I just lost 100 pounds. Here’s why almost nobody else will!
By: Noel Dickover
Tags: Diet, Weight Loss, Exercise, Health, Diabetes

Internal Health Measures

Deluxe, often expensive Internet of Things (IoT) personal tracking devices like Fitbit or the new Apple watch are the rage right now. Just pay $99.99 and get your calories counted, heart rate monitored, your blood pressure measured, your steps counted, your sleeping patterns graphed, and bloody sugar levels tracked regularly. I really have an aversion to the entire product set, because the focus is wrong. These products get you to think of your body as an mysterious black box that requires external scientific measures to generate reliable data.

Your body is a living system. It doesn’t operate in “per day” increments.

Your body operates in the here and now, whether or not you’re noticing.

You can become aware of it…will you?

Further, these products seem to buy into the delusion that external goals should drive the pace of your recovery, not the actual and current condition of your body. You want to lose 30 pounds in 6 weeks? You can now measure your progress in real time! These products optimize your time, and our bodies just have get with the program! To be clear, I am not opposed to datasets or sensors for data collection— my day job involves finding aggregating and applying data from harsh environments in really creative ways. I just think the costs for using it personally far outweight the benefits.

That said, I do have friends who are using IoT products to successfully lose weight. If you’re using Fitbit, cell phone apps, Apple watch or some other hip device and its helping you get healthy, congrats and keep rocking it! If its working over the long term, use it! The section below provides an alternative approach to external measures — one that is at odds with the current external measures trend. So if you’ve settled into a happy partnership with your Fitbit and are afraid of offending it, feel free to skip down to the “Movement and Eating” section below.

The anti-Fitbit approach

Leopard track, Neredu Valley, India, August 2015, Noel Dickover

Experts say you should drink X cups of water per day, Y calories per day, that you should limit your carb and fat intake to Z grams — you know the routine. With no data other than my own experience in losing over 100 pounds, I’ve decided that’s all bullshit — the whole approach is flawed. As we see above, this advice is not helping people lose weight. Worse, the reliance on external measures solidifies the view of the human body as a near undecipherable black box — one that causes us to quickly lose confidence in our own perceptions. And in doing so, we stop paying attention to clear signals and rich feedback our bodies are constantly providing. Not surprisingly, the new innovations in personal tracking devices line up perfectly with new and improved, data-enabled 5 step diet plans, that if you only follow to perfection will allow you to…its all bullshit.

Your body is an organic, living system. This means it doesn’t operate in “per day” increments. Your body operates in the here and now. Whether not you’re pay attention, your body continually regulates itself in real-time. Diets are designed as if your body was an engineered machine that is missing a gasket or two, but living systems simply don’t function that way — they aren’t analogous. Engineered machines like precise instructions and reliable measurements, and constant improvement. But your body is constantly adjusting to a whole series of internal and external purturbations — this implies prescribed totals quickly lose their utility. There is a tenuous connection at best between what the prescribed daily totals for someone like you “should be” and what your body actually requires at this very moment.

Your body’s actual functioning in the present and next few hours are critical, but daily totals at the end of the day are near meaningless. I’m suggesting that like most skinny people, it is important for the rest of us to develop a deeper awareness of our body’s functioning — one that will inform our decisions on food and movement choices far more effectively than any professional health plan.

Look inward for your measures

To paraphrase Darth Vader,

“The power of the Fitbit pales in comparison to power of your own ability to understand what is occurring within you in the ever living present. I find your lack of faith in yourself disturbing.”

You either “do” or “do not” need water right now, but chances are, if you’re exercising regularly and regulating your metabolism you‘ll be drinking water heavily. Put simply, guidelines to drink 12 cups of water per bullshit period time in absence of actual movement will not improve your health or disposition.

As a living system, your body still abides by the laws of nature — if health goals are disconnected from your actual state of health, they won’t succeed. You might lose that fast 5–20 pounds, but we both know you’ll have more weight than you started a few months later. Long term change comes from understanding your body’s current state — this gives you the knowledge necessary to make the right changes for you, one by one, gradually and permanently over time. Understanding your body’s current state requires learning to pay attention to what is happening inside. This is a very knowable thing — something a large percentage of skinny people do naturally.

Neredu Valley, India at dawn, Noel Dickover, August 2015

The Measures that Matter: If I’m not counting calories or fat, or poking myself daily for sugar levels, how can I gauge progress? My approach to getting healthy has as its core developing deep awareness of how my body functions. Like all gradual change, this is a long term effort that yields greater dividends the more skill you attain. Understanding both my internal motor and physical condition has been critical to my journey. For measures directly affecting weight loss and diabetes recovery, I pay attention to three key things:

— Energy level — Metabolism — Sugar level

ENERGY LEVEL: Start with your energy level. Everyone can feel if they are energetic or not. I’m asking you to pay regular and explicit attention to your energy level, not unlike your awareness of the room temperature. This takes practice — for me it took well over a month to really lock this in.

I would try to ask myself almost hourly, “On a scale of 1 to 10, what is my current energy level?

Once you do, you’ll begin notice a clear relationship between food you eat, both type and quantity and its impact on your energy level. For me, this was the key to changing my eating habits. When I looked at a lunch menu and fixated on something large and heavy, once I knew intimately and repeatedly what happens to my energy the immediate enjoyment factor drops — I started selecting better choices because of it. Again I stress that this is a not a day revelation — this takes weeks if not longer.

