Monthly Archives: February 2015

Seat Belt Extender, etc.

Here is a journal entry from December 2010, which captures my thoughts on finally not having to use a seat belt extender, being proactive while on trips, etc. Hopefully, this journal entry can provide some real-time insight about what I was experiencing during my weight loss.

“December 26, 2010. This week I took a vacation, and traveled to Miami. My experiences traveling, and during the holidays, is that you have to be proactive, focused and vigilant. For example, I only book hotels that have exercise equipment similar to what I have at home, and make a point of working out every day like I do at home. I also travel to locations where I can do other physical activities; for example, this week I was in Miami, where I was able to take long walks, play tennis and swim.

It is amazing to be swimming again. It has probably been 6 or 7 years since I last went swimming since I was so embarrassed about how I looked, and had a difficult time finding a bathing suit that fit. But, now, I was swimming every day and not too self-conscious about how I look.

I had a good reality check earlier this week about how much further I have to go, and why I need to continue to push myself to reach my weight goal. As I mentioned in an earlier journal entry, I no longer need to use a seat belt extender in airplanes. I used to travel with them since I hated asking for one once on the plane, and had a seat belt extender for domestic travel and international travel, since they used different seat belt designs. But I digress; the reality check is that although I no longer need to carry a seat belt extender, I still needed to wear the seat belt at its largest setting, so I am only a few extra pounds from again needing a seat belt extender — a very sobering thought and a good reason to maintain my focus.

Staying with the proactive theme, I find it very important to be careful about what I eat, and be active to ask for my meals to be adjusted according to my dietary needs. For example, I was at a Mexican restaurant one night, and came up with a way to enjoy the meal, yet to cut down on the calories I eat. Typically at a Mexican restaurant one eats chips, guacamole and salsa, but what I did is essentially eliminate the chips. I ate the guacamole with my fork, and saved the salsa to put on my main course, which was a skirt steak. So I only had about 4 chips in total. Also, the skirt steak was to come with rice, but I instead asked for vegetables, and put the salsa and left over guacamole also on my vegetables. For most other meals I sent the bread back, and if I ate any bread, did not add any butter. For desserts I ordered fruit, and I went food shopping at a local market so I had tomatoes and Wasa crackers to snack on if I was hungry between meals, or did not feel the dinner or luncheon portion was sufficient. Also, I ordered salads without dressing, and used balsamic vinegar instead. Finally, I brought Lindt 99% coca chocolate bars with me if I wanted a sweet snack, and ordered unsweetened ice tea and water instead of cocktails or wine.

Yet, even though I was proactive, and physically active, I was disappointed to lose only about ½ lb. this week, now weighing 285 lbs. I would have thought I would have lost more weight, and that is a bit disappointing. I wonder whether air travel is again affecting my weight like it did when I flew to Europe, and that next week I will be seeing a significant weight loss. We’ll see. On Wednesday, I will be headed back to the Canyon Ranch Spa to spend the New Year’s, and to come up with a exercise and nutritional plan to lose the remaining 105 lbs.”

Postmortem: I still (in 2015) have my seat belt extenders (for both domestic and foreign travel) in my apartment, to remind me what I have experienced and achieved, and as a reminder of the vigilance I need to maintain so as to never allow myself to approach my old overweight condition.

Use Better Planning To Enhance One’s Willpower and Discipline

Often people who are overweight are thought as lacking the willpower and discipline to lose weight. From my own experience, I know that is not the case, and there are ways to enhance one’s willpower and discipline simply through better planning. In an August 17, 2011 article by John Tierney, published in the New York Times, entitled “Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue?”, Mr. Tierney discusses how decision fatigue (to me, indecision) wastes energy, and makes it harder to have the mental energy for continued self-control, willpower, and discipline.

The article refers to experiments by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, who studied mental discipline, and whose studies showed that each person has a finite amount of mental energy for exerting self-control, and when a person is fatigued, it makes it more difficult to sustain one’s self-control, willpower, and discipline. The studies pointed to boosting one’s mental energy through increased energy input (like through sugar intake), but also pointed to making one’s mental energy last longer by lessening the amount used on each decision, with the idea that each decision uses a certain amount of a finite amount of mental energy, so lessening the amount used for each decision makes that energy go further. Let’s call it mental efficiency.

