Having faith in the process: nothing's worked before, why would this work now?

If you have enough geek-cred to get the above meme, then you already know that the cake is a lie. I've been burned before. I mean, sure, I've done some silly Dr. Oz-like diet nonsense (thankfully I've never actually wasted any money on him) but I haven't only been burned by obvious charlatans. I've followed the "good" recommendations, I've done more cardio than a fricking cheetah, all in the name of losing weight. I've tried to "eat intuitively" (still don't know what that means) and to "listen to my body" (newsflash: my body wants lots of crap that's bad for it!). I've cut all fast food and almost all crap food out of my diet. I haven't had a soda in living memory. You know what I discovered when I did that? I discovered that I can totally get fat by eating intuitive amounts of healthy foods.

I'm a huge advocate for eating actual food, rather than food-type substances. I try hard never to eat things that can only be described using their base chemical composition. But despite what the talking-head-du-jour just said on CNN Health, just cutting McDonalds, Totinos, and Coke out of one's diet does not guarantee weight loss, and it certainly does not guarantee permanent weight loss. Sorry.

And cardio. CARDIO. Oh, where should I start with you, cardio? Cardio, I believed in you. Cardio, everyone told me that you were the key, that if I worked enough with you, I would lose weight. I devoted years of my life to you, cardio, YEARS. But you let me down. No, you betrayed me. Whenever I pointed out that things just weren't working out between us, you'd say, "Babe, don't leave me. We can make this work. I can change. I can do what you need me to do. Why not try the elliptical instead of the bike? Or the treadmill? I'll never hurt you again. All our friends and family and doctors and TV personalities want us to be together. Everyone believes in us!" But none of that was true. The weight wouldn't come off, or worse, it would invite friends to come live with us. You took my trust, and you threw it back in my face. I had faith in the process. The process sucked.

(NB: here and throughout, when I say "cardio" I specifically mean "steady state cardio"--you know, when you climb onto the treadmill and stay there at more or less the same level for an hour? This is different than High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), which will come up occasionally, and for which I don't have nearly the same ire.)

Melodrama aside, the issue now is how do I recover from this place? This isn't just a matter of finding something that does work, but finding the courage--maybe finding the faith--to stick with it. Because even though it's not a popular topic on TV weightloss infomercials, changing diet, and habits, and lifestyle--it takes a long time, and rarely if ever offers instant gratification. It's perfectly possible to be making progress and not be able to tell. But how can I tell that I'm making progress when I can't tell if I'm making progress, especially when I spent so long assuming I was making progress but not making progress because I couldn't tell if I was making progress?! To really change one's lifestyle takes a level of commitment not unlike jumping out of a plane. This really is a "go big or go home" kind of mindset (even if I emphatically do not advocate Doing All The Things, see here, #5). But I have to have faith in my parachute, or I'm just gonna keep edging up to the door, looking out, never really jumping. How did I find that faith?

For me, it was a convoluted string of things. I'm the sort of person who always does better when I understand how things work rather than, say, just following instructions. The theory behind cardio for weightloss was so simple--work off more than you take in--that it's hard to understand how it can go wrong. I mean, this is just thermodynamics + addition/subtraction, right? In fact, no it's not. But the simplicity and apparent "obviousness" of this narrative makes it so damned compelling, that when it didn't work (over and over and over) I started to seriously believe that my body was so utterly doomed to be fat that it could defy the basic laws of thermodynamics. Lemme just tell you, believing that you have fat-maintaining superpowers is not a good headspace to be in vis-a-vis actually losing fat. I had to figure out what was going on, or failing that, find a radioactive spider somewhere. So I learned a reasonable amount of physiology and sports nutrition to understand why "eat less, move more" wasn't working. Turns out, our bodies are way more complicated than simple input/output functions for food. I'll probably talk about the nutritional stuff I do some other time. Right now, Physiology!

So what did I learn? Physiology taught me that successful weight loss is easiest to achieve and maintain when you build up a good fast metabolism. So naturally, I go and Google "increase metabolism". (I encourage the reader to do this. It's an instructive exercise.) And while I found all manner of cray-cray suggestions for how to get your motor running (acai berry anyone?), one component I found consistently on every. single. article. was the importance of building and maintaining muscle. Muscle takes more calories to maintain than fat (or bone, or organ, etc.), and so increases the amount of calories your body burns just to keep itself going. That's how metabolism works for us.

"Hey babe! You can build muscle by doing really hard cardio!"

Shut up, Cardio, that's bullshit. I tried that for years, it didn't work for me. Doing cardio hard enough to actually build muscle makes me want to die, which is counterproductive for getting healthy. Quit lying to me! I'm not coming back to you! (Although your cousin HIIT is kinda hot....)

For building and maintaining muscle, the best game in town hands down is good old fashioned lifting. Heavy lifting. Lifting that makes me screw up my face into funny shapes and occasionally make strange sounds. That builds muscle. Muscle burns calories, which in turn burns fat, because my body is all like "Whoa, crap, can't burn muscle if she's gonna keep trying to pick up that stupid metal stick over and over--kill the fat reserves!"

