Getting the diet back on track after the holiday

The other weekend, I gave the diet a break for a few days. I was on holiday, and I didn't want to have to worry about counting calories, and also ruining everyone else's time while I sat there drinking water and not having dessert.

For that reason, there are no food diary entries for that whole long weekend, and I didn't bother checking my weight so there's a bit of a gap in the graph.

Although I was taking a diet holiday, I still had a bit of a target: by the time of the next weigh-in, I wanted to be pretty much back at the weight I was at the previous weigh-in, two weeks' earlier. I managed to make that happen, with a couple of ounces in hand, and my handy weekly-daily-calorie budget spreadsheet was quite useful in making that happen.

Losing the holiday weight with a Google sheet

I had written off four days - Thursday to Sunday - for the diet break. During those four days, much pizza, lasagne, Thai takeaway, ice-cream sundaes and associated other tasty things were consumed and very much enjoyed. All of which washed down with a fairly reasonable amount of beer and wine.

As I wasn't counting any calories, I really didn't know how much over my budget I'd been, which obviously makes calculating what your new budget needs to be to balance that out pretty tricky. Realising that, I just decided to apply a bit of common sense for Monday to Friday, picking a respectable number of 2200 calories a day.

I reasoned that by the time I'd rounded up the calories on each item, and walked a bit, that 2200 a day would get me there or thereabouts by the time Saturday morning came around. Having indulged for four days, Monday came in at a nice round 1000 calories: I had plenty of energy stores ripe for the picking, so I just wasn't that hungry. Easy.

Not only was that a good start to the week, when I plugged that into the spreadsheet, coming through Monday 1200 calories under budget meant I had those 1200 to add to the following days' allowance. Seeing the daily allowance cell change to an even richer green was a nice psychological boost actually: it just made me feel like things were going to be easy.

The rest of the week was fairly uneventful. I didn't feel the need to have any particularly super-low calorie days, I just ate a sensible amount and ended up keeping the daily calorie intake under that 2200 each day, with the exception of Friday, where I pushed the envelope to 2300 calories by drinking a bottle of wine.

By the time I went to bed on Friday, my average daily calorie intake for the working week was 1860, comfortably under the initial 2200 target I'd set. When I got on the scales on Saturday, I was 160 lbs and 2 oz, 2 oz. down on 2 weeks' earlier.

Holiday weight lost.

And that was it. No silly fad things, no having to spend all evening in the gym every day, no 'expert' plan to follow, just picking a number that felt about right, and eating a number of calories each day that was smaller than that.

Day 55 - 2850 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
2x slices toast (300)
Weetabix (150)
Mini hot cross bun (150)

Lunch
Bread (200)
Lentil Soup (300)
Protein bar (200)

Dinner
Chicken, rice and vegetables (400)
Beer (200)
Cheese and pickle sandwich (250)
Chocolate (600)

Exercise
60 press ups
25 crunches
30m walking

Day 56 - 1750 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Toast (100)

Lunch
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)
Ham sandwich (250)

Dinner
Venison burger (200)

Exercise
2x 25 crunches
3x sets dips
100 press ups
45m walking

Day 57 - 1600 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Muffin (300)
Toast and scrambled egg leftovers (150)

Lunch
Chicken breast with tomatoes, peppers, chilis and rice (450)

Snack
2x Ham sandwich (300)

Dinner
Venison burger with vegetables (300)

Exercise
70m walking

Day 58 - 2350 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Muffin (300)
Ham sandwich (150)

Lunch
Chicken breast with tomatoes, peppers, chilis and rice (450)

Dinner
Chorizo slices (250)
Ham sandwich (150)
A few beers (950)

Exercise
100 press ups
5x sets dips
30 crunches
80m walking

Day 59 - 2050 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Lunch
Chicken breast with tomatoes, peppers, chilis and rice (450)

Dinner
2x scrambled eggs on toast (300)

Exercise
85 sit ups
3x sets bicep curls
45m walking

Daily weight variation on the diet - part I

The diet weigh-in

While I'm mostly judging the success of this diet by what I look like in the mirror, checking my weight is obviously an important key performance indicator. Particularly at this early stage in the diet.

While I would like to add a bit of muscle mass in the future - likely meaning I'll put some weight on - the first stage was always going to be about shedding the ballast, and that meant making sure the reading on the scales came down.

