Nutrition and Fitness Professional, LLC

Weight Loss Counseling, Vegetarian, Vegan, & Sports Nutrition, plus Fitness Training Services and Body Fat Assessments

Posts Tagged anorexia

Checking Benefits for Nutrition Counseling–How, Why?

Feb 17

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Healthcare | No Comments

Unfortunately, it isn’t obvious on many health plans that you can see a licensed dietitian, the healthcare professional trained in working with people to reverse many of the leading causes of disease and death in the US, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Many plans did not cover this service until recent years or after the Affordable Care Act’s mandates for coverage for obesity and those at risk for diet-related disease.

Now, many plans do cover, but it hasn’t made it to common knowledge or insurance benefits packets.  It isn’t in the automated phone message system either.  You have to speak to a customer service representative by calling the number on the back of your insurance ID card.

Perhaps if everyone knew about it, there would be too much business?  I’m not sure why it isn’t advertised with your insurance.  It is cheaper to see a dietitian a few times a year outside of the hospital than to have bypass surgery in a few years with associated hospital fees.

How to check nutrition counseling benefits:

  1. Turn over your insurance ID card and call the number.
  2. Choose Medical.  Not dental or behavioral health
  3. Supply your insurance ID and date of birth.  If given these ahead of your visit, we can sometimes help verify benefits if not busy.  You should check yourself so you can hear it for yourself.
  4. Eligibility and Benefits.  Sometimes you have to select “office visit” or “outpatient service” or “specialist.”
  5. State “nutrition counseling” into the voice system–you probably won’t hear it in a list of automated services
  6. Ask about CPT codes 97802, 97803, 97804 (individual initial, individual follow-up, group, respectively).
  7. Ask if you need a referral or preauthorization for the service.  Only some plans require this.
    1. Referrals can take a few days to a week to get from your physician’s office and may or may not require you visit your Primary Care Physician (PCP) first for a visit.  If you schedule a visit and cancel in less than 24 hours because you “just find out” you need a referral, you will still be charged a missed visit fee for reserving business hours. It is the patient’s responsibility to be aware of his or her plan’s rules and only reserve professional time when ready to have the service rendered after plan requirements are met.  We accept and bill your insurance as a courtesy and are aware of many plans that require referrals from experience, but not ALL plans in existance!  Sometimes plan rules change year to year.  Remember, it is YOUR plan, so know the rules for it!
    2. Preauthorization can take a day or two.
      1. If you don’t have a referral or preauthorization prior to your visit and your plan requires it, the service will be denied, and you will be responsible for payment.  We will aid in preauthorization requests, but will only confirm referrals if notified your plan requires them.  Referrals must be on file with the insurance company if your insurance company requires a referral.  Informal physician referrals are not required to be on file with the insurance company if your insurance doesn’t require a referral for the service.
  8. Ask if there are any excluded ICD-10 diagnosis codes (some plans only cover diabetes or kidney disease, others cover dietary counseling and surveillance, e.g. Z71.3 code, others cover obesity and overweight codes).
  9. Get a confirmation reference number for the call and restate your understood coverage back to the representative.  If preauthorization or referral is required, get the additional preauthorization and referral number.

We do our best to check benefits for patients with plans we are not familiar with as well, but this needs to be a joint effort to limit surprise fees that we do not like issuing nor you like paying, including late cancel fees or self-pay fees for services that would be denied due to no referral or preauthorization.

Self-pay is going to be more expensive than insurance coverage, and you should always be prepared to self-pay even if 90% (yes!) of our patients receive coverage when they properly check their benefits and follow the rules on coverage.

If you cannot make your appointment, you can reschedule at no penalty if done >24 hours of your visit by emailing or calling and leaving a message.



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Women’s Body Image: Calorie Restriction, Strength Training, & Weight Loss

Mar 23

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Diet or Exercise?, Personal Experiences and Opinions | No Comments

I get to work with a lot of women who want to lose weight on the fitness side as a personal trainer and on the nutrition side as a registered dietitian.  Most women who come in to “lose weight” really just want to change their body composition, and it is interesting to see whether people think it is their eating habits or their exercise program that will do that for them.

While I do assess whether they are actually overweight or not through a variety of different assessment parameters, weight loss often tends to reinforce a body image that is inaccurate for women in society, especially if they are not truly overweight.  That gets us to the methodology.

