Marching Into The Peace Corps, pt 13: The “Special K” Santa Claus and New Years Resolutions

Once in awhile, the advertisers come up with something funny instead of downright dumb, and this time the Special K cereal has got the post holiday edge that’s sure to tickle any funny bone. If you haven’t seen the ad, it’s worth paying attention to when the commercials come on!

A child is slowly wandering down the stairs and notices a big red robe with some white fuzzy trim on it. In her innocent glee, she cries out “SANTA CLAUS!” The camera angle dramatically shifts to a shot from inside the fireplace, revealing it’s not Santa, but Mommy. To paraphrase, the advertiser’s line reminds the person about all the holiday cookies she ate, and then kicks into the Special K diet pitch.

Just before New Years’ Eve, I was in a health food store picking up a few odds and ends, when I saw this couple that couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, talking to the person behind the counter. The man was looking to buy a common product some people swear by for fast weight loss: Hydroxycut. It’s a junky product and definitely won’t solve his long-term goals of being a ripped stud muffin for his lady. Instead, his wallet will be much thinner and he won’t be able to afford his girlfriend.

It’s also ironic that the FDA fined several of these big name products and/or manufacturers for their false claims just in time for the New Years’ resolution rush. The government doesn’t always act in a timely manner , but at least this time they got it right. I just wish they had gone further and pulled more junk products off the shelf. These products do work, but what price are you going to pay in terms of your health?

We are naturally lazy creatures who demand fast returns, and the latest and greatest diet products do give us those returns. What’s so bad about that? Have you ever seen a ripped guy who starved himself to death? He looks like a floppy chew toy for the family dog; his skin hangs and he will never have any definition.

I’m not a fan of diets at all. I hate them just a little bit more than I hate exercising, but both are necessary evils. Constantly I find myself being lured back into the old mindset and forget those “solutions” were nothing more than temporary fixes. It’s easy to be sucked into the slick, sexy ads that show six pack abs and butts so tight you can bounce quarters off them all day long. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want that? So with our New Years’ resolutions, we run to the stores and buy the vitamins and swear to ourselves, “This year I’m gonna do it! I’m gonna lose the weight!”

The best advice I can give you is to avoid the quick fix route as one fat butt to another: don’t diet and move!

“What do you mean, ‘don’t diet’? How am I supposed to lose weight?” Here’s where the old thinking comes in to trap you and your wallet into making foolish mistakes, and since I’ve been down this road I’m speaking from experience. My goal is to lose sixty pounds by May 1 st , 2007; will I get there? I hope so, but it’s anyone’s guess and squarely dependent on my actions.

So often you hear claims about pills or aides that will help you to lose weight, but inevitably it comes back and brings a few “friends” with it. You always get fatter after you go off a diet, so that’s why I’m urging you NOT to diet. The other problem no one talks about is how diets slow your metabolism down, which is the last thing you want to have happen. “Staple bologna to my face, but don’t slow my metabolism down! Anything but THAT!” A slow metabolism is the kiss of death in every diet out there and results in more frustration with the dreaded diet plateaus. We get frustrated and give up when we can’t break through it fast.

Here’s a new concept: forget about losing weight…aim to lose fat. “Isn’t that the same thing?!” Absolutely not! Weight is an overall measurement, whereas fat is a specific component. You can lose weight on the junky stuff like Hydroxycut, but the actual question you should be asking about this type of product’s performance is what kind of weight am I going to lose?

Most weight loss products center on losing water weight and are loaded with diuretic components, which dehydrates your body. How can you pass fat and waste products from cellular activity if you’ve dehydrated yourself in a short period of time? You can’t. The more your body holds onto these waste products, chances are you’re self-contaminating yourself.

The human body is made up mostly of water. If you use a junky product and dehydrate yourself, you will lose weight, but you won’t get the results you actually desire. If you’re anything like me, you’ve been down this road several times in the past with a variety of fad diets. In the end you’re thinner, but you still look like a floppy beached whale with about as much ambition as a dust mop. Even worse, in a few weeks you’re starting to see the pounds on the scale and before you know it, you’re lying on the bed with a metal coat hanger threaded through the hole in your zipper, sucking in your gut, and trying desperately to fit into your jeans.

Forget trying to lose weight. Forget trying to diet. There’s another alternative that’s much healthier, will give you better results (if you’re patient), and if you’re willing to do some exercise, the body you want. What is it? Lose fat, not weight.

My goal is to become so healthy that people can eat off my blood work results. Why? The Peace Corps is a pain in the butt to get in, and their own site claims more than half of all who apply don’t make it through the application process (either by giving up, or not being able to pass the requirements). In terms of what I’ve read from assorted sites, their health requirements haven’t been updated in 46 years, which means they’re super hard to achieve today. I’ve also read some horror stories of people who were generally healthy but had to fight tooth and nail over as much as 17 months to get their health clearances. This isn’t something I’m looking forward to happening at all, but it’s a worse case scenario I’m planning for.

Once I realized there was a difference between “weight” and “fat”, I was able to view the whole dieting mess with new eyes. I understood why some skinny people have the ability to eat junk food all day long and never gain an ounce and are classified as “skinny ‘fat’ people”. That kind of diet also has negative consequences in terms of their cholesterol levels and cardiac disease risk factors, which often slips past what we see with our eyes.

A few days before New Years’ eve, my dad’s best friend and his wife of fifty years boarded a plane. He started to have some twitching, broke into something akin to a seizure, and the plane made an emergency landing. By the time the wheels were on the tarmac, Archie was dead. To my eye, Archie wasn’t fat, but I’m suspecting he might have been a skinny fat person. The autopsy reports have not come back, but from other details not mentioned here, it looks like he had a massive heart attack. My heart and prayers go out to his wife, Christine.

These sort of incidents act like a wake up call for me. They should be a wake up call for you, too.

At this point I’ve lost 16 pounds and 3% body fat. How big of a deal is three percent body