The Exercise Lesson

Let's talk a little about aerobic exercise vs. anaerobic exercise. 

Both are healthy for the body and necessary for weight loss, but they work very differently in the way they burn calories.  Aerobic exercise, also known as cardio (running on a treadmill, for example), spikes your caloric burn which returns to a resting stasis typically within 1-2 hours.  Anaerobic exercise, also knows as weight training, only spikes your caloric burn about 1/3 as much as cardio, but it increases your resting metabolic rate by 20-50 calories per hour for the rest of the day.  So which is better?  You know what I'm going to say here... neither is better than the other.  In fact, you need to do BOTH do lose weight effectively.

Why?  Exercise is about oxygen.  When you exercise aerobically you intake and expend tremendous amounts of oxygen through your lungs but when you return to stasis the oxygen levels return to normal, along with your breathing.  In anaerobic exercise the "interior" oxygen in the physical muscles gets "squeezed out" (okay, not literally, but it's an easy way to understand the process).  Throughout the day following a muscle-building workout the muscles require more oxygen as they "rebuild" themselves.  It's this rebuilding that makes them harder, stronger and sexier.   Your muscles require fuel to obtain the oxygen that's necessary for this process, and they get it by burning your calories.  Since it takes a long time for the muscles to rebuild you continue to burn your calories throughout the day, even long-after you're done with the exercise and the heavy breathing. 

It's kind of like the tortoise and the hare.  The hare is aerobic, sprinting and leaping and expending great amounts of energy, but also taking complete rest stops along the way.  The anaerobic is like the tortoise, slowly and steadily and sure-footedly moving along, burning those calories evenly to the end.

The BEST way to lose weight with your exercise is through INTERVAL TRAINING, also known as a Boot Camp.  You need both the tortoise and the hare to fully understand the story and interval training brings the two together.  Interval training combines cardio with strength, and it also requires you to TAKE FREQUENT BREAKS.  The frequent breaks part is the secret key to your success.  The hare doesn't lose the race because he stops, he loses because he naps.  Stopping and resting is not only okay, it's encouraged.  Napping is not allowed when you're exercising. 

So rabbits and turtles are your new best friends.  The problem is most of us prefer kids and dogs and spouses and jobs to rabbits and turtles.  We don't have the time or financial resources to attend weight loss camps that specialize in interval training.  Nor do we have six hours a day to train.  If we did we'd already be at our goal weight, right?  Our kids and dogs and spouses and jobs are very important to us.  So how can we live in the real world and still find the time to be with our rabbits and turtles?

There is a way...

If you step on a stairclimber for an hour by the end of it you're sweaty, your heart is pounding, your breathing is insane and your legs hurt.  You get off, proud of what you accomplished, but utterly exhausted and already dreading the next session a mere day away.  You've worked out for an hour and the effect of the spike will last another 1-2 hours, max.  Then you're back to normal, burning your 85 calories an hour and wishing you could take a day off.

Instead, do this:

Warm up through an 8-10 minute deep-stretching abbreviated yoga session.  It's short but necessary.  It will condition your body for what's to come and set up your breathing for good inflow/outflow.  I'll put up a video shortly demonstrating the positions you need to know.  Don't worry, you don't need to be a yogi master to do them--I'm not going to make you pull your feet over your head or do anything scary or dangerous. Promise.
For now, stretch the way your gym teacher taught you, but do take a full 8-10 minutes to be fully comfortable and relaxed and ready.
THEN:

Do 25 jumping jacks.

Do 10 push-ups (on your knees is okay if you need to).

Do 15 stomach pulls (use a device, or do sit-ups)

Sit down and rest for THREE FULL MINUTES, sipping water slowly.

If you're at a gym do one full routine of a single muscle-group exercise, meaning do your arms or do your legs or do your torso.  Don't do all three, just do one.  Keep the weights at a moderate level--don't hurt yourself or push yourself beyond your limits.  This should take about 20 minutes, tops. (I'll post a video soon about how to exercise anaerobically if you don't have access to a gym). 

Sit down and rest for THREE FULL MINUTES, sipping water slowly.

Do 25 jumping jacks.

Do 10 pushups.

Do 15 lunges on each leg (30 total).

