I Am Not A Reptile

There is no doubt my deep reptile brain is pushing me to stuff myself full of blubber and then hibernate. But I am not a reptile. I always hate those studies that grab headlines in the newspapers that say "these kind of people are hardwired to behave a certain way".  Besides the fact they are usually based on about twenty college students studied for a couple of weeks, the fact is we may have innate dispositions towards behaving a certain way, but we are thinking beings. We don't have to act on our instincts. We can choose.

Gary Taubes wrote a book about the science of weight,  Good Calories, Bad Calories, where a major point he made is that we gain and lose weight due to things we cannot control.  One of the ways I remember what he said was a chicken-and-egg analogy - do we gain weight because we eat, or do we eat because we need to gain weight?  He pointed out that teenagers in growth spurts eat absurd amounts of food, but no-one believes that they grow because they eat - we all assume they eat because they need the energy to grow.  So, he says, there are times and forces that will make your body put on fat, and responding to those forces will drive you to eat.

I just went to double check the spelling of his name, and see that he has a new book coming out!  And the title is perfect for this topic: Why We Get Fat.  It comes out the end of December, but I know I'll be reading it over New Year's.

But, barring any enormous new insights, back to my current thinking....

I believe there are forces that propel your body to add or subtract weight. The change of seasons is definitely one of them. But, I am a human being. I cannot control chemical reactions inside my body.  I can, however, control my behavior.  Yes, it gets harder when the forces are pushing me in a different direction. Yes, it's not fair that my Norwegian ancestors survived those cold dark winters by evolving a thrifty gene that conserves energy to increase the odds of surviving till spring. Life isn't fair, and as a rational being, I can examine my behavior and act how I choose.

The facts are stark:  I am sleeping more than any time since snowmeggedon in February last year, yet I am stumbling with fatigue. I am burning less calories than any time since then and every footstep is an effort. My eating is up slightly from where it has been for the past several months, but I am hungry and mouthy both all the time.  But I have it in my power to affect this behavior.

First, go ahead and sleep. I will try to get as much as the body tells me it needs.

Next, move, dammit!  Keep adding in activities as much as possible. I am doing my two or three trips to personal training each week, but I need much more than that. Based partly on a suggestion from my friend Kim, and partly on the stairclimbing tips from Ms. Bitch Cakes, I took some reading I needed to do and wandered the stairwells while reading. No prizes for speed or gracefulness, but I spent about a half hour with my report and probably got nearly a hundred extra calories burned.  I work on the ninth floor of a ten-story building, so I will continue to have opportunities (today, I walked down all 9 flights and back up four of them when I was fetching my lunch.)  Tonight, I braved the cold to walk to my kids house and back - I know from experience that's another hundred calories.

The food:  this is the biggest problem. I need to log it all, even when the truth is so ugly.  I need to work out how to get portion control taken away from me. I do yogurt-like containers of cottage cheese for breakfast, in spite of the horrible waste of resources in the individual serving packaging. I need to buy pre-packaged salads at Trader Joe's for lunches again, if I'm not going to take the time or effort to go walking for a fancy salad from Cosi.  Dinners - that's where I need to be rational and on my guard, conscious as I plan and serve.  Tonight, I get credit for deciding not to add garlic bread to the spaghetti supper - I can keep small portions of pasta, but the bread would have been additive not to mention addictive.

Despite all this angst, I'm actually doing OK on both fitness and weight-loss fronts. I am so proud of my upper body strength, I'm going to go do push-ups in the gym at work in front of the guys. I avoided the scale during the Thanksgiving break (just accidentally of course, my morning routine was off) and Monday's weight was a full three-and-a-half pounds above the average of the week before, (which had been consistent with my tiny but clearly downward trend).  But Monday's number was fleeting water weight; Tuesday's weight was one pound down, and by this morning the remaining two and a half pounds had all been peed back out.  So I'm back in the ball game.  I need to keep reminding myself:  I cannot control the number on the scale, but I can control my behavior.  I can choose how I want to be.

I AM NOT A REPTILE.