I also learned some important differences between how cardio affects the body and how weightlifting affects the body. Three things in particular were relevant:

1. Adaptation: if we keep repeating the same physical activity over and over, our bodies are super-good at, well, becoming super-good at them. This is what cardio training (e.g., running, biking, trialthlon training, etc.) all trade on. Frankly it's kinda cool. The more you run, the better your body gets at running. But here, "better" basically means "more efficient", and that basically means "less energy for more capability" and that basically means it takes fewer and fewer calories to do the same thing. So, if your goal is fat loss, you have to keep increasing intensity/duration in order to maintain a status quo. If one loves running, or biking, or whathaveyou, that's great. If you hate it and just want it to be over with, then having to do more and more of it and end up stalling out on fat loss altogether is a bad deal. Weightlifting does also incur adaptation, but it's much easier to amp up the difficulty without having to, e.g., spend 2 hours per day lifting. Check out progressive overload principles for more details. For me at least, it is just easier to keep progressing in a positive direction with weightlifting than with cardio, and hence continue to burn fat instead of stalling out (or worse, regressing).
2. Afterburn: here's an awesome thing that weightlifting has and cardio simply doesn't--afterburn. When one wraps up a cardio session, once one's heart rate is back to normal, all additional calorie burn comes to a halt. Not so with weightlifting! There's a very real, very well-explored effect called afterburn, which means that after a reasonably intense weightlifting session, one's body keeps burning higher-than-maintenance calories for hours afterwards. You're functionally still working out, even once you're back at home sitting at the computer. The effect is varied based on individual, intensity of workout, and so on, so it's almost impossible to actually calculate one's overall calorie burn doing weightlifting--which for me is totally okay, as I discuss here. But burning more calories while I'm sitting on the couch watching Supernatural? I'll take it. (Side note: HIIT, the hot cousin of cardio, also seems to have an afterburn effect, and it takes way less time to do that cardio does. Just sayin.)
3. ROI--return on investment. How much am I getting back from the effort I put in, relative to what my goals are? All kinds of things can be included in this analysis. It captures considerations of adaptation and afterburn, but also how many calories are burned for overall work, how expensive the workouts are, how much one enjoys them, how much time they take, how sustainable are they (or do they need to be), etc. Here's my personal rough ROI analysis for cardio versus weightlifting:
   
   1. CARDIO: I hate doing it, I have to do more and more of it just to maintain my current place, I have to do more of it time-wise to be equivalent to the calorie burn of weightlifting, it takes more of my time than I am comfortable with workouts taking, it has diminishing returns of not increasing or even maintaining my metabolism on top of the adaptation issue, I constantly look for excuses to get out of doing cardio, and I almost always peter out on my willingness to do cardio at all within a few months. Oh, did I mention that I hate doing it?
   2. WEIGHTLIFTING: I love doing it, I only have to work out three times a week for an hour (and I really could get away with less, but I enjoy it), it builds my metabolism, experience verifies for me that it burns more calories overall, it makes my body look increasingly good (rather than the weird "skinny-fat" thing that's just de rigeur these days), it doesn't take me away from my family for as long, I look for excuses to go and do it, it builds my confidence, makes me feel powerful, helps me love my body, etc.
As you can see, this isn't even really a contest for me. Of course, I luck out inasmuch as I really do enjoy lifting. But I'll be honest, and I've heard this from some personal trainers too, even if I didn't enjoy it, I would probably still lift, just based on the ROI for fat burning. It would take an increased level of dedication if I didn't enjoy it, but hopefully the benefits (e.g., fat loss, measurement loss, hotter body, more health, etc.) would create enough of a positive feedback loop to be reinforcing for me.

So, in short, this is why I have faith in the process--a lot of new understanding of physiology. It also helps that I use a lot more metrics for progress than just scale weight. I measure myself every month, I track my progress in the gym, and so on. My first trainer told me that if you want to change or improve a behavior, the first thing to do is track it. She was so right.

Alright, so I'm obviously pretty down on cardio. Does that mean that I think cardio should be abandoned altogether? Absolutely not. I just don't happen to be in a place in my life right now where I enjoy cardio, and cardio isn't a good method for accomplishing my goals. Honestly, my body is still big enough that it makes cardio exceptionally unpleasant. Ever try to take a jog when you're 50lbs overweight? It's a horrible, painful, and demoralizing experience, never mind how much damage one does to their knees & other joints in the process. Maybe once my weight is healthier, cardio activities will become more enjoyable. Maybe I'll take up jogging for funz. I'll probably enjoy hiking, biking, swimming, etc. much more then. I will never, ever, ever, ever camp out on stupid cardio machines at the gym, but that doesn't mean I'll never do fun cardio. But right now, it ain't fun for me.

In fact, I rather look forward to when I find pleasure in cardio activities, because both my spouse and youngest son are fairly avid runners. I'd like to be more participatory in this. Also, weightlifting might be the ticket for me for fat loss, but cardio is the thing for... um... increasing cardiovascular health. (Duh?) Having more stamina. Having better heart-health, lower heart disease, better sleep, better overall metabolic function, better many things. In point of fact, I think my spouse put it best:

Lifting gives you a body that's hot in bed.

Cardio gives you a body that performs well in bed.

It's all about your goals.... =)