For me, improving one’s mental efficiency has worked best (because, e.g., increased sugar intake which can increase your weight), and that matches what I have experience in my business dealings. In my experience, the hardest thing for a business to deal with is indecision. If something is negative, you can come up with a course of action to fix it, and if things are going well, one can look to do the same thing, or look what improvements can be made; however, if one does not know what to do, that is the most stressful position to be in, which causes the most stress for a business.

So how can better planning help one’s willpower? Easy – if each decision one makes takes up a certain amount of their mental energy, one can lessen the amount of cumulative mental energy used by making many decisions easier, thereby using less energy for those decisions. In practice, what that means is that you decide ahead of time what you are going to do, what you are going to eat, how long one is going to exercise, etc.

What I have done, and continue to do, for example, is decide on the weekend what I will eating for dinner each night, and then go about preparing and planning my evening meals for the upcoming week on the weekend, including preparing the food for each night’s meal in advance so dinner will be ready in 30 minutes once I get home from work. Also, when I travel, I always pick a hotel that has a gym with the exercise equipment I use, so I know in advance that I will be exercising when I travel, and am comfortable in the equipment that will be used. I also make it a point to travel with a scale, so every day I understand if I am gaining weight, losing weight, or have staying the same. The whole point of these types of action is that I have shifted these decisions to a time when I have more mental energy use on these decisions, so that during the week, when I am confronted with many more decisions, I do not waste energy on those decisions, which gives me greater mental energy to maintain my self-control and discipline for other matters that come up doing the day. Call it mental energy shifting. So start planning ahead, making those lists, and filling up that calendar, and you too should find that extra mental energy to enhance your self-control, discipline, and willpower.

Oil, Vinegar, Food Preparation, and Eating Out Tips

Two spray dispensers for cooking oil, and a container of Roland Diamond Balsamic Vinegar of Modena.

Salad dressings typically contain lots of calories, fat, salt and sugar, and should be avoided if one is trying to lose (or maintain) weight, so instead, I ask for oil and vinegar when I dine out, or use only balsamic vinegar when I eat at home. However, if balsamic vinegar is not available when dining out, I will then use red wine vinegar. And it is amazing, when dining out, how often the server does not know the difference between balsamic vinegar and balsamic vinaigrette – I have won many bets that the server will inevitably bring out a container of balsamic vinaigrette instead of balsamic vinegar. Just so there is no confusion, balsamic vinegar is pure vinegar, made from grapes and is low in calories, whereas balsamic vinaigrette is made from combining oil (usually olive oil) with balsamic vinegar, along with garlic, salt, etc., and it is higher in calories and salt than just balsamic vinegar.

That is not to say I do not use oil in my cooking, but I use it sparingly. The oils I primarily use are olive oil (first cold pressed extra virgin), canola oil (when I want to avoid an olive taste, like with French toast), and peanut oil (with grilled meats when I want a peanut flavor, and want to use an oil with a higher burn temperature than olive oil). I even use olive oil for omelets, instead of butter, but use a spray dispenser (Misto®, or some other spray dispenser) to spray the pan/pot with a thin coat of oil, instead of just pouring the oil into the pan/pot. The main advantage of this technique is that it limits the amount of calories added to the dish since you only use the amount of oil (hence calories) needed to coat the pan/pot to avoid the food from sticking. I learned this technique at the Canyon Ranch Spa (Lennox, MA location), where I took a few cooking classes, and it is the technique they use to limit calories. Other advantages of this technique are that your oil last longer (as you use less), and when cooking up French toast or pancakes (on those special occasions), there is no excess oil in the pan to burn during each batch, as you simply re-spray the pan after each batch rather than re-use the excess brunt oil.

I also use this technique when I cook my vegetables in a microwave, as I first spray them with oil (usually olive oil) before adding any spices, thereby better adhering the spices to the vegetables. In this way, the spices and olive oil can better enhance the taste of the cooked vegetables without adding too many calories, while also helping the vegetables to cook better as the heated oil helps the cooking process. As I have mentioned in earlier posts, part of my process for controlling my food and caloric intake, is to take time on the weekend to clean and cut various vegetables into bite-sized pieces (broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, carrots, sting beans, etc.), put them in a microwave container, spray them with olive oil, add spices (typically, crushed pepper, cayenne pepper, paprika, garlic, etc.), and then place them in a sealed container in my refrigerator so that I can quickly cook the vegetables once I get home during the week.

