The Wait

I pulled into Nazareth...

It's a bit like fishing: you do your preparation, arrive beside the water, choose a method you think will be appropriate, and wait. Sometimes you wait all day, and go home without having had a tremble on the line. Other times they're hurling themselves at you.

And so it seems to be with weight: you do the research, count the calories, eat the right foods, do the right exercises, and wait. Sometimes the weight creeps off. Sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it creeps back on again.

In the week preceding my long bicycle ride I had dropped twice the amount of weight I would normally have done; I started the week at 12 stone 9 pounds, and on the evening before I set out on the first attempt to reach the railway, I weighed 12 stone 5 pounds.

I was elated, puzzled, and even slightly apprehensive. There have been rumours of dieters having problems with their life insurance, because the companies view weight loss as potentially harmful, a prelude to a wasting disease. The advice from doctors is to lose no more than two pounds a week, and here I was, doubling that figure, and I hadn't even tried. I hadn't eaten less, I'd been drinking plenty of water to guard against dehydration, and I hadn't tried any clever tricks like cutting out carbohydrates.

I had cycled a bit more, of course, and decided that exercise was obviously my particular key. I responded better to hard work than to a restricted diet. (Note to self: this does not mean you can eat more.)

After my two days either pushing or riding, I saw a brief figure of 12 stone 4 pounds. Excellent, I thought, long sustained exercise could knock a pound a day off. If only I could ride all day, all week. And then the earlier worries returned, would such an increased rate of losing weight be good for me? I wondered whether to go and have a word with my Doctor.

As it happened, I didn't need to. The next day, my weight had increased to 12 stone 5 pounds. I decided that the low figure had been a dehydration blip, and that it had taken a day to restore my fluid balance.

And on the next day, I reached 12 stone 6 pounds, and remained there for the rest of the week. I started to shirk getting on the scales, terrified I would see the needle reach the 7 pound line, or even worse.

The nice thing about the web is that there's always advice for something like this. There's sometimes too much advice, often contradictory, but it seems that every other person who has tried to lose weight has experienced both the plateau, and the reversal.

Some of the confusion comes in the figures they quote. Thin people need less basic calories per day than fat people. OK, so as you lose weight, you perhaps need to also reduce your daily intake. But, they also say, the extra muscles you develop as part of the exercise required to become a thin person consume more basic energy, so you should continue to lose weight as a result of the increase in basic metabolic rate. I was confused. Did I need to eat less as I lost weight and gained muscle, or more?

I went through all the pages I could find on plateau during weight loss. The key points I picked out where that:
1) this often happens
2) it is nearly always due to hidden calories
3) worrying about it is the worst thing to do.

An interesting comment on one of the cycling pages I had skimmed through jogged my memory, and I went back for a second portion. Increased exercise often means extra food intake, to give the body fuel to maintain the muscle growth. I realised that I might have moved out of the phase where my cycling was primarily to burn up fat into the phase where I was actively building muscle.

For a few moments I decided the reversal I had seen meant that I had actually converted some of the fat into muscle, and due to some magic process, actually gained more muscle than I had lost fat. A quick squeeze just above the waistline convinced me that I was thinking bollocks again.

Another dimly-remembered page on the web was re-visited. It recommended increasing the amount of protein and decreasing the fat and carbohydrate component of the daily diet when exercising hard. It did also say that the protein intake should not exceed 25% of the total intake, to avoid drifting into the perils of the stormy Atkins controversy. Oh, don’t go near the Atkins sea, sailor boy, it'll slice your sails and rattle your rigging and make your timbers tremble.

What I did do was take another look at what I was eating, and noticed that my old favourites, bread and cheese, had crept back up. And, after looking at the bread, I began to realise what was going on. I make my own bread, in a bread-making machine. It produces small, compact loaves; well, dense, actually. I love the texture and the taste, it's so much nicer than the shop loaves. And I loved experimenting with different types of flour. I had been using Spelt for quite a while, but had then discovered malted flour, and the taste of it was just too good.

I was mixing equal measures of Canadian wholemeal flour with organic malted wholemeal flour, and had stopped using the spelt. Looking through the packets to see what differences there might be, I discovered that the spelt flour claimed to have a higher protein content than normal flours. So, by switching to malted flour, I had inadvertently both reduced my protein intake slightly, and, because of the taste, also been eating more bread than perhaps I should.

So now I have a decision to make. Do I mix spelt and malted flours, or do I forgo the taste, and therefore the temptation, and restrict myself to simple spelt and wholemeal?

Just like fishing. What bait should I use? Why is nothing happening? Am I in the right place? Am I doing the right thing?

No, was all he said

And how much longer will I have this wait?