Sit down and rest for THREE FULL MINUTES, sipping water slowly.
Stairclimb or treadmill or use the elliptical s-l-o-w-l-y for three minutes, and then at the maximum speed you are comfortable with for a full 15 minutes.  It's okay to really push yourself here (but don't hurt yourself).  When the 15 sprint-like minutes are up, walk it down slowly for 3 minutes or until your breathing returns to a more normal state. 

That's it!  You've worked out, start to finish, for less than one hour and fifteen minutes and you've not only exercised your heart and lungs with terrific cardio, you've built your muscles too.  You've burned the same number of calories you would have just treadmilling the whole time, but now your resting caloric burn will increase to 125 calories per hour for the rest of the day, including when you sleep.  This little extra, for only fifteen minutes more than your current routine, will add up to beyond the 500 extra calories you need to burn every day to lose weight.

The psychological benefit to this form of exercise is in the variety.  Walking on a treadmill for an hour can seem daunting, but sprinting for 15 minutes, well that's very doable.  The weight training is fun, but it doesn't hurt because you're not overdoing it by throwing your body into every possible contortion in one session.  The constant rests and sipping water will keep you hydrated and energized.
It's just like eating:  A salad is not lettuce, it also needs tomatoes and cucumbers and some dressing and maybe almond halves to keep it interesting.  Your proteins need a veggie on the side.  Think of your exercising the same way--a routine with variety, an interval training session, will keep you motivated and excited in a way a solitary stair-climb cannot--even if you are watching a good episode of Dr. Who while you do it.

AND...
Don't make it a one shot deal.
Think of your body like a car.  It needs to be turned on consistently to maintain the fluids and the systems.  Rest = Rust.

Every four hours do 25 jumping jacks and 10 pushups or lunges.
This little boost will take 3 minutes out of your day, but it will keep the metabolic machine running smoothly and the fuel flowing.  You take breaks to snack, why not take breaks to work them off too?  Why limit your exercising to the "I gotta get to the gym" when there are things you can do in your kitchen while your waiting for the green beans to defrost?  Do it with your kids.  Call out "Homework break!" and dance in the living room.  Do it on a road trip.  Call out "Firedrill!" and run around the car like maniacs three times.  Do it at work.  Go into the supply closet and jump, Jack, jump.

As the Brady kids sang, "We gotta keep on... keep on... keep on movin'..."

The Emotions Lesson

As a good friend recently pointed out, yes, when it comes to calories the math is the math, but knowing the mechanics is fairly irrelevant.  Few people walk into buildings to visit a doctor or get the dog groomed and think about the structure, the columns, the glass, the air conditioning, the acoustic tiles.  And even those dorks of us who do think about these things don't choose not to use the building if the door opens the wrong way or the windows are too small.  We just use the building the way it's meant to be used and the calories are going to burn the way they're meant to be burned.  What's more important is WHY we're in the building.  Is it for the doctor or the dog?  Or are we loitering?

This component is called The Emotion and it’s typically the emotional connection to food that keeps people from losing it.  Our identities are tied up in our self-assessment of our self-image and going from heavy to thin means change, and change is scary.  Remember when you stopped sucking your thumb or finally put away your childhood teddybear or blanket?  Scary.  Rembember when you had your first sleepover at someone’s house--your first night alone in a different bed in a different place?  Scary.  Remember when you lost 100 pounds and started to see a new person in the mirror smiling back at you?  Just as scary.  Even though these things are desired it doesn’t mean they don’t frighten us. We are creatures of habit, and changes scare us because we have to take ourselves out of our comfort zones and dip our toes into the unknown.  Ironically, change is also necessary.  Stagnant waters fester.  Stagnant foods go moldy.  Stagnant people become unhappy (and even diseased).

I’m going to oversimply (because that’s what I do) but I’ve found in my life that when I’m miserable about something, and I mean truly miserable, whether it be about a job I hate or a relationship I can’t stand or even just a blue day with gray weather, if I take a step back and breathe I’ll discover the emotion I’m feeling is fabricated.  This doesn’t mean it isn’t a real emotion, or genuine, or necessary.  What it means is the emotion is coming from a factory of multifarious components that conspired to put out a product that somehow I ordered--even if I didn’t know it.  I saw the gray day and a difficult client and my brain processed all the gray days and difficult clients I’ve seen and attempted to replicate the way I deal with gray days and difficult clients because that’s what it knows how to do.  That’s the factory I’ve built, and my Gray Day Difficult Client Factory puts out a product I call Gloom. 