While on the subject, here are some other dining out tips. First, should the restaurant not have balsamic vinegar or red wine vinegar, and one still wants dressing on one’s salad, choose the dressing with the least creamy and/or cheesy composition, ask for it on the side, and then use a fork to sparingly spread it on the salad. Second, avoid sauces, particularly, cream sauces. So instead of having, e.g., sauce béarnaise on a steak, ask for balsamic vinegar instead. As an aside, and as you may or may not know, the more expensive the balsamic vinegar (typically by how long it has been aged – which can be for 25 or more years), the balsamic vinegar has a sweater taste, and is more viscous. These aged/premium vinegars can even be used for meat toppings, dressing, or even dessert toppings. One brand of balsamic vinegar that I particularly like is Roland Diamond Balsamic Vinegar of Modena, and I use it for everything from salad dressing, sauce for meats and vegetables, and sometimes even on desserts.

Another eating out tip has to do specifically with Mexican restaurants. What I do is avoid the chips, tacos, and wrappings, so I instead just eat the salsa straight out of the container with a fork, and/or put it on my dish instead of a sauce. So when first ordering, I ask the server for my own container of salsa, separate from the container that others in my party may be using for dipping their chips, and then eat right out of that container. There are many advantages to this approach – salsa without chips is low in calories, the chips are very high in salt and in calories, and by eating salsa in such a way, I still maintain the flavor of my Mexican meal, without the extra calories and salt from the chips (or tacos, wrappings, etc.). I also eat guacamole in the same matter, sans chips, since avocados, which are high in calories, nonetheless have no cholesterol and contain monounsaturated fat, which studies have shown helps to reduce one’s cholesterol and are a good heart healthy choice.

Persevere To Overcome Doubt

2014 Gridiron 4-Mile

2015 Gridiron 4-Mile

Today I ran in the NYC Gridiron 4-Mile run, something that I have also done in 2013 and 2014, and really enjoy doing. I have also run in the Central Park New Year’s Eve run, which is also great fun, and has been a fantastic way to start off the New Year. I only run in these two races each year, and instead take long walks – every Sunday taking a 2 ½ hour 8-mile walk.

It was in law school when I first started running as sport, and before then, running was just a training tool for the sports I played competitively – tennis, soccer, basketball, and baseball. Running distances started innocently enough, with me taking 1 mile runs near my apartment, but eventually grew to unofficially running 18.6 miles of the New York City Marathon my first year in law school, and then officially running and completing the Marathon my second year. How that happened is a great story onto itself (for another time), but the result of all that running, and training, was knee injuries, and the cessation of running due to injury. When I stopped running I quickly gained weight, and that weight stayed with me until the last few years.

To avoid a recurrence of leg injuries, I do not run anymore (except those two short runs), and instead prefer to walk briskally – walk everywhere in Manhattan (avoiding public transit and cabs), and take my aforementioned Sunday walk. Moreover, my daily exercise is on a indoor recumbent bike, and on an elliptical machine – both low-impact activities which minimize the possibility of leg injuries. That is one of the reasons I prefer those two pieces of equipment over a treadmill.

Yet on those two occasions a year, I enjoy the challenge of again running over a distance, which brings me to today’s run, and how I was struggling to keep running, instead of just walking. But what kept me running was the thought that if I just persevered long enough, I would overcome my difficulties running, as well as my doubt about whether I could run the entire race. Being able to persevere is an important element in finding and maintaining one’s inner drive, and it has applications to all parts of one’s life, not just with regard to physical fitness.

No matter whom you are, or what you are doing, at some point you will have doubts about what you are doing, and whether you will accomplish a goal. For me, I have never been the smartest, nor the best athlete, but where I am strongest is my ability to stick it out and work to improve myself. And there are also tricks that have gotten me though those periods, like today, when I kept focusing on just taking one step at a time, and that I should keep running to the end of a song that I was listening to on my iPhone. I also thought about how elevated I would feel if I was able to accomplish my goal of running the entire race.

During my daily morning exercise, I am not always in the best physical or mental condition to exercise for an hour, so I find distractions – watching something on TV, listening to a particular song, reading e-mails, etc., just trying to find something to get me a few minutes more on the bike. Those minutes add up, and eventually, you can accomplish your goal, like I did today in running the entire race.

So this week’s message is when those situations occur, and you have doubt about being able to accomplish a goal, focus on something that will get you doing the activity for just a few minutes more, and eventually, you will be able to accomplish your goal. For longer term goals, just focus on doing a small part, and eventually, all those small parts will add up to accomplishing your goal.

Drive From Within