Steak (top ground round) — Tomato — Celery — Grapefruit — Coffee

Friday

Lunch – 2 or 3 eggs — Tomato — Grapefruit — Coffee

Dinner – Combination salad — Fish — 1 piece of toast — Grapefruit — Coffee

Saturday

Lunch – Fruit salad (nothing else)

Dinner – Same as Wednesday

Sunday

Lunch – Chicken — Raw carrots — Tomato — 1 piece of toast — Coffee

Dinner – Vegetable soup — Chicken — Cooked cabbage — Carrots — Celery — Grapefruit

My theory on weight-reduction does not include coffee, tea or any stimulant. You may drink coffee if you wish, but I would suggest that you substitute bouillon, alfalfa mint tea (obtainable at any health food store) or any good beverage substitute.

Well, there you have it. Hope you like eggs! This would be a pretty low-calorie diet. And since salt is outlawed, I’m sure you’d shed a lot of weight over the course of it.  If you have a bridesmaid’s dress to squeeze into, this might help you out there. Although it’s not the type of thing I would (or could) stick to for the long term. I mean, unless an avalanche of eggs has trapped you in a cabin and you have to work your way through them anyways.

That last paragraph is very interesting. I’m a little surprised that health food stores were so ubiquitous in 1960. I would have thought that was a late-70′s thing. And are there really people who sip bouillon instead of coffee? Don’t get me wrong, I love veal, but sipping on a mug of the broth at 7AM doesn’t really interest me. I’m also curious what a “beverage substitute” might be. To me there are beverages, and then there’s everything else in the world that is not a beverage. I’m not sure what one might use as a beverage, that isn’t in fact a beverage. But I’m sure this is just a failure of my imagination, because I have no doubt that Jack was and is a genius.

It’s 1962, and your portly grandmother in her housecoat and curlers decides it might be time to get in shape. She picks up a Jack LaLanne book– deciding to give those exercises a go– and is confronted with these images:

That’s right, Shirley, simply grab two chairs and your adjustable-height stool, and hoist yourself up on them.  What’s that? You don’t think you can hold yourself up in that position? Hold yourself up? Shirley, that’s just the starting point, you’re going to be doing dips from that position.

Then Jack just starts F’ing with people.  He has you standing on one leg…doing squats… on a chair. Why on a chair? No reason. It doesn’t increase range of motion or anything. It just amuses Jack.

The exericise routine continues in this manner.

Although it should be pointed out that at the time these pictures were taken Jack was almost 50 years old. So he clearly knows what he’s talking about.

I’m not really someone who can get into reading self-help books. You would think as a genre they would make a fun and invigorating read. But when I read them I just feel like a turd.

The exception to this would be self-help books that were written pre-1970. I love these old books. I have a theory why this is. In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, there emerged a prevailing opinion that willpower wasn’t the problem in regards to losing weight or any other type of self-improvement. Willpower became a bad word. But I like willpower. I like the idea that I’m not broken and the world isn’t broken. What’s keeping me from achieving a goal is just the strength of my will — and your will can be exercised and made stronger just like everything else.  And yes, I understand that means that if I don’t reach the goal it’s because of  my lack of willpower. I don’t mind that. I’ll take the blame.

In the early self-help books that I’ve read, willpower plays a strong role. They also call it “intestinal fortitude.” I like that. I like these olds words and phrases we don’t hear too much. If you read some books from the 50′s you’ll read a lot about people getting back their vim and pep.

Betsy sure has a lot of pep and vim these days! It’s probably because she had the intestinal fortitude to stick to that daily program of fun-nastics!

The word fun-nastics is the creation of one of my all time heros, Jack Lalanne. Jack is a genius. I wouldn’t say I follow a lick of his advice but I find him such an inspiring person regardless. Go to his website and buy all his Collector’s Edition DVDs. They’re great. Exercising with live organ accompaniment is remarkably pleasant.

Over the course of this blog I’m going to write some posts looking at some of my favorite old diet and exercise books.  This week I’m going to put up a couple posts about Jack’s 1960 book, The Jack LaLanne Way to Vibrant Good Health.

I don’t know why these types of books speak to me. I’m not even looking for a diet or exercise plan to follow. I just kind of like them as historical records of another time where it seemed more things felt possible. All you had to do was be committed. As Jack writes:

“Stick-to-it-iveness.” That’s the word and the key. Stick to it 365 days a year, all your years, and you can’t fail. Keep faith in yourself. Keep believing in your mind and body. Keep working.

I’ll make some further postings on this book later this week, including one of the three diet plans Jack offers in the book and some pictures of the insane exercises that I would love to see a chubby 60s housewife attempting.