As I wanted a bit of a confidence boost at the beginning, I made the first weigh-in day a Saturday, knowing that I did, let's say, enjoy my food and drink over the weekend, so I wanted a nice Saturday morning number prior to eating enough calories to last 3 1/2 days in 2.

Dieting away the glycogen

With that precedent established, Saturday became the regular, weekly, weigh-in day. What that has meant though, is that, with a calorie target established for the next week, I'd burned through plenty of those before even making it to Monday. By the time I got to Thursday and Friday, things were often getting a little desperate in terms of how many calories I had left.

All of this led to Friday becoming something of a super-low calorie day. Certainly a lot, lot fewer than I was burning. Where did a lot of the energy I needed come from? Probably those glycogen stores, that were full to bursting from a week of eating doughnuts and cookies.

Let's say that there's perhaps about a pound of glycogen in there, with a concomitant water weight; let's call it three pounds. So, let's say I start the day with all of that in there, and use it all up at the end of the day, that could be as much as 4 pounds gone purely from using up those glycogen stores - which doesn't actually take a whole lot of doing if you're up and about all day.

Add that to the glass or two of wine I have on a Friday night to dehydrate a bit more, and the difference in my weight from a Friday morning to a Saturday morning could be really quite significant.

Losing weight while putting it on

Of course, with that precedent established, if I was actually careful with my calorie budget over the course of the week, I might not have to starve myself on Friday and I might wake up on Saturday with some glycogen and some water left. If I get on the scales, my weight could have gone up since the previous week.

For some folks who've worked hard to stick to their plan, that could be quite demoralising.

Let's look at my situation. I could have weighed in last Saturday - glycogen depleted - and been 162 pounds. The next week - a better planned week - I could have had lots of calories to play with on Friday, gone out for dinner, had a few pints and stopped for a hospitality-sized bar of chocolate on the way home.

I might have finished the week under target - let's call it 3500 calories under what I burned that week. I get on the scales the next morning, and I'm 165 pounds.

Aaagh! I've put 3 pounds on! How's that happened?! Well, I'm just not comparing like with like. When you think about it though, you might well have lost a pound of fat, it's just you've put 4 pounds on in glycogen and water weight. Burn through that glycogen and you could be 161 pounds tomorrow morning.

It's nothing to worry about, you're doing well, it's just a bit of variation.

Long term vs. short term

For me, the long term goal is losing the fat. It's worked out so far that, as every Friday has mostly been the same, I've been comparing like with like. However, over time that's not really what I'd like to be doing.

For the first few weeks, it's been great to see the points on the graph fall every week. It's given me empirical confidence that my diet plan works and that many of the top search engine-ranked 'experts' are talking complete guff and I wouldn't send them with a short list to do my shopping.

Now though, I don't think there's any harm in letting that number pop up from the previous week occasionally. Who cares? As long as the trend is heading in the right direction, that's okay. As I mentioned in the holiday post, I want to be able to go out and have fun without a diet cramping my style. As Friday night is a good night for that, always having to fast because that's the day before the weigh in is not what I want to have to do.

So, from now on, it's all about that trend so, if you see a point on the graph that looks a bit out of place, you'll know why...

Day 52 - 2050 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Protein bar (200)
Ham sandwich (150)
Shortbread (100)

Lunch
Chicken, bacon and cheese sandwich with chips (900)

Dinner
Lentil soup (300)
Weetabix and milk (150)
Wine (150)

Exercise
100 press ups
4x sets dips
30m walking

Day 53 - 2300 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Protein bar (200)

Lunch
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Dinner
Ham (200)
Wine (700)

Exercise
Walking (60m)

Day 54 - 4100 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Toast (150)
Weetabix (150)
Shortbread (150)

Lunch
Lentil soup (300)
Bread 250

Dinner
Poached egg on toast (200)
Shortbread (150)
2x flapjack bar (250)
A good evening of beers (1500)

Dinner II
Cheese on toast (450)
Weetabix (200)
Toast with chocolate spread (250) 

Exercise
40m walking

The holiday diet

You want my secret to enjoying your holiday when you’re on a diet? Take a break from the diet.

