We say "weight loss" but we mean "size loss"

Date: 3/23/14
Distance: 6.68 miles
Location: Carrboro, NC
Catalyst: Sawbones (Weight Loss)

For the first bit, I mostly thought about how much I had to pee. I stuck to my route, which was on suburban sidewalks for the first 3.5 miles, despite a nagging need to duck into the woods for a minute. But there were no woods for a while. And such is the dedication to my craft. For the rest of it, I was free to think about loftier things. Thanks, Maslow!

There is a world of difference between my mind when I'm running while looking down and when I'm running and looking up. The latter keeps me focused on going the distance and the former keeps me focused on dumb things like didn't that small pile of sticks look like a human figure, like literally a "stick figure" and whether pencil lines on a page are considered "sticks" in other contexts because I can't think of any they are always just called lines although technically "line segments" because "lines" technically extend infinitely in two directions...

Also I thought a lot about weight loss because of the podcast. I've been half-thinking for a bit about how almost all the desire for weight loss I see in my culture is actually just a desire for size loss. Literally no one I know would be upset if they were slimmer but weighed more. And this is probably a perfectly reasonable outcome for someone who replaces fat, which is big and light, with muscle, which is smaller and dense. This post I just found makes this point pretty well: weight loss per se is a pretty dumb goal since no one can see your weight and literally no one cares about your weight. Your bigness, on the other hand, is there for everyone to see.

Also, I've been weighing myself on the digital scale my wife bought. I like to do it: it's so easy and the number is so clear. I weigh myself several times a day and I've been keeping track using some phone app I found. Since I re-started running recently, I've lost a couple of pounds overall, but it's really only about one standard deviation of my weight fluctuations from hour to hour. I'm not sure how normal this is: this post I also just found cites some "nutritionist" as saying 3 to 5 pounds range in a day is perfectly normal. 3 to 5 pounds is a dieter's success story! And it can be attained just by weighing yourself a couple of times in the same day! I could make a fortune with the "wait four hours" diet. Or should that be the "Weight For Hours" diet? I am a genius. Do not steal my idea.

I counted calories for a while too, but it's really annoying because food is largely an undifferentiated mass, but calorie counting requires some sorting and clarity. That egg and cheese biscuit at Johnny's may have 250 calories or 350 calories depending on the weight of the thing and the size of the biscuit and the type of cheese and who the hell cares because I'm hungry and I'm going to eat it. In any case, I think I've figured out that "hungry" is really just my body keeping a balance of calories in to calories out. It's really kind of amazing to see the numbers verify this obvious conclusion. If I exercise I bunch, I get hungry and I eat more. It all kind of works out: I end up eating (in counted calories) about as much as I burn (in counted exercise) except for two things:

First, I don't know a lot about my non-exercise burning. I know I'm burning calories just typing this out: energy isn't free. I know if I were out of calories I would be hungry and tired, so I'm obviously still running on whatever calorie savings I've accrued. But typing isn't exercise so I don't know how to count it all up. Heck, just being a warm mammal burns calories. There are estimates for a man of my size and activity level and I can just lean on those, but how can one verify that I'm not burning more (or less) than I think I am?

Second, I almost always eat when I'm hungry but I don't always stop when I'm full. Because of this, my calorie overages are many and my calorie underages (that didn't type out right: "my calorie deficits" is maybe better?) are few. So even if I'm not over-eating at any given point, it all adds up. It's weirdly hard to burn more than you eat...

Unless you burn a frickin' lot. I'm starting to think that getting to that point where your hunger feels insatiable is the best place to be. So I'm going to keep running farther and harder until I get to that point. But I'm not going to hold my breath until my scale shows me lower numbers.