Restricting to maintain a light frame is not healthy because it is an unrealistic healthy body.  It is really just nutrient deprived and fitness deprived, especially as you age and are no longer able to maintain an idealized adolescent and thin teenage body that many women think is healthy.

Colleagues who work in eating disorders have found out that letting these women who really aren’t overweight or have health issues due to their weight actually attempt to lose weight is not helpful even if done in “a healthy way” because it reinforces anorexic psychology and behaviors.

I find this valuable information because often times, my belief has been that “hey, you can try it, but you won’t like the outcome when you get there because it won’t be the body type you are looking for anyway and are probably going to gain the weight back again without any change in overall fitness ability.”  Unfortunately, people are going to do what they want.

If they try to diet and weight comes back, I figure it is a learning experience because many men and women are determined to do what they’re going to do anyway.  Why be resistant?  Why not teach them to do it in a healthier way to reduce the risk of malnutrition and let them learn from the experience?

This is only for women who are slightly overweight according to some of the traditional weight assessments.  If they are clearly underweight or normal weight, I don’t help them on that restriction.  It is unethical.

What I find many women are often saying, is something like “I don’t like my body” or “I don’t feel sexy in my body,” and they are focusing on WEIGHT only as the only measure of that.
 
First of all, feeling sexy has to do with a lot of things, including having self esteem.  It is not just physiology and body composition.  Working with a qualified psychotherapist (I know a few good ones) often helps you figure out what to focus on and what is important.  Sometimes, a weight obsession is really tangent to something deeper.
 
Having worked with many women who come to me as a personal trainer to “lose weight” (even though physically training for a few hours a week results in mild, if any, weight loss, which is frustrating for them when it is explained to them on the first day), many women come out of it with a more positive body image, feel sexier, fit into their clothes better, have a tighter body, and they weigh MORE or the SAME while eating MORE or the SAME amount of food.
 
It is also obvious to me as a trainer which clients are restricting or under eating when working out because they never improve and are hungry working out on low calorie diets, among many other signs and symptoms I will not go into detail in a blog post.  They are stuck on the light weights.  They never fully recover.
 
While some women want to maintain an image of being small and frail, I do not support it when training because it isn’t healthy.  Osteoporosis, or lean mass?
 
Getting women to buy a healthier body image, ie one that is strong, can lift more than pink 5 lb dumbbells, and consume over 2000-2400 Calories is what I try to do.  It is difficult.  It is its own area of eating disorder work, not even recognized by the old school eating disorder specialists.  Of course, they don’t even lift or train people! 🙂
 
The summary of what I’m trying to say is that while some women are focused on body image, teaching women what a healthy body image is with strength training and eating more is probably what is most helpful for them long term due to the relapse rate of women who just try to modify their body with diet alone.
 
Many women will likely be focused on their body image either way, so why not give tangible feedback through fitness parameters they are not able to meet when restricting?
 
To clarify, strength training is NOT bodybuilding, as that is an ENTIRELY different concept.  Strength training produces results with very little time in the gym and very little loss of fitness in weeks of not doing it with strength goals rather than calorie burn and aesthetic goals.  Bodybuilding is aesthetics focused.
 
The problem is that when some women go to do a workout program, it is circuit training, non-specific, non-goal oriented resistance training, “go-for-the-burn spinning classes or CrossFit,” pink weights with dance music and air crunches (about as hard as it sounds), stretching, pilates, yoga, and a small percentage go with bodybuilding, which is also not what I would recommend for a positive body image because the focus is on aesthetics/weight/body fat% rather than fitness parameters you can improve with goal-oriented training programs.
 
Goal oriented training programs focus on overall increase in functional capacity like weight lifted, repetitions (reps), and sets with moderate progressive overload.  They focus on attaining better coordination, balance, agility, strength, REASONABLE muscular and cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, and body composition.  However, I’m not promoting the concept of mainstream “functional training” programs, as that is not standardized either.  Those programs sometimes make no sense to me either as to the purpose of some of their exercises.
 
In comparison to bodybuilding, strength training focuses not just on body composition but also other important and more readily testable exercises that show you are actually more adept at moving your body in space in time rather than just lifting weights till your muscles are broken down to the maximum for no purpose other than to build them.
 
Sometimes it is amazing to me how much exercise people do that is not doing anything for their bodies in terms of aesthetics, yet they are focused entirely on aesthetics for exercise.
 
