31 Months a Vegan! You can't out exercise too much of a good diet either! #I'mstuffed #eatlikeagorilla #eattoloseweight #2muchis2much

I have a confession to make. For the past 1.5 months I've been participating in aerobic activities. I run 3.1 miles (5K) on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday and I swim a mile during the weekend then Tuesday and Thursday and I haven't lost any weight. Not a single pound. It's not supposed to work that way!

I don't eat any animal products or oil. I limit myself to 12 almonds 2 or 3 times a week, I don't eat sweets, processed food, white rice and almost no bread or pasta. My diet is 100% plants and I'm not losing any weight. By my calculations the calories burned by the extra exercise add up to about 3600 per week. The generally accepted standard is that 3500 calories burned equals 1 pound of weight loss and I haven't seen any difference at all for 6 weeks. So what am I doing wrong?

I did some research. That 3500 calorie standard turns out to be wrong. It is based on lab values set 58 years ago and measures how many calories are released by burning 1 pound of fat in a lab. It does not take into account hormones, rising and falling metabolic rate or the myriad of  other things that happen in a human body during any 24 hour period. 

In a University of Michigan study designed to examine this very subject people who are obese to begin with are resistant to the hormone that suppresses appetite. Especially in women. If you are lean, exercise will suppress your appetite immediately after. If you are obese, exercise will not suppress your appetite and will probably make you more hungry.

Now back to me. I wanted to understand what I personally was doing wrong to sabotage weight loss without participating in expensive metabolic measurements and blood work to study my hormones. 

My thought was that I was rewarding myself for all the exercise by eating more. So I began to keep a food diary again; a simple way to measure my intake. I had the advantage of being able to compare my current food diary with the one I kept 2 years ago while I was in the middle of losing 103 pounds simply by going Vegan without doing any exercise routine at all. 

"You can't out exercise a bad diet!"

Before changing my diet, I figured that if I had a lot of pizza on Friday, I could just work out on Saturday and burn it off. That never worked. Either I wouldn't work out at all or not enough to burn off anywhere near the amount of calories I had consumed. The next day I would just eat some other high fat food anyway and get stuck in the same vicious cycle. I had fallen into the same trap that kept me fat most of my adult life. My food diary showed that I was eating twice as much food as I ate daily 2 years ago. It was all good, healthy, strictly plants food but I was taking in as many calories as I was burning with exercise. Almost exactly as many. As a result I didn't lose or gain any weight at all. 

That was my lightbulb going on over my head moment. I was rewarding myself whether hungry or not with way more food than I needed. While part of this problem may be due to my body trying to maintain homeostasis, most of it is psychological. I've proven to myself over the past 31 months that I have the willpower and the ability to control what I eat. Now I had to go back to controlling how much I eat.

I've gone back to using a food diary as a training tool. I write down everything eaten, including water, for 3 days in a row. This simple tool helps repair the disconnect between my stomach and my brain. When I see it on paper, the desire to eat just ceases. Contrary to my previous belief, even a vegan who eats no oil can still eat too much. Luckily for me I realized what I was doing wrong and found a way to get back on track. It turns out you can't even out exercise too much of a good diet!
Here's the plan:
1) Eat whole foods
2) Just plants
3) Not too much.
.....Challenge accepted. Two pounds gone in 3 days. ;-)
Carry on!