Overcoming Obesity

This needs to be the number one priority in your life until it is fixed.

Normally the MordeStack is heavy on analysis, but today I am dealing with a topic that ought to require very little: obesity. Yes, excessive body fat. Obesity is responsible for an unbelievable amount of death and disability and is an aggravating factor in even more. It limits the types of activities you can do and the vigor you have in doing them. It prompts compulsive behavior, it is economically wasteful, and it makes people less attractive. Obesity is harmful in almost every way. But you already know that.

Yet, it is everywhere you look. Gun guys will train by shooting thousands of rounds to be ready for the one lethal threat they may encounter their whole lives, while giving no serious attention to the thing most likely to kill them. Churches will preach about the importance of dying to yourself but are too bashful to preach against the thing causing your “self” to die, and this despite gluttony being a sin.

Culturally, this is a sore subject. Many of us are fat or know and love fat people, and addressing obesity as a problem feels like an attack on the people we love. The problem is that the situation is inverted. We already agree that obesity is harmful in every way. I want to help you eliminate the obesity that is harming you and the people you love. Loving people involves addressing difficult subjects, so that is what we are going to do.

Fifteen years ago it was trendy to emphasize the “idolatry” of the common aspects of middle class life: idolatry of the family, marriage, career, and so on. Not that they can’t be idols, but the framing was odd, as if the problem was merely loving good things too much, rather than disobeying God in service of these things. Perhaps the biggest missed opportunity for application was the idolatry of food. When confronted about eating habits, people will look you right in the eyes and say things like, “You have to die some how,” or “I will live as long as God has me to live,” which would both be pathological statements if they were talking about the use of heroine or fentanyl. It’s an explicit denial of the godly duties required by the 6th commandment, and John Calvin’s own warning against the misuse of the doctrine of divine providence.

It is not just Christians who have this problem. If there is one thing the unites America, it is acceptance of obesity. Leftists have started the fat acceptance movement and advocate for Fat Studies along the same lines as Women’s Studies programs for feminism. Meanwhile, conservatives take indulgent diets of fried food and sugary drinks as a point of pride. Many so-called “masculine” circles orbit around excessive use of whiskey, beer, or cigars while their guts are falling out of their shirts in the lounge. Society as a whole is accommodating, treating obesity as a disability which can warrant disability benefits and accommodations. Mobility scooters are commonplace for those too obese to walk comfortably. Clothing makers provide huge sizes. Most perverse of all, is how taboo it is to speak about fatness in any negative way, much less with a fraction of the seriousness such a rampant and deadly problem deserves.

It’s also common for people to say, “Yeah I really need to do something about it but I am just so busy and its another thing to add to the list.” The problem is that most of the diseases from obesity have risks associated with your lifetime exposure to risk factors. In other words, heart disease and cancer become more likely the longer time you have been obese, so fixing it sooner counts. You can’t keep putting this off. Every week has its own fires to put out and its own urgent problems, and there will never be a “good time” to do this. You don’t even need a lot of time. You need to make this a priority. Decide there are things that can be left undone.

If you don’t take this seriously, no one else will make you. You’ll just die young, suffer the whole time its happening, and leave your family with a bunch of your medical debts. This is a preventable problem. You can overcome obesity. It’s not your thick belly but your thick skull. You have to overcome the excuses, the false narratives, and the misplaced priorities that are causing this to remain a problem.

In a moment, we will get practical, but for now I want you to stop what you are doing and say the following sentence, out loud if possible:

“It’s not ok to be fat.”

See? It is not so bad to be honest! It doesn’t make you a terrible person or subtract from your value in any way. You’re just taking a break from the cultural lie and telling the refreshing truth. Previously you had two problems: you were fat and you believed a lie. Now you only have one! By being honest, we create the environment where problems have solutions. This pattern of non-judgmental honesty will serve you well the entire time you are losing weight and beyond.

Getting Started

Physiologically, weight loss is well understood and not controversial outside of influencer circles and fads. Obesity is caused by routinely consuming more calories than you expend without using those extra calories to build muscle. We can discuss this in detail, but the obesity did not happen for anyone overnight. Barring pregnancy, the mere presence of obesity represents a problem that was neglected or addressed ineffectively until it got out of control. That is a problem of the will, not merely information.