You may have noticed that there was no weigh-in this Saturday. No update to the graph, not even any food diary updates. There’s a reason for that: I was on holiday. I did not want to be ‘that guy’, sitting having dinner with my family, always going for the lowest calories thing on the menu, and making everyone miserable as I agonise over dessert.

So the diet took a holiday and, really, that’s what it’s for.

Diet takes a holiday

What’s actually the point of losing weight? I’ve got myself to a healthy BMI, my waist/height ratio is even better - my waist measurement is significantly less than half my height - and, on Thursday morning at least, I had a fairly presentable set of abdominal muscles.

Now, if you saw my post about my target, all was looking good for going swimming, but as it turned out, we ended up going on Saturday rather than Thursday, but I was still presentable.

Yes, I would still like to lose another three or four pounds, but I’m actually looking okay. I like to think of a lot of the point of this diet is to give me the freedom to be able to eat and drink as much as I want on holiday or on a night out, and not have to worry about it; to have enough diet behind me to be able to put on a pound or three and still be in a window of target weight, then I can just lose it again.

The children’s leftovers

I’d actually had quite a good calories day on the Thursday. Admittedly, I’d been sat in a car for four hours, but things were going well. Then it was time for dinner. I ended up going for the under 600 calorie pizza and salad option. I wasn’t particularly aiming to stick to any sort of target for the day, but it actually sounded pretty good, and I thought, well, if I can have a good day, I might as well.

Then the children didn’t finish theirs.

A moment of “oh, should I, shall I be good?” struck me, and I told it to sod off. I was on holiday, the food was good, and I don’t like to see waste. I even had a pudding.

The next day was the same story. I had made peace with the diet holiday concept by this point, so the buffet breakfast was put to good use, followed by another pizza (and large ice cream sundae for pudding) at lunch, with a couple of beers before dinner, a large lasagne, and, having felt that the previous night’s sundae was a bit on the small side, I paid the extra £1 and upgraded my dessert option to the ‘sharing’ size.

Saturday started well, but became something of a binge-fest (I shan’t go into details, I’ll just say that multiple steamed puddings and a doner kebab were involved), and Sunday involved a takeaway and a bottle of wine.

It’s now Monday morning and, looking in the mirror, I don’t look too bad. I don’t look as good as I did on Thursday morning, but I’m pretty confident I will do by the weekend again.

And that’s what it’s about. I have lost enough weight to get into a position where I don’t have to worry about enjoying myself every so often, and that’s where I want to be. I’ll be back to the counting and rounding up today, and I’ll weigh-in again this weekend. If I’m back to where I was last weekend, hell, even a pound up on it, I’m happy with that.

I know it will be gone again by the next week.

Day 49 - 1000 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)

Lunch
Protein bar (200)

Dinner
Protein bar (200)
Glass of wine (200)

Snack
Weetabix, raisins and milk (200)

Exercise
100 press ups
70m walking

Day 50 - 1750 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Protein bar (200)

Lunch
5x Double chocolate cookies (1100)

Snack
Ham sandwich (200)

Dinner
Weetabix and milk (150)

Exercise
100 press ups
6x sets dips
60m walking

Day 51 - 2200 calories

Breakfast
Milk (150)
Protein bar (200)

Lunch
5x jam doughnuts (1150)
Ham sandwich (250)

Dinner
Lentil soup (300)
Weetabix and milk (150)

Exercise
70m walking

On hunger

The thing about food and drink - beer & pizza and wine & cake in particular - is that it's great.

It tastes great, for some of us it's psychologically and emotionally great, and it does that fantastic job of making us not feel hungry. And feeling hungry isn't great.

And therein lies a problem of trying to lose weight. If you have neither the time, nor the resources, to exercise all of those calories away - and if you work and have a family, you probably don't - you're going to have to eat less.

And that's just not fun.

And even if you can exercise all the calories away, all that exercise may well just end up making you feel more hungry anyway.

Being hungry

Unless you are particularly lucky, have worked out a great system, or are losing weight slowly enough that it isn't making a huge reduction to your daily calorie total and it doesn't hurt too much, you may just have to find a way of dealing with hunger occasionally, sometimes, or regularly.

And, you know what, that's nothing to be ashamed of.

It seems that there are plenty diets that shout about never feeling hungry. Well, possibly there are, but I really have neither the time nor the money to deal with them. I can't afford to have multiple smoothies delivered to me every day. I don't have the time to prepare multiple small meals for throughout the day, nor do I have the opportunity to eat them.