Over time, you can use your awareness of energy levels to make small changes in your food and movement choices. Awareness of your current energy level will prompt you to find reasons to get up and move around once an hour, or you might find yourself eating more snacks along with smaller sized meals far more often. This approach is VERY different from keeping track of calories. In essence, you are paying attention to the internal impact of the calories in the here and now. That’s the only time they calories are relevant. The fat either will or will not have been added to your gut by the time you calculate your caloric intake the end of the day.

Once you are comfortably keeping track of energy levels and regularly notice the impact of your food choices, you are ready to gain better awareness of your body’s motor — your metabolism.

METABOLISM: Energy awareness is the gateway to gaining awareness of your metabolism. Your metabolism is the engine that powers the living system that is you. Its processing can be felt, and eventually optimized in the sense that there are natural ways to speed it up. But in the beginning, start paying attention to it in the same way you do your energy level. This will take you a few months of effort, so don’t be discouraged if you aren’t successful after a day or two.

Neredu Valley, India, 2015 Noel Dickover

If you’ve ever lost weight, at times you can “feel” almost a tingly sensation when you perceive you are losing weight — this is usually accompanied by higher energy levels. Similarly if you pay attention, you can “feel” when you are gaining weight. This is not magic — its a knowable thing that lots of skinny people take for granted. If you gain awareness of your body’s engine, you can gain control over your weight loss. If you understand what your metabolism is doing, you have the knowledge necessary to guide your eating and movement choices.

Get to Know Your Stomach: The key for sustained attention to your metabolism is your stomach. If you’re like I was, you have no idea what’s happening in your stomach. I rarely paid attention to how my eating habits directly led to mood swings or energy spikes. As a consequence, I used to ingest 2–3 Pepsid ACs a day — now I take less than that in a month! If acid reflux is a regular part of your day, chances are good that your stomach seldom processes your food properly, and has long since resorted to just “sending it on” to the small intestine where your food sits and is digested slowly and poorly.

Chew Your Food! If you’re interested in developing a deeper awareness of your stomach, try learning chew your food very thoroughly. I used to decide I was full when my taste buds were satiated. By this point, if the food was tasty, my stomach was usually stuffed to the point of breaking. To stop the cycle, the stomach eventually initiates its “nuclear option” —stomach acid starts shooting up into my mouth to ruin my taste. Acid reflux is the stomach’s way of getting the mouth to stop overeating. Like all nuclear options, the side effects aren’t good. If you chew your food thoroughly, you are pre-digesting it for the stomach in a way that it can take the next step in the digestion process. Food that’s properly chewed leads to quicker, better faster processing by the stomach, which leads to a faster metabolism rate. More importantly, it allows you to pay attention to your body’s engine.

I went from chowing down three large meals a day to consuming

lots of small meals all day long

Over time, I began looking for ways to optimize my metabolism. I did this through food choices, supplements and most importantly, my eating frequency. I went from chowing down three large meals a day to consuming somewhere between 10–20 small meals all day long. In keeping my metabolism at a high burn rate, I usually try to keep my stomach just above empty. As soon as I feel hunger pangs, I eat a small snack. I have lots of healthy, but mostly delicious things to eat. I now keep snacks everywhere and am constantly eating. As a consequence, my stomach has shrank so much that even if I wanted to binge, I can only eat a small amount before feeling bloated.

SUGAR LEVEL: After a few months of paying deep attention to my metabolism, I began to regularly sense of my sugar level. At first, it was most easily felt when I had something overly sweet. Most people can feel a sugar rush if they eat large quantities of candy. This is no different, except in the sense I became hyper-aware of it, even when I wasn’t indulging in sweets. As I ate food, I became aware of its near term impact on my sugar level. My goal was to stop the spikes in sugar (which often correspond to spikes in energy levels), and to slowly lower the overall sugar levels over time. As I mentioned earlier, I applied this approach without regularly poking my finger, so I can’t give you any statistics of my rate of decline. I will say that over a period of 6 months, my doctor slowly lowered and then eliminated my drug reminen.

If you’re diabetic and on Metformin, the challenge in getting off is that Metformin is designed to keep your sugar levels in the normal range (this is a good thing). Once I developed better awareness of my sugar level, I attempted to keep my sugar levels regularly slightly below what I perceived as normal. This led to doctor-approved reductions in Metformin (from 2 pills to one, to a half, and then finally the doctor removed them altogether). If you try this approach and start getting faint spells (this definitely happened to me), it’s probably a sign your sugar level is too low. If so, this is where you want to talk with your doctor about reductions in Metformin intake.

The measures that matter — the ones that will help you get healthy — are internal

Use of Personal Tracking Devices Sap Confidence in Internal Measures: The Fitbit approach will give you exact measures (we hope), but at the cost of reducing confidence in your ability to understand your internal operations. By relying on external measures, you give more credence to its “rightness” and less to internal measures that are inexact and untrackable. But the measures that matter — the ones that will help you get healthy, are all internal. I’ve only listed those critical to metabolism, but your perception in engaging in movement and exercise is just as critical— the two are connected.

Sure, you could poke your finger 20 minutes after eating each meal — this would work as a method for understanding your spikes. But it’s not necessary- there’s nothing magical about becoming aware of your internal workings. Large numbers of skinny people manage themselves naturally by paying attention to their bodies. This is a learned skill — one you can develop and improve on over time. If you learn to pay deep awareness to your internal measures, you will find they are transformative in their ability to change your future in ways that external devices simply cannot touch.