I’m sure many of us have heard others say they walk 8 miles a day “to burn calories,” while simultaneously complaining they have no butt, or they adopt a running program for the sole purpose of calorie burn and again wonder why their butt isn’t getting nicer (it doesn’t overload the gluteal muscles and is not high intensity).  These are not fitness goals that are healthy, and frankly, it is an abuse of the purpose of exercise.
 
The problem is trying to get women to strength train, something that may make them fit into clothes better independent of calorie restriction (or even by eating more food!).  Some do not want to do it because of this unhealthy body image that women are supposed to be thin, skinny (more like skinny-fat), frail, and if they lift anything over 5 lbs they may start to look like a man.  This is an irrational, but all too common a belief.
 
Being frail is not cool!  If more women strength trained, I think it would cut down the number of women who are dissatisfied with their bodies significantly.  Bodies are made to move and be strong.
 
Strength training also can give realistic negative feedback on your physical condition as a result of cutting calories, thus giving negative reinforcement to the restrictive and thin mentality.  Use “that butt” as a reason to actually eat more food because you won’t get “that butt” if you don’t eat more and lift heavy.
 
Big guys train hardcore, sometimes have chemical help, and lift more than 50 lbs.  Most lift more than 100 lbs.  Getting to the 30 lb dumbbells as a woman and squatting your body weight should be seen as an accomplishment, not that you are manly.  Furthermore, male testosterone levels are much higher than women’s, so even if lifting the same amount as a man, you will not look like a man.  Times change, and so should women’s body image evolve to a healthier one that strength trains.
 


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Low Calorie is Not Synonymous with Healthy

Oct 9

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Personal Experiences and Opinions | No Comments

This is something I see over and over again, so excuse the rant post.

Everyone thinks they are an expert on nutrition these days.  You can find nutrition information all over the Internet telling you how to lose weight and exercise.  Everyone believes it is really simple science of calories in = calories out.

We run into special sorts of…first world problems in my profession.

Example:

Suzie read a journalist’s article on a website promoting beauty and fitness (nothing illegal in this realm on advice giving) with ads promising “pound shedding” and “fat blasting” and “washboard abs” (keyword rich content).

It may have even been one of those websites that requires you click to get to the next sentence 20 times in a slide show format because it optimizes the number of ads that can be shown per user who is dying to learn the secret to a ripped physique on this credible website (I’m not serious about the credible part).

In the article, vegetables are promoted as healthy for everyone in large quantities because they are low in calories and high in vitamins, minerals, and fiber.  MyPlate does something similar for the general population–making half your plate fruits and vegetables.

While this seems innocuous and may be an article promoting a much needed message when 2/3 of the population is overweight, sometimes the type of person reading this article can take things too far.

Suzie works out 6 days a week for 1-2 hours a day and is an active student walking to classes.  She sometimes eats breakfast, has a salad for lunch because salads are healthy, and she watches her portions using the standard portion sizes recommended on the side of packages for serving sizes.

She also runs when she feels tired and has a recent history of a stress fracture and tight muscles.

Suzie might be eating 1300-1600 Calories on a good day and isn’t even meeting her RDA for protein (the lowest recommendation for protein), and of course, she wants to lose weight and tone up.  This is a common goal for many women.  She has these insane cravings for sweets and feels guilty when she eats them because they are “not healthy.”

Suzie underestimates her workouts and overestimates her portion sizes while tracking her calories to the calorie.  She’s not losing weight and she is frustrated.

Is encouraging another salad for lunch for this individual healthy?  No.

Furthermore, the thought of going up on calories from 1600 to 2000 Calories seems like a dumb idea to her since, yea she might gain some muscle, which would solve the firming and toning issue.

Anyhow.  Nutrition is about matching nutrient needs to the individual.  Population messages are important but need to be taken in context.

It is important to match macronutrient needs (total calories, protein, fat, carbs) to the individual’s activity.  A message telling the population to choose low calorie foods and skimp on portion sizes is not an appropriate message for people like Suzie who is an “overachiever” with her goals and doing nothing wrong but reading nutrition messages on the Internet that are not tailored to her.

If you like this post please comment and share with your friends.  If you resonate with Suzie and would like to schedule a consultation, please send me an email.