I'm sure the wonder that is the internet is full of sites telling me how I can lose weight by eating as much of what I want and never feeling hungry - no doubt by 'never eating the five things that KILL WEIGHT LOSS' or similar, but I'll take them with a pinch of salt.

And, if you think about it logically, if all of those diets worked as easily as they said, we'd all know about, everyone would be doing them and we'd all be the weight we wanted to be.

Much like the many emails that populate my spam folder offering an easy way to increase the size of my body - well, one part of it anyway - if it worked, we'd all be doing it.

And trousers would need a fundamental redesign.

Sometimes you're going to feel hungry, and getting through it actually isn't as hard as you might think.

Managing your hunger while eating less

I remember watching an episode of Horizon, I think it was the one that brought the 5:2 diet to the world's attention, in which Dr. Michael Mosley did a three day fast. He described hunger as coming in waves, but that they pass; and I've found that to be true.

Hunger doesn't gradually appear and continually build and build, the feeling of hunger appears, then it passes. Much like the waves Dr. Mosley describes, you can let them wash over you.

Now, obviously, this takes willpower. Not as much as you might think, but willpower nonetheless.

I came across an article on an online 'nutrition' site that said something along the lines of 'asking someone to lose weight through willpower is like asking a child not to get any taller through willpower.

I have one word -actually, I have a few - to describe what I think about that, but - as I don't know you well - I shan't use them for fear they might cause offence. I'll just say that these two situations aren't really comparable, but I think we all know that.

I'll come back to willpower, it's enough of a subject to warrant its own post.

Making it work for you

I'm not going to try and say I have all, or even any of the answers. We're all different, and we'll all deal with things in different ways.

If feeling hungry is a problem, then experiment with different ways to manage it. When I've been trying to lose weight previously, I'd tried a little an often strategy, that didn't work, I just felt hungry all the time. I found I felt much less hungry if I went as far into the day as I could, then ate the majority of my calories in one go.

I've tried high protein diets, that just doesn't satisfy the hunger. For me, high fat seems to work a lot better, keeping the hunger away for longer.

I've tried drinking water when I'm hungry, works Sort of. What absolutely doesn't work for me is chewing gum. All that seemingly does well for me is stimulate my appetite.

It's your body, you know it best. By all means, try the suggestions that you find, but if they don't work, don't worry about it, and try something else.

Right, having blown my calories at the front end of the week, I'm off to have one more cup of coffee for breakfast and fast until tomorrow morning...

Day 44 -2200 calories

Breakfast
Milk 100
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Lunch
Turkey club sandwich (550)

Dinner
Weetabix, milk and raisins (250)
Bread, butter and jam (200)

Exercise
Walking 70m

Calculating the daily calorie target

This was actually relatively straightforward, so shouldn't really take long. However, as usual, there are a few variables you might want to consider if you want to make it work for you...

The calorie target - inductive or empirical?

If you believe me - in that the way to lose weight is to burn more calories than you eat (forgetting about those efficiency overheads of course!) - then you really need to think about 2 things: how many calories you need to eat each day to stay the same weight, and how fast you want to lose weight.

Let's look at the first part of that: how many calories a day do you need to stay the same weight? Well, that's going to be different for each of us. And that's where two difference research philosophies come in: induction reasoning  and empiricism.

What we can strip these two philosophies down to is this: do you come up with that daily calorie number using information, equations and assumptions that are already known, or do you work it out for yourself.

Calculating your daily calorie needs inductively

The inductive approach is easy. You can start with the very ballpark guidelines of 2500 calories a day for a man and 2000 for a woman. It's a great starting point, but chances are those numbers aren't quite right for everyone. I've not performed a study myself, but I wager the numbers are going to be different if you're desk-bound, 5' 4" and 130 lbs, than if you are 6' 2", 240 lbs and work on a construction site carrying bricks around all day.

Just a hunch.

That said, if you would say you were 'about average' in terms of build and lifestyle, you get make a start based on those numbers, but if you think you're not, or you want to be a bit more 'accurate', then it's time to hit the online calculators.

