Mar 25

Gaining weight: the start of my own change journey

Posted in Announcements
This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Weight Gain

I haven’t got very personal up to this point on this blog; it’s a professional blog, but it’s a professional blog, so I think it’s appropriate to talk about relevant personal stuff. Not politics or religion; I certainly have views on those, but for my hypnotherapy blog, not appropriate.

In case you had the idea that hypnotherapists have it all going on, that we never struggle with our own issues… Not so. I’ve decided at last to address my lifelong underweight problem, and I’ll be chronicling the experience here – kind of a worked example in real time of personal change.

Very few people are underweight – fewer than 3% in NZ, according to the Ministry of Health – but I am, and have been all my life.

So why am I doing something about it now? A few reasons.

Firstly, I’m taking a nutrition class as part of my Health Science studies at Massey University, and was startled to discover that my energy intake was low even for my height and weight. Then, secondly, I weighed myself for the first time in a while, to check that I was using the right weight. I’ve been saying for years that I weigh 57kg (126lb, for those still using non-metric measures) and have a BMI of 17, but when I actually weighed myself I was 5kg lighter than that. Which put my BMI at 15.5. Given that 18.5 is considered the lower end of the recommended weight spectrum, that gave me a shock.

At the moment I’m in a good space in terms of lifestyle, having made some positive changes already over the past couple of years, which helps with motivation. I’m eating healthily and exercising (dumbbells and cross-trainer). I’ve got my hypnotherapy training to draw on to help me over any emotional hurdles – and there are emotional hurdles in deliberately changing your body, regardless of whether it’s losing weight or gaining it. (Incidentally, I’ve been trying to avoid the term “weight loss” in favour of “weight reduction”, since if you don’t want it then getting rid of it isn’t a loss. But people may experience it as a loss, nonetheless – just like any personal change involves a loss of the old self-image.)

So I’ve begun. Drawing on my nutrition studies, I came up with a recipe for an “energy cookie” using healthy but energy-dense ingredients, and I’m eating a couple of those as snacks each day. (I’ll share the recipe in a later post.) I’m trying to double the size of at least one meal a day, as well, and I’ve gone back to drinking juice as well as water (I may also start drinking milk again, though it’s really expensive at the moment).

So far, so good; I’ve increased by 1kg in a bit over a week, which is a good rate of progress – I advise my weight reduction clients not to go for more reduction than that since it isn’t usually sustainable.

I do feel full most of the time, and it’s not entirely pleasant; I feel like I’m eating all the time and spending a fortune on food. I plan to work on these things with self-hypnosis.

I’m using fridgegraph to track my progress, and thus very slightly screwing with their front page statistics, since they’re a weight loss site and I’m aiming to gain. I’ve set a target weight of 67kg, which is 10kg more than I’ve ever weighed (to the best of my knowledge; I haven’t weighed myself all that frequently in the past). This would give me a BMI of 20, still on the low end but well within the “normal” range of 18.5-25. As I’m aiming to put on 1kg a week, and the weight gain required is 15kg, my target end date – giving myself a couple of weeks’ leeway – is my 41st birthday on the 10th of July.

If you want to do a similar weight change exercise, in either direction, or just eat more healthily, here are a couple of resources:

Nutritiondata.com has some great tools for calculating your nutritional needs, working out what you’re actually eating and what would be better, and looking up data on individual foods (they have star ratings for weight loss, weight gain and health for each food, and a slew of other information). I’m doing similar calculations as part of my course, using resources in our textbooks, but this site achieves the same end and is freely available to everyone.

World’s Healthiest Foods is another great source of comprehensive and free nutrition and health information for specific foods, which extensively cites scientific studies on the health benefits of particular foods.

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Mar 27

My weight gain journey: the how

Posted in News
This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Weight Gain

Here’s my personal strategy for gaining weight (as per my last post, Gaining weight: the start of my own change journey, in case you missed it).

I’m already taking a break every hour and a half and doing a set of exercises with the dumbbells. What I plan to do is also eat at the same intervals, except where I’m within an hour and a half after a meal. So the day will look like this (times are approximate, of course):

banana

6am: breakfast. Porridge made from oats, with dried apricots, a banana, cinnamon and a little milk; green tea. I’m thinking about adding milk powder to the porridge if I find that my weight gain isn’t as rapid as I want. (More about this meal, and why it’s good for me nutritionally, over in my Weight Loss Support material. If it seems odd for me to refer to weight loss when I’m trying to gain, well, some things are just good for practically anyone, and this meal is one of them.)

9am: first weights set; energy cookie. I’ll post the recipe for this once I’ve done a nutritional analysis on it.
10:30: second weights set; peanut butter on wholegrain toast.
12:00: third weights set; lunch. I was already eating two pieces of fruit, a home-made fruit/nut/seed bar that I’ll also post the recipe for later, and a pita sandwich consisting of avocado, cheese, tomato, olives and spinach. I’ve added fruit juice, and replaced the single pita pocket with four slices of wholegrain bread, making two sandwiches with the same ingredients as before, plus cream cheese. (I spread cream cheese on one slice and avocado on the other for each sandwich.)

avocado

1:30: fourth weights set.
3:00: fifth weights set; second energy cookie.