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My Recent Weight Loss Experience: Part 1

Dec 29

Posted by Joey Gochnour, BS, BS, MEd, RDN, CSSD, CSOWM, LD, NASM-CPT in Diet or Exercise?, Personal Experiences and Opinions | No Comments

In an effort to become a better personal trainer and registered dietitian, I decided to embark upon a weight loss journey on November 1, 2014 that ended December 15, 2014.  Granted, I didn’t need to lose weight for any health reasons, but I tend to go on some sort of a reduced calorie modified version of what I currently eat about every year and a half to reset to where I like to be.  Otherwise, I’d just keep gaining weight the way I like to eat and sometimes exercise! 🙂

Because this post got longer than I expected, you can jump to the how I felt when I did it part after the Preface heading, which gives background on my thoughts on weight and rationale for changing my weight.

Preface

Not everyone loses weight because they need to.  It is often a want to sort of thing.  For me, I enjoy being at different weights for different reasons.  Sometimes I like to emphasize the big heavy lifts, and more mass makes me better at that.  After a while, I tend to find it exhausting maintaining that weight, eating all that food, and keeping up my cardio to keep my body fat percentage down.

Add training and nutrition consulting with local Austin clients, working with private client hours on top of that who are not local via telehealth, and developing this website, it can get fatiguing after a while.

I also don’t like to be too lightweight.  In our society, a muscular male physique is valued more than a ripped, agile, and fast male physique.  I also just feel weaker than I can be and don’t emphasize endurance activities in my routine.  Rather, I do them for general health and maintenance.

The perks of being light include: I save money on my grocery bills, I have boundless amounts of energy, I can workout “forever” without getting fatigued, and my strength:mass ratio is probably the best due to these previous qualities.  Strength:mass ratio, ie maximizing your strength for a given body weight, is the way to go if you lift weights, in my opinion, as it takes less time to maintain the results and yields the most functional body type.

If you think about it, for a small framed individual to have tons of weight, be it muscle or fat, it makes the body less efficient at doing anything.  Your organs don’t grow enough to keep up with the body size changes.  Your heart prefers a certain size, your liver a certain size, your kidneys a certain size, and your lungs a certain size.  They just don’t grow like your muscles can, so when you pick a body size to be, understand the pros and cons.

Bigger people are stronger, but lighter people (to an extent…as there is too light) can be more athletic for anything that requires moving the body through space and time.  I prefer the ideal body weight equation over BMI when assessing weight ranges for people, but I look at both models and consider fitness status as well for the big picture.

My belief in the healthiest human body is one that is good at many aspects fitness but also absent of disease or disease risk propensity.  Aspects of fitness include skill based and precision work, muscular strength, muscular endurance, agility, balance, cardiovascular fitness, and body composition.

The heavier I get, the more strength and muscle I have, but also the more likely I will have high blood pressure, as it runs in my family.  Moreover, the less likely I will be good at running for any extended period of time over a couple miles.  Think of fueling a Prius vs a Hummer.

I have had either prehypertension or high blood pressure at a few points in my life of high stress, and it is more likely to come on as my weight creeps up.  Being able to squat and bench heavy at that point becomes moot to me.  I’m already a small- to medium-framed individual anyway so won’t set any big records there.

I’m a 5’10” male who likes to weigh between 165-175.  When I was a competitive swimmer, however, I weighed 150 and got my best times at 145 (age 17) when I had diarrhea during a meet that I was shaved, tapered, and wearing a fastskin for.  That experience taught me that losing 10 lbs of water weight (I actually lost from 155 during that meet) gave me collegiate division 1-worthy times for swimming.

I didn’t understand that at the time though, and obviously it is not a healthy thing to do due to the electrolyte abnormalities and possible heart risks with that fast of weight loss while competing at a high level.  But I digress!  Back to weight loss!

There are a few reasons I decided to lose the weight.  I knew the holidays were coming up, and I wouldn’t be able to work out as much or the way I wanted with family.  I also needed a break from working out, in general, to let my body fully repair and heal.  I decided it was a good time to do so.

My weight was creeping up to 182 at a peak but averaged around 177-178.  I carry a lot of water weight that fluctuates depending on the time of day, hydration, how much fiber and sodium I have had, stress levels, and exercise amounts.

I also knew I started lifting really heavy and found it easy, a sign I gained some muscle (and fat), which when working out as many years as I have, I know I don’t make many muscle gain or strength improvements anymore without a significant technique or routine change.

I also was becoming exhausted with less cardio than I used to.  Any extra muscle on my frame size at this point inevitably carries more and more fat.  You can’t continue to gain muscle with a low body fat percentage on a given frame size forever.