If you query your search engine of choice for 'TDEE calculator', you'll probably get a few results. Some of them may use a different formula, and some of them may produce a result that's a better fit for you. I would recommend trying a few and taking an average. When I tried it, I received a range of values from around 2200 to 2500 calories a day.

And there's your starting point.

Calculating your calories to make Karl Popper proud

Of course, as a follower of empirical science, I'm much more of a fan of knowledge coming through experience and being based on deductive reasoning, so how do we do that? Simple, we do an experiment. We'll strip the design of this back a bit though, we're not going to be submitting it to a journal for peer review...

Choose your reference weigh-in time for a once a week update and pick a number of calories, possibly based around what your eating each day as it is and times it by seven to work out your weekly calorie budget.

Eat that number of calories in the next week and weigh yourself; if you weight went up, reduce it for next week, if it went down, but you were hungry all the time, you could maybe increase it. Work out your budget for the next week and repeat.

And repeat, and repeat, and repeat. If you then plot a graph of your weekly calories against your weekly weight change, you'll be able to see (approximately) the number of calories that should give you a weight change of zero. I've thrown together a quick example of how it might look with a quick plot of some made-up numbers in Excel.

Other spreadsheets are available.

Of course, you may have noticed the obvious downside of this: time. To get a good few data points you're looking at a good few weeks. Possibly not the greatest.

Combining induction and deduction

So what to do? Well, just adopt the best of both worlds. Use the inductive method to get your rough starting point, weigh in, then start recording the weekly calories and adjust as required. Easy.

Now to the next part, working out what the daily target number should be to lose weight, and that just comes down to balancing how quickly you want to lose weight, with how hungry you can cope with being.

As a rule of thumb - and there are a few average and assumptions that go into this, but it does the job for our purposes - a pound of fat is about 3500 calories. If you search for that, you'll no doubt come across lots of things saying that it isn't and that reducing your calories by 500 a day to lose a pound a week is a myth. Ignore them. For our purposes that works fine.

Yes, longer term there are more things we might need to think about - the main one being that as we lose weight, there's less of us to maintain, so our daily energy requirement goes down, but you're going to be following how much you eat and how much weight you lose, so you'll always be on top of that.

So, starting out, if you want to lose a pound a week, you need to reduce the number you've come up with by 500 calories. There are two ways to do this: eat less, and/or exercise more to the equivalent. Again, there are lots of exercise calorie calculators out there, so take a look at a few and find out what you need to do.

The ones I've looked at I've always thought were a bit generous, so I usually take an average of a few and round down and that seems to work for me. The graph is still heading in the right direction. For me at least - male, 5' 10", 161 pounds, I count brisk walking for an hour as 250 calories.

Coming up with my number

I started with the 2500 a day guideline number and just used that - given my averageness. Of course, I'm keeping notes of the calorie intake and monitoring my weight change, so I'm covered empirically as well and can adjust when things start to slow down.

By using that number, then rounding my calories up as I eat and not deducting the exercise as I go, I'm probably about 500 calories short of that (I reckon 250 calories a day in extra exercise and 250 in calorie over-estimation is close enough), and that seems to fit with my losses of a pound a week.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, you'll find lots of things on the internet that say the 3500 calories thing is nonsense, things about starvation mode, even some things that say exercise uses up so few calories it's not even worrying about, so why listen to me?

Put simply, because I have no vested interests, I'm not selling anything and, as far as I've found so far, I'm the only one saying what I eat and telling you week-by-week how much weight I'm losing.

And, if you want to, you can do the same.

Day 41 - 4900 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)
Weetabix (150)

Lunch
2x sausage sandwich (700)

Snack
Chicken sandwich (300)

Dinner
Curry, rice and naan bread (1000)
4x beers (800)
Bread and butter puddings and cream (1000)

Snack
Bread, butter & jam (200)
4x cereal bars (550)

Exercise
30m walking

Day 42 - 1000 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)

Lunch
Ham sandwich (200)
Ham sandwich (150)

Dinner
Chicken sandwich (300)
Plum (50)
Beer (200)

Exercise
Walking 70m

Day 43 - 2400 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)

Snack
Water biscuits (200)
Cheese (100)

Lunch
Chicken & lentil curry with rice (400)

Dinner
Chicken & lentil curry with rice (400)

Snack
Chocolate cake (1000)
Beer (200)

Exercise
Walking 60m

Expanding on the thermodynamic diet

I fear I may have fallen into the same trap as many of those I don't respect: I have been glib. I have oversimplified things and that is patronising and unfair.

