Biggest Loser, Part Deaux

Okay, I'm in trouble because I don't know my french, so I'll have to come up with a new name for any further reports on this rather than keep trying to count in french.

Anyway, I mentioned seeing that there was a group doing this program, so I went to check it out. It's a group of probably 15 people who started meeting last week. It's a contest of sorts, where everyone weighs in each week, and after 8 weeks the winner is determined by the percentage of their weight that they lost. But I suppose it's as much as anything a motivation and accountability thing, and if you're serious about shedding some pounds, you could do worse than having a good dose of either.

Okay, so basically I have to do better in 7 weeks than everyone else did in 8. Think I'm up to the task?

Now, the girl who was this week's leader... I have to say she did really well because, she didn't really have that much to lose. At least not compared to some of the rest of us, but still managed to shed a few pounds and is in a good start at 3%. For me... wow, that's like 11 pounds I'd have to lose to be at the same pace. My weigh in there was 385.7, a good 10 pounds higher than what I'm weighing in the mornings, (been stalled this week). Some of that is, it's a different scale, it's in the evenings, and I was wearing clothes, and while knowing all that, I still don't get a lot of warm fuzzies seeing it's 10 pounds more.

They had a nutritionist speaking, and basically she boiled it down to you eat less calories than you burn. Which I suppose it's as simple as that, but I guess what I think would be helpful would be more taking some time saying, okay, WHY are the calories important, how do the calories and carbs and proteins and blood sugar and fats and all of that work together.

I think this is where I have to be careful. I've read a couple of books on weight loss that treated some of this stuff pretty well and really kinda opened my eyes to how certain kinds of foods work in different ways, and a light went off in my head. But this is where I think I have to be careful and realize that having read some books doesn't make me smarter about this stuff than someone who's gone to college several years studying nutrition. I do have my biases that I'm sure are very influenced by what I've read and because of those biases I do think that sometimes the approach of saying just keep your calories down probably isn't the best approach.

There was somethign that I really appreciated in her approach. She said it well that there's no one good diet, no one kind of food that is key. You have to find the approach that works for you. It depends a lot on your own physical makeup and your own susceptibilities. For me, I'm pretty sure that large amounts of processed sugars and flours in my diet are my worst enemy because of how my body responds to those things, and the approach of the South Beach diet which pays more attention to eating good carbs vs bad carbs, good fats vs bad fats, is going to be much better for me than a typical low calorie diet. Because that's my perspective on what works, it's real easy to say the same has to be true of everyone, but I think other people will have other things that work much better.

And probably once 193 are down and there are 0 to go, maybe I can speak with even more authority about what works.

All of that said, I'm looking forward to the next few weeks just to see how it all goes.