We know the kind of behaviors we ought to have, and fail to muster the will to follow through with them. If you are the kind of person who can decide something and follow through with it reliably every time, congrats, this process will be easy for you. For everyone else we have to build up to this point. The center of our strategy is learning how to build up the will itself.

Winning the Mental Battle of the Will

Every decision you make is an internal negotiation, where two parts of your mind are in debate with one another. One side is advocating for the “right thing” and the other side is seeking immediate comfort and gratification. When this tension is not well managed, it creates a situation where you reliably choose the wrong thing but feel guilty or anxious about it and so compensate for it with some type of compulsive or anxious behavior, making the whole situation feel futile. There are a few tricks to fix this problem.

The First Trick

The first trick is that you need to build a very easy habit. This habit serves to prove to yourself that you can follow through with a decision you make, and give yourself practice making good ones. The only rule is that this habit needs to be something you can get a 100% compliance rate on. If you don’t do something you can gain 100% compliance, you are practicing failing. My favorite habit of this type is to weigh yourself every morning and log the weight in an app or piece of paper. Here’s why:

• Your selfish brain has no reason to resist it. I’m just standing on something and writing down a number.

• It is a daily hedge against delusion. You can’t deceive yourself about where you stand if you are looking at it daily.

• You’re confronting something that is normally emotionally uncomfortable, and turning it into something mundane. Sure you don’t like the number day 1, but day 25 you are used to it. Now you’ve proven to yourself you can push through a negative emotion to get results.

• It’s an internal reminder that you care about this. If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t be doing anything. You’re doing something and so you care.

• Often you change your behavior without even consciously trying.

• You establish some semblance of a morning routine, and learn that you have the capacity to modify it at will. It presupposes a few basic disciplines around sleep and waking.

• The data you collect is useful in the long run once you’re no longer thinking about the will and you’re thinking about physiology.

• Every day that you comply with this habit is another day of evidence accumulated to prove to yourself that you stick to what you commit to.

During this early habit building phase, you are permitted but not committed to do more. Anything more than your baseline is bonus, provided you meet 100% of your commitments. Become ruthlessly non-committal for anything that you are not 100% dedicated to doing. Your commitments are sacred and integral to you being able to trust yourself. Everything you do depends on your ability to follow through with your decisions, so guard your commitments carefully. Feel free to make plans that are not commitments, but never make commitments that are up for debate. This is why we start easy.

If done right, the easy habit will be slightly gratifying since you can see your nice streak, but a little boring and in a short time you can add similar easy habits. Here are a few examples:

• Logging the foods you eat, or some portion of those foods.

• Replace sugary drinks with something that has no sugar

• Exercising in any capacity a set number of days per week

You can also add weekly “missions” where you take a one-time effort to make some amount of progress advancing yourself towards fitness. For example:

• Make a list of 3 local gyms and pick one to get a membership. The deadline is Friday.

• Use an online tool to calculate your ideal body weight

• Decide on a pair of shoes that would be suitable for exercise and order them before Friday

• Have a phone call with two or three of my “fit” friends to ask them questions. At least send the text by Wednesday.

The Second Trick

The second trick is that you need to break the anxiety-compulsion feedback loop that rages every time you have the internal mental debate. Begin with honesty. Mentally tell yourself, “I know the right decision in this situation is X. I am feeling the compulsion to do Y instead.” If you yield and do Y, you don’t respond with anxiety, but rather you say something like, “I made the wrong decision this time,” and leave it at that. This is counter-intuitive, but your mind is geared up for mudslinging over guilt, and the defensive posture that comes from it. Whereas all you’ve done is be honest. Worrying, scheming, making new resolutions, deciding to “pay” for it one way or another… none of this actually drives better decisions. Just be honest and say, “I made the wrong decision this time because I didn’t have the will to resist what I wanted to do,” and move on.

This is an anti-self-delusion newsletter.

Next, you need to understand that your “selfish” mind is kind of right in some ways. Life should not be about only doing things you hate all the time, but there are a ton of options to do things that are fun, enjoyable, and fulfilling that are also good or harmless decisions.

• Throw the Frisbee with your buddies

• Have a stick of gum after lunch

• Take a 20 minute bath

You need to plan in a little fun so your selfish brain doesn’t feel like you have to “cheat” to get a little enjoyment in life. As you get more experience with fitness, your virtuous mind and your selfish mind will often converge and you eventually get pleasure for pushing and meeting your goals, not being a hedonist.