I apologise.

Let's expand on the last post and make things a bit more clear. A bit less glib.

Expanding on the thermodynamic diet

Right then, the key thing I've talked about in this 'thermodynamic diet' is the fact that if you consume fewer calories than you use, you'll lose weight. I absolutely stand by that and believe it to be 100% true. It's been the basis of my diet for a little over the last month, and I've lost 7 1/2 pounds.

With all this talk of efficiency and things in the last post though, we possibly need to revisit the word 'consume'...

A calorie is a calorie; there is no getting around that. It is the amount of energy required to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. Whether it's a calorie of carbohydrate, or a calorie of protein, it's the amount of energy to do that.

However, that's all lab and textbook stuff, and we're not trying to heat water, we're trying to make ATP and, as we mentioned in the last post, that's not 100% efficient.

What we're really looking at then, is the net number of ATP molecules made from 1 calorie of carbohydrate may not be equal to the net number of ATP molecules we can make from 1 calorie of protein, 1 calorie of fat, 1 calorie of alcohol... Well, you get the idea.

A calorie is a calorie?

Yes. That doesn't change. The issue comes down to efficiency - for a given calorie, how much ATP can we generate and how much work are we able to do. 

Now, a lot of this is the driver behind many diets you might see out there; low carbohydrate, high protein diets for example. But I think the discussion of all of that sort of thing can wait until another day. It’s certainly enough of topic on its own.

That said though, I cam across one paper the other day that said, at least for a very specific set of circumstances, the conversion of protein into sugars carried an overhead of 33%. So, to process the energy in say 100 calories of protein required 33 calories, so you could infer that the net calorie gain from 100 calories protein was 67 calories.

Like I said though, that was under a very specific set of physiological conditions, and a set you may not enjoy getting to.

Does that mean a calories isn’t a calorie? Of course it doesn’t, it just reminds us that various processes in the body use energy, and that is something we might have to account for.

I am not even going to bother worrying about it.

I base my calorie figure on the number that is on the packet and do my rounding up. The numbers might be off by a few percent, the portion size might be off by a few percent, so I’ll round up, eat within my daily calorie goal, and, I expect, continue to lose weight.

Worrying about the little changes in efficiency of conversion just takes too much time. I see people who seem to spend far too long in front of their macronutrient calculator app, trying to make sure that they are getting the right amount of calories from their various macronutrients.

Life’s too short and time’s too precious!

If you struggle so much with perpetual hunger that you have to squeeze every last calorie you can out of your diet somehow, then maybe that’s what you just have to do, and good luck to you, but for the few percent difference it makes, I’d rather have that time back and go for a walk...

Day 37 - 2150 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Protein bar (200)

Lunch
Ham sandwich (200)
Chicken sandwich (300)

Snack
Chicken sandwich (300)

Dinner
Lentil soup (400)
Chicken sandwich (200)
Weetabix, milk and raisins (250)
Beer (200)

Exercise
70m walking

Day 38 - 4050 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Protein bar (100)
Plum (50)

Lunch
5x Double chocolate cookies (1100)
Ham sandwich (150)
Lentil soup (400)

Dinner
Smoked haddock, poached egg and spinach (250)
Bottle of wine (700)

Extended evening eating...
Cereal bar (200)
2x Protein bar (400)
4x Weetabix, milk and raisins (600)

Exercise
100 press ups
1x 2m plank
30m walking

Day 39 - 300 calories

Breakfast
Milk (50)

Dinner
Wine (250)

Exercise
80m walking

Day 40 - 4200 calories

Breakfast
Milk (300)
Croissant with 3 scrambled eggs (650)
Almond croissant (350)

Snack
Toast with butter and jam (200)

Lunch
2x slices fruit pudding, 2x slices black pudding, 2x slices lorne sausage (750)
Plum (50)

Snack
1x Weetabix, milk and raisins (200)
1/2 slice of toast and jam (100)
Chocolate coins (100)

Dinner
Fish and vegetables (150)
Wine (500)

Snack
Beer (200)
Bread, butter and jam (200)
3x cereal bars (450)

Exercise
Walking (20m)

The Thermodynamic Diet - what do I mean by that?