The nice thing is, I own the factory.  I forget this, but it’s true.  I own it outright and I can change the orders and the components at will!  I can say, “Hey, Gray Day Division--we’re going to replace component 31B: “Sadness with not being able to play in the park” with component 31B-2: “Delight that we don’t have to mow the lawn” and 31B-3: “Joy that we have an excuse to hibernate under a blanket.”  And instead of being a negative source of aggravation, my difficult client will now be perceived as an opportunity: This person’s high demands forces me to exercise my ability to say No, which is tough, but good for me.  I can take pride in going the extra mile in my job.  If I satisfy this client I'll know I can satisfy any client I ever meet.   This type of thinking takes practice, but the emotional assembly lines are ready to do what you command.  You own the factory, but you have to concentrate on what it is you really want to produce.   You have to learn to manufacture the emotion that gives you the results you know you need.

How?  Here’s a technique for when you find yourself in a slump or feeling miserable about something: 
 
Literally stand up and take three big, deliberate steps backwards.  Picture yourself stepping away from your emotions.  Picture yourself literally taking the contents of your state-of-mind and stepping back from them.  You can see it all in front of you, but you’re not connected to it--you are now three steps behind your feelings.  Close your eyes, knowing those feelings are still there, hovering in front of you.  Breathe in deeply from the base of your abdomen, up through your lungs and fill them to maximum capacity, as slowly and as comfortably as possible.  Then exhale naturally--don’t push it out forceably.  The breath will come out quickly at first and then taper off.  Breathe in again, slowly, same way.  Exhale again, same way.  Repeat one more time.  Now you’ve taken three deep, cleansing breaths.  With each exhale you’ve blown away the emotions you were feeling, the ones that were three steps in front of you.  Each breath broke apart those emotions and they dissipated.  They still exist, of course, but now they’re all over the room, blown to the corners, trapped in the carpet, stuck on the walls.  Without your direct connection, they will dissolve on their own.  Open your eyes and you’ll see that they’re not there anymore, holding the space where you were.  They’ve moved on.  Take three big steps back into the place where you were and you’ll feel different now--proof that those negative emotions have been cleared.  You are open now to fill yourself with the emotions you want to feel.  If you want to run around the room and recollect all those hard feelings, feel free, but it might be easier to fabricate some new ones in your sparkling emotional factory. 

The Law of Attraction, at it’s core, reminds us that You Are What You Think.
I know you know this, but it needs to be reiterated because it needs to be lived, and living is action, and all actions start with your thoughts.

If you think of exercise as a struggle that you have to get through every day, it will be a struggle that you have to get through every day.
If you think of yourself as fat you will be fat.*
If you beat yourself up for not losing weight then you are focused on not losing weight and you won't lose weight.
If you are frustrated with not losing weight then you will remain frustrated and you won't lose weight.
If you hate to exercise then exercise will be a chore that you hate.
If you feel like exercise is the only way out of this but it doesn't seem to work, then it won't work as your only way out of this.

*when I say fat here I don’t mean overweight, which is a truth about one’s physicality, I mean the word fat as a description with negative connotations that makes us feel bad about our physicality and affects our emotional well-being.

Every thought has a counter-thought.  Flip the stick when you think these thoughts.  Flip the stick and look at the gem at the top instead of the part that's stuck in the dirt on the bottom.

Exercise is strength.  It takes strength and it creates strength.  While you do it you feel strong and when you finish you feel strong.  Feeling strong feels good.
Your body is the size it needs to be right now to do the things it has to do.  Your body is becoming the size you want it to be to do the things you want to do.
You are changing your body to the size you want it to be with every step and with everything you eat.
You are satisfied with the process of your body changing size because it is a healthy process and a natural process.  It is a happy process.
You are healthy.  You are doing the right things.  You are making the right choices.
You are privileged to have the tools you need for exercising when you need and want them.
You are happy to be able to move and everything works as it should.  You enjoy wearing the spandex because it makes your tushie look sexy.
You are confident the exercise will work because you’ve seen and felt the exercise working.
Exercise is a joy because it works.
Exercise is a joy because it feels good.
Exercise is a joy because it creates strength.
Exercise is a joy because it is healthy.

MG