One Warning

When you begin to make changes in your life, it is tempting to want to announce your decision to other people. Avoid doing so. Talk is cheap, and psychologically you can get the same feelings of accomplishment from talk as you can from actually doing it, despite not doing anything. Instead, simply let the results do the talking for you, and people will come to you and ask.

Learning What To Do

Once you know how to follow through with what you decide to do, it is time to figure out what to decide to do. For that, we want to understand the physiology of weight loss. Let’s start by understanding body weight.

Body Composition

Your body weight is the sum of the weight of your bones and organs, body fat, muscle, water, and the contents of your digestive tract. The only one we want to lose is body fat, but all of them will show up on the scale when you weigh yourself. Once you weigh yourself daily, you will notice that your body weight can fluctuate several pounds throughout the week, and unless you have a major calorie surplus or deficit this variation is based on your hydration and how much mass is in your digestive tract. There is no point in trying to account for this. Instead, we will just observe the general trend by paying attention to the low numbers that occur each week, and assume that from week to week the difference between the lowest numbers are how much fat plus muscle you have gained or lost.

For people not on steroids, muscle mass grows slowly. Over a career of weightlifting it is common for a body builder to gain around 30 lbs of muscle with most of it built in the first two years of well-structured training, though this varies with genetics. Contrasting this with fat, the body can gain nearly unlimited amounts of fat. So for the most part, when you see week to week movement on the scale, and you’re comparing the low numbers to account for the fluctuations in hydration and food, the main change to your body composition is body fat.

Understanding Calories

In order to lose weight, we need to maintain a calorie deficit. Occasionally, proponents of fad diets will argue against this based on the fact that they lost weight without counting calories. Nevertheless, it was the calorie deficit that drove the weight loss, whether they counted them or not. This has been tested and replicated countless times in human studies that once you control the diet for total calorie intake, the weight loss or gain matches exactly what the calorie balance predicts.

We figure out our calorie balance with:

Calories IN - Calories OUT = Calorie Balance

Since we are targeting weight loss, we want this to be a negative number. It is not necessary to count calories in order to have a negative calorie balance, but we do need to achieve the balance and counting is one way to provide ourselves with evidence.

Most people hate the idea of counting calories, so I do not want you to quit out of hatred for the idea, (though I personally found I never had a workable system until I started counting). So one strategy could be to start by not counting and wait until your progress stalls out, and then start counting to troubleshoot.

If you do count calories, I recommend you weigh your food and log it with an app like Nutritionix, and when eating meals away from your kitchen scale, just estimate the quantity. Even if you can perfectly track your calories in, calories out will always be a best guess. If you have a fitness tracker that outputs calories, ignore it, as these are inaccurate and will only mislead you. Instead use an online calculator and calculate your Total Daily Energy Expenditure. Make your dietary target 500-1000 calories less than your TDEE and you can lose about 1-2 lb per week. During this period, you can add exercise, but during a weight loss phase my primary recommended exercise is walking and rucking (walking with weight), though you can add in your favorite low impact cardio exercises like biking, swimming, or rowing. Weightlifting is recommended in general but not necessarily to contribute significantly to the calorie burn.

When exercising for weight loss, it is important to recognize that you will likely only achieve 300-600 calories of burn in a day from exercise, which is significant enough to matter, but could be overturned by a single meal. Therefore it is more important to focus on food than exercise. Better of all to have both.

If you decide to track calories and exercise like I have described, we can call this FLEXIBLE DIETING. This is my general recommendation because of how adaptable it is to anyone’s situation and how it will serve you well later on if you become an athlete, since the same skills are needed in weightlifting. But different people like different strategies. Here are a few simple strategies that are in my opinion less ideal but still viable:

• Eat mainly meat and vegetables in your meals with one or two servings of starch per day, and one or two fruits.

• Intermittent fasting: Restrict a daily eating window to a narrow portion of time

• Pay attention to how much you used to eat and then just cut the portion size

Cheat Meals

I do not like the term “cheat meal” because it implies that you are breaking your commitment to yourself, and we already discussed the importance that commitments play. Rather, we can have intentional higher calorie days occasionally. During weight loss, I would recommend a high calorie day no more than once every two weeks, but at least once every month as this helps you avoid the metabolic adaptation that can undermine weight loss long term and overly stress your metabolism.