What I really mean by the thermodynamic diet is that if I use up more calories than I take in, I'll lose weight. If I take in more calories than I use up, I'll put it on. It's that simple.

While it is actually that simple at its most basic level, there are one or a few more considerations we might need to think about.

One fundamental thing to consider though, is that this is a diet, it's not a physics project, so there's really no point in over-analysing things and getting into the minutiae. By sticking to that central theme, you can lose weight.

The thermodynamic diet

 

The key phrase that sums up what we want to get out of the first law of thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form into another.

So, from that statement, we can say that if we don't put any energy into our bodies, and our bodies continue to use energy, that energy must be provided from what is already stored in our bodies and we will lose weight.

There are no calories in air, and we can't create them out of nothing, so if we don't eat and continue to live, we have to get the energy we need to maintain our bodies from our energy stores.

Now, searching for 'thermodynamic diet' on the wonderful world of the internet reveals quite a few hits. I took a look at a lot of the top-ranked ones, and found them to be mostly nonsense.

Admittedly, some of them used some scientific words, some of them talked about some published studies, one of them said that thermodynamics is 'utterly irrelevant', and another said that it 'has no place in human nutrition'. Interesting.

Oh, and I came across one article that said the exercise made so little difference it wasn't even worth considering. That one seems particularly odd. Speaking for myself here, with the extra walking I do to and from the bus stop to work - if I get off early and walk through the park - that extra exercise gets through enough calories to balance out a chocolate chip cookie or a doughnut - each day!

I would say that was worth considering. If I didn't have the treat, it would account for about half a pound of weight loss a week.

Ever heard of "calories in equals calories out"?

 

I hadn't, until I started exploring a few diet and nutrition websites. As soon as I read that, I instantly leave the site and try to forget everything I have 'learned' from it.

Calories in equals calories out is not a thing. It is exactly what thermodynamics and dieting does not mean.

Of course, I could just be interpreting the statement incorrectly. To me, saying calories in = calories out means that I can put as many calories in my body as I like, and I won't put on any weight as they'll all just come out.

I don't think that's how it works. As soon as I see a site that uses this phrase I, just about instantly, write them off as not knowing what they're talking about and move on.

So how does the first law of thermodynamics apply to dieting?

 

The way I apply it is as follows. My body cannot create energy, it can just convert the chemical energy contained in what I eat to other forms. What it doesn't use, it stores as glycogen and fat. If my energy requirement is greater than my energy intake, my body makes up the shortfall by using the stored chemical energy in my fat and glycogen.

So what else is at play here? Well, the one thing I rarely encounter in any of the articles I've read about thermodynamics and weightloss is the concept of 'efficiency'. No 'machine' (at least none that I can think of) is 100% efficient. Your car does not convert 100% of the energy contained in the fuel to movement.

Thermodynamics, dieting and efficiency 

 

Your body is the same. It does not convert 100% of the chemical energy contained in your food to its 'working' forms of energy. As an example, glycolysis, the citric acid cycle and oxidative phosphorylation are central pathways that convert the energy contained in our food into energy the body can use, chiefly a compound called ATP.

Ah, this brings back memories. Second year undergraduate biochemistry. I knew all these pathways by heart. They formed the basis of an exam I would really rather forget...

ATP Synthase animation (MRC)

Looking at the process on paper, 1 molecule of glucose that goes into these processes should produce 38 molecules of ATP. In practice however, the number is closer to 30, due to the nature of the process. We're not taking full advantage of the calories that go into the system.

What happens to the energy that we don't convert? As with most things in thermodynamic efficiency, it probably ends up just generating heat, thus conserving the first law of thermodynamics: we are not destroying energy, we are just converting it into other forms.

These energy generating pathways are actually how out brown fat tissue generates heat to keep us warm-blooded animals at the right temperature. The enzyme that produces the ATP is called ATP synthase (it's also a very beautiful example of the complex molecular machinery at work inside us) and it uses the energy from our food (after the various biological processes have created what's called a proton gradient) to convert ADP into one of our energy sources: ATP.

In the brown adipose tissue, the part of the ATP synthase that does the ADP -> ATP bit is 'uncoupled' from the rest of the enzyme, so all the energy from that protein gradient is used to spin the enzyme without producing ATP, turning all that proton motive force into heat.