4:30: this is about when I finish work, since I work at home and don’t have commuting time – your mileage (heh) may vary. Five minutes on the cross-trainer (a brisk walk would be an alternative) and a smoothie with juice, milk, a banana and an egg ought to do it. I haven’t tried this yet, will be trying it today and seeing if it diminishes my appetite for dinner too much.
6:00: dinner. About the same as I used to have – something has to stay the same. That’s some kind of protein, usually fish or beef mince in some form, about the size of my hand more or less, with steamed vegetables and probably carbs such as rice.

I quite often have a client in the evenings (this evening being no exception), so my next scheduled event is:

8:30: final weights set; wholegrain toast and peanut butter.

toaster

Now, I’m probably not going to achieve this every single day. Part of sticking with a program like this is accepting that you are going to miss occasionally, and not catastrophizing that (“Oh no! I have deviated from my program! I’m a hopeless case and might as well give up completely!) but just returning to it at the next opportunity.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Mar 31

Eat as if you were the weight you want to be

Posted in Techniques
This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Weight Gain

(This relates to my weight gain goal, but it’s all equally applicable if you’re losing weight.)

I said to my wife over the weekend, “I’ll be glad when I reach my goal weight and I can ease back a bit on eating all the time.”

That got me thinking.

Physiology – or physics, for that matter – tells me that if I am taking in more energy than I need for my energy output, I will gain weight, and if I’m taking in less, I’ll lose weight. The body seeks a balance.

balance
Old Scales by ukapala

The body’s energy output is mainly affected by three things: Level of activity, body composition (fat versus muscle), and body weight.

So, if I find out the amount of energy that I theoretically would need if I was my goal weight, and plan my eating so that my everyday intake is that amount, my weight should naturally and inevitably rise until the energy intake and the energy output balance, and then stop. This should (again theoretically) occur at my goal weight, give or take whatever individual variation my particular metabolism has from the average.

The advantage of this approach is that right through my weight change process I will be eating in the same way that I will need to eat to maintain the changed weight. That’ll be my new lifestyle as someone who weighs that amount. I’m not making one change to get to that weight and another to keep it.

So, how do I run the numbers and figure out what I need to do?

calculator

Well, I go to nutritiondata.com and use their Daily Needs Calculator. I put in my age (actually the age I’m going to be in a few months), my height and my gender, but I put in the weight that I plan to be – not the weight I am now. The results are:

You are a 41 year old man, 6ft 0in / 183cm tall, with a current weight of 67.0kg. You lead a somewhat active lifestyle.

Your Body Mass Index

Your current Body Mass Index (BMI) is 20.0.

BMI is a standardized ratio of weight to height, and is often used as a general indicator of health. The “normal” BMI for an adult man of your height is 18.5 to 24.9. This translates to a healthy weight range of 62 to 83 kg. However, BMI does not take body composition into account. A weight above this range could still be considered healthy if your percentage body fat is less than average. For more accurate determination of body fat levels, consider using a body fat caliper.

Your Calories Burned

Here is an estimate of your daily energy needs…

Calories Burned
Daily Energy Expenditure: 2562 kcal ( 10727 kJ)

After some disclaimers, it gives me some further useful information about my minimum nutrient needs, including the key figures of 130g of carbohydrate and 54g of protein (both of which seem low, but they’re minimum figures, remember).

My next task, then, is to compare what I eat now with these target values and see how far off I am. To do this, I create a “Pantry” (a slightly unintuitive name, but never mind) on the Nutritiondata.com site. I have to be signed in for this so that I can save it.

You can combine multiple ingredients into a recipe and save it with its own name, which is useful, or there are a large number of prepared foods in the database as well.

I quickly discover that my breakfast gives me 195 calories towards my target 2562.

I usually have the same breakfast, lunch and snacks from day to day but vary what I have for dinner. Within a very reasonable span of time and with no significant issues, I have worked out that my standard daily intake at the moment, excluding dinner, totals to over 3000 calories. I already know from working it out for my nutrition studies (the hard way, from printed reference tables typed by hand into a spreadsheet) that my usual dinners run between about 300-600 calories, so I’m about 800 calories over what I actually need to reach my goal weight. I can afford to back off a bit on the stuffing, which is a relief. For example, I can drop the time-consuming preparation of a smoothie with fruit juice, a banana, an egg and milk with my dinner in the evening; it’s giving me about 500 calories I don’t need and a glycaemic load of 28. I could probably go back to one sandwich instead of two for lunch, as well.

apple

The analysis also gives me links where I can investigate better alternatives to the foods I eat (“better” for weight loss, weight gain or optimal health, whichever is my specific concern). It tells me that my glycaemic load is a bit high, my vitamin C is about 60% of the recommended amount (which considering how much fruit I eat is a surprise), vitamin K is about 25%, folates are at 93% (without dinner, remember, so they’re probably OK), and everything else is at or above 100% – manganese, for example, is at almost 500%. Clicking through to the food recommendations, some more spinach, which I do eat, should sort me out on the vitamin K and folates.

With the smaller daily intake, when I recalculate I find I’m a bit short of other important nutrients. Adding some milk back in helps, but sends my saturated fats and trans fats too high. I’ll need to fiddle with it some more to get an ideal diet, obviously.

All in all, this is a very impressive site – not only does it have a lot of valuable data but it’s very easy to use. I recommend, to complement it, World’s Healthiest Foods, which goes into what the various nutrients are good for according to a huge mass of studies.

The values are, of course, not totally exact; the database is US and I’m in New Zealand, and there can be quite a variance in the composition of foods locally. But at the level of hundreds of calories, which is what I’m concerned with, this was a very useful (and fairly easy) exercise.

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