How I Lost the Weight–Diet Only this Year*

In the past, I have lost weight by the book.  I did both diet and exercise in the past.  This time, I just did diet only.  The asterisk means that I was still biking to my personal training employed job and still training clients (some who require more physical effort on my part than others, which is what goes with the profession), but I was doing no formal exercise as I usually do to push my own limits.

Usually, I hit all muscle groups heavy a little less than once a week, do high intensity cardio (run or swim), moderate and relaxing cardio (run or swim), bike to/from work, agility and balance and gymnastics skill work using bodyweight at playgrounds with parallel bars and monkey bars, or I’ll count a physical outing like hiking or kayaking as a workout for the day.  These make great date ideas that do NOT involve food…I’ll have to post on that topic another day!

In the past, I did it by cutting my food portions of non-protein calories like carbohydrates and fats down very mildly, as I still wanted to be able to fuel my workouts.  I have a food scale and use measuring cups and live alone, so it is much easier to track.  I believed in sports nutrition by the book in that it was supposed to have that magic 30-min to 2-hr window after a workout when you have to eat, or you lose all your gains!  More on that in another post.

I also still lost about 5-10% of my strength with weight loss, which is inevitable.  I couldn’t do as many reps or sets in the gym, and my high intensity work wasn’t as intense.

In the past, I also would get muscle cramps, tight muscles, and nights where I had to “refeed” the calories I cut that day in order to fall asleep because my body was trying to repair muscles that I wasn’t feeding.  I wasn’t even severely cutting my calories, but to be able to workout at the intensities I usually do, my body needed more calories and wouldn’t relax until it got them.

This time, I went into my weight loss journey knowing I would lose strength and endurance no matter what I do.  Why go through the psychological trauma of seeing your lifts decrease in weight and repetitions when you could just start over at the end?

As a trainer, I see unfit people get fit very quickly.  Losing your gains is not hard to get back.  My clients teach me this when they are gone for an extended period of time and then come back.  It is exhilarating to see, from my perspective, and made me less strict with my own regimens.

When cutting calories, my body doesn’t want to work out intensely.  It is just counter intuitive to push yourself harder while eating less as an already lean individual (for someone who is new or intermediate to exercise, this sentence may not apply due to relativity of ratings of perceived exertion during exercise).

This time, I got NO cramps, I didn’t have to wake up in the middle of the night to refeed myself food I had cut out earlier in the day due to working out raising my calorie needs.  I had no tight muscles.  Muscles shrink during weight loss anyway.  Why try to make them bigger during this phase of your life?  I took my own advice and experience and did it on myself this year.  The weight loss experience was much more pleasant.

I usually eat about 3000 Calories a day at my 175 weight, consisting of 4 meals and a snack.  Normally, I work out 5 days a week doing different activities at various intensities.  When I cut my calories, I started out having 3 meals and a snack.

The first week, I was hungry.  After the first week, I wasn’t hungry and didn’t get hungry for the rest of the experience.  I was able to cut down to 2 meals and a snack after I noticed I was losing weight slower and the fact I was starting to be satisfied on smaller amounts of food.

I probably ended up having about 1500-1700 Calories with those 2.5 meals when I finished my weight loss journey at about 160.  I could probably be more specific since I have my diet in a spreadsheet and could figure out the specific numbers, but that is beyond the scope of this post.

From a sociological standpoint, people were concerned rather than encouraging.  There is a stigma any time you cut weight and are already relatively lean, whether male or female, especially for those not familiar with athletic populations who do this often.

There is a lot of overlap with anorexia nervosa behaviors and effective weight loss behaviors.  I think the difference is whether it becomes a clinical problem of becoming underweight, malnourished, and having a distorted, unrealistic body image.  Another difference is knowing when to stop these behaviors.  There is a difference in knowing which thoughts are rational and which are irrational.

I think a lot of the concern is also self-reflective on those who are concerned about their own thoughts about body image.  Perhaps they want to lose weight, fear the process of doing it, and hesitate to do it.  It is a temporary lifestyle change, after all.  If you associate too much of your daily joy and life-meaning with the act of eating food, then that will be something to think about.

The bottom line of this? I cut calories more intuitively this time.  I didn’t have exercise and all its variability in energy expenditure making things complicated.  I used the intuitive eating technique for knowing when I wasn’t eating enough.