Sources of variability

 

A frequent argument against thermodynamics in dieting is the one that says "well, what about my friend who eats all the time and never puts any weight on?". Well, that doesn't disprove thermodynamics at all. It just says that they either do more exercise than you see (or that they let on), that you only see them when they're eating vast amounts (and not when they're being very careful with their diet the rest of the time), or they're simply not very efficient, and they're just turning all of those extra calories into heat.

The first law of thermodynamics - a central component of how the entire universe works - is not violated by your friend who seems to eat a lot and who doesn't seem to put any weight on. They're just using the energy in different ways.

Another argument is the idea that a "calorie isn't always a calorie", something that is used to promote low carbohydrate, high protein diets for example. I would argue that a calorie is always a calorie. Where any differences come from is in how efficiently our bodies are able to utilise them from various sources, something that may depend on many things, from host genetics, to how much glycogen you currently have, to whether or not you ate something that disagreed with you and that makes everything move through you faster than normal.

Whatever the reasons, I wager that the laws of thermodynamics remain unviolated.

This is a big subject, so we'll leave it there for now, but I guarantee we'll be back.

Day 34 - 2300 calories

Breakfast
Milk (200)
2x poached eggs on toast (300)

Lunch
2x poached eggs on toast (300)

Snack
Apple pie (250)

Dinner
Burgers (400)
Mixed vegetables (100)
Beer (200)
Wine (250)
2x Weetabix, raisins and milk (300)

Exercise
45m walking

Day 35 - 1900 calories

Breakfast
Milk (150)
5x jam doughnuts (1150)

Lunch
Ham sandwich (200)

Dinner
Lentil soup (400)

Exercise
40m walking
2m planking

Day 36 - 2400 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Protein bar (100)

Lunch
5x jam doughnuts (1150)
Ham Sandwich (200)

Snack
Lentil soup (350)

Dinner
2x poached eggs on toast (300)
Plum (50)
Glass port (150)
 
Exercise
3x 2m planking
70m walking 

I need another method of psychological release

Maybe I need to start smoking.

Obviously not, of course, but at least that would give me a zero calorie coping mechanism.

It's not been a great week so far, headspace-wise. There's a lot going on that I want to tune out at the moment, so I eat.

It happened with the large amount of Quality Street the other night, and there were a few more the next day.

At least day 30 kept relatively under control, but it had been an opportunity to make up for the previous day. One that I didn't take advantage of.

It's now Thursday morning. Saturday weigh-in is 48 hours away, and there's no weigh I'm 11st 9lb again this week.

I did remember the Wednesday weigh-in: it wasn't good, but more on that in a future post.

It's time to get my big boy pants on, focus, and get the hell on with it.

< 11st 8lb by next Saturday.

If I can do that, maybe I'll buy myself a present. One that isn't food or drink.

Day 30 - 2200 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Snickers (250)
Ham sandwich (250)
Jaffa cakes (200)

Lunch
Chicken breast (200)
Lentil Soup (400)

Dinner
Skate wing (100)
Cadbury's fudge (150)
Buttered toast (150)
Quality Street (400)

Exercise
3x sets bicep curls
6x sets dumbbell raises
45m walking

Day 31 - 1500 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)

Lunch
Ham sandwich (250)
Lentil Soup (400)

Snack
Chicken sandwich (300)

Dinner
2x Weetabix and milk (250)
Quality Street (100)
Dark chocolate (50)
Milk (50)

Exercise
45m walking

Day 32 -2000 calories

Breakfast
Milk (100)
Rice Krispie Square (250)
Half a breakfast bar (100)

Lunch
2x turkey steak sandwiches (750)

Dinner
Ham sandwich (150)
2x glasses wine (400)
Protein bar (250)

Exercise
Walking 80m

Day 33 - 3900

Breakfast
Milk (200)
2x Weetabix, milk and raisins (300)
Buttered toast (150)

Lunch
Ham and cheese croissant (500)
Scrambled egg croissant (550)

Snack
Square dark chocolate (50)
Small slice cake (50)
Snickers (250)

Dinner
Steak pie and veg (600)
Slice toast and jam (200)
4x chocolate biscuit bar (450)
Beer (200)
Wine (450)
2x Weetabix, milk and raisins (300)

Exercise
40m walking