Losing Fat vs. Muscle

When people lose or gain weight, it’s some combination of muscle and fat. The main factors that influence what kind of weight you lose is how much protein you are eating (more is better), how quickly you lose the weight (slower is better), and whether you are weightlifting (lifting is better). If you are significantly overweight, you will probably want to lose weight as fast as you can, at least initially, since the loss of 100 pounds could take two full years of losing a pound a week, and losing more than a pound a week is completely achievable for someone 100 pounds overweight. The main disadvantage to fast weight loss is muscle loss, but if you are not yet a weightlifter who has done serious training to build muscle, there is relatively little concern about losing muscle mass, and it is easy enough to gain it back when needed.

Exercise Plan

Since we are exercising for weight loss, we are mainly focusing on increasing the size of our calorie deficit and limiting muscle loss. One to three days per week of strength training (based on personal preference) is a great start and you should target a diversity of muscles when exercising. You can look up basic weightlifting programs anywhere, just do not pick something that is aimed at weight gain.

The majority of your exercise should be contributing to the calorie burn, which is why I recommend walking so highly:

• You can easily spend a spare 5 minutes or 3 hours walking and still be doing something productive.

• Unlike other exercises, you do not need to “build up” to high amounts as much

• You are unlikely to injure yourself walking

• It is adaptable by adding weight or incline

• You can be in nature

• You can be on a treadmill if weather or location is an issue, or you want to watch something

• You can be alone with your thoughts, pray, or listen to books

• You can do it solo, or with people

Feel free to mix in other of your favorite cardio, but do it mindful of your need to gradually build up the volume to avoid injury.

Overcoming Obstacles

At this point we feel confident about our ability to commit, and we know what commitments to make, but now we want to address the obstacles that will try to derail us once we get started. Anything worth doing will cause us to face oppositions and setbacks, and we have to push through them to be successful. We will examine a few, and hopefully you can apply the same tactics to your particular situation.

Unsupportive Family or Friends

Once you start getting serious about weight loss you will often find people coming to you about how “concerned” they are that you are so “obsessed” or “rigid” and will tell you they support you but you’re doing it the wrong way. Your first inclination will probably be either to argue with them or to give in. Remember, they were not concerned when you were okay with being fat, only now that you are doing something about it. They’re probably not mad at you, they just feel threatened by your new resolve and you need to just stay the course. One of the simplest ways is to give the most American answer possible: “This is a way that is meaningful and important to me.” America is obsessed with individual choice. In a world where people can decide their own truth, certainly you can decide your own diet! If they push back, just hold the line, pleasantly. “Thank you I know you want the best for me. I just feel the need to try it my way.” If you really can’t get anywhere, just use the wild card, “Thanks, I will give it some thought.” End of conversation.

If there is a practical objection, like “I don’t want to cook two separate dinners for the family,” then just work it out and say, “Why don’t you just cook what seems best and if you don’t mind I’ll throw some frozen broccoli in the microwave to go with it or have a protein shake with it?” Or perhaps you can ask that each meal have at least one thing that fits well with the diet. You can also use portion control to eat the same things but less of them. Ultimately, you will want to have a serious conversation and try to get them on board with a workable solution if possible.

Travel

When traveling, the most important part is preserving the same mindset. Aim for 100% and you will hit 80%. You can always grab a rotisserie chicken at a deli or a salad at a fast food restaurant. The biggest problem is entertaining a “travel mindset” where you stop trying at all during that period. You can still accomplish a lot in a hotel gym, the grassy field next door, or a public park.

Injuries and Illness

Similar to travel, maintain the same mindset when injured or ill that just because one aspect of your plans has changed, you are not throwing away all of your commitments. You can change out the types of exercise, reduce the intensity, reduce the amount, or add rest days as needed.

Conclusion

If you have made it this far, congratulations. You have ALREADY done more thinking than most fat people ever will do about losing weight. Now you just need to take this momentum and get started building habits. If you get stuck or have questions, leave me a comment and I will do my best to answer. You’re ready to save your life and get healthy. Don’t put this off. Get started today.

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Medical Disclaimer: I am not a professional doctor or coach and this newsletter does not constitute medical or expert advice. Modify as needed, and consult a doctor for personalized information.