I only looked at my calories afterwards because I’m a registered dietitian and feel compelled to know this sort of information for the sake of my career and to better help clients, the few who actually understand and think in calories.  I have a different idea for ways the general population should better understand food calories in another post.

I overshot my weight goal of 165 to 160 on purpose (on average, as it dipped to 158 depending on the day) because I knew the moment I started eating more and exercising again, I would gain my weight back to 165 very quickly thanks to fluid shifts and storing more carbohydrates again.  Rather than having to restart adapting to fewer carbohydrates as energy again, which can take a while, I just decided to overshoot my weight goal a bit.

Interestingly, whether it is the adaptation to eating fewer carbohydates (due to lower calorie intake), or the fact I wasn’t always having blood diverted to my digestive system, I was much more mentally clear during the process.  Who knows?  The research isn’t out on that yet.  I do like to keep up on ketogenic diets though just for sheer interest in the unknown.  This is not to be confused with ketoacidosis.

Notice mental clarity is the same thing people on that religion of bulletproof coffee report.  I think it is more due to the weight loss and blood to gut diversion being reduced, not the “grassfed pure butter that is good for your brain.”  I would like to see some references for that statement.  Oh right, there aren’t any!

So, that is the end of my weight loss journey (and the midpoint to getting back to fitness).  Once I got to the point of finishing up, I was mildly irrationally afraid of starting to eat more food again and having to get back into shape.  What a pain, I thought.  I could see how people can get stuck on eating less and less food when you have been successful with weight loss.  It is an anorexic thought.

That’s why everyone should have fitness goals.  It’s not optional these days.  You HAVE to exercise to be healthy.  It lets you eat more food and feel great.  Who wouldn’t want that?

Now that it is a week or two back into my old routine, I’m back on 3.5-4 meals a day and am exercising again.  I feel great, lighter (weight didn’t come back instantly or anything), and healthier.  I lost a fair amount of fitness in that I’m not pushing myself to my weights I was pre-weight loss because I didn’t feel that would be safe.

That said, I probably only lost about 10% of my strength.  I expect to gain about 5% of it back in the next month, depending on soreness and when I can fit workouts in my schedule.  I’ll write Part 2 when that happens.

The whole point of the diet and no exercise thing this year was to better understand what clients feel physically when losing weight, and to prove a point that you don’t need to work out while losing weight because it can take twice as long and be accompanied by all sorts of musculoskeletal annoyances like tight muscles and overtrained muscles.

I also wanted to see if the weight loss process was faster this year (and it was).  That said, Part 2 of the post is to see how long it takes me to get back to full fitness, so I haven’t proved it is faster in terms of maintaining fitness yet.  The first week back I will tell you that I was SORE AS EVER.  I am not sure if the caps emphasize that enough, but I was a bit zealous in starting myself back to about where I should be mathematically speaking in terms of strength losses and cardio.  I also got winded in a half mile of intense cardio.  It will come back in a month.  I’m not worried.

This isn’t the first time in my life I’ve just let a high level of fitness go.  When I quit swimming competitively at age 19, I played 6 months of addicted World of Warcraft gaming.  I lost 17 lbs of muscle then (160 to 143).  No, it wasn’t healthy, but I wasn’t depriving myself of food.  I just wasn’t exercising then nor was I hungry.  So, fitness can come and go.  Your gains are easily reattainable.  Why try to choose two competing goals at the same time?

My opinion is that unless you are brand new to exercise and have to learn a lot of techniques and get into the healthy habit of exercising in order to build your self-efficacy to do exercise competently, then you may achieve physical goals faster and with more satisfaction by focusing on one at a time.  If it is weight loss and you are a very fit individual already, try to diet first.  Seriously, don’t try to increase the amount of exercise at the same time.  You will learn! 🙂

In the future when I lose weight again (after it creeps on again, as it will because the body is a master at caloric efficiency, which I do NOT view as a diet failure as media/science makes it sound…more on that in another post), I plan to do LESS exercise rather than NONE.  I may lose the weight faster with no exercise, but I lost more fitness this time than I would like.

I’ll keep readers updated for my next post (Part 2) in a month or so whenever I’m back at peak condition, hopefully at my 165 or 170 weight.  I really am not too concerned about whichever one it will end up as.  Life happens, so be as fit as you can be for it, and maximize your functional capacity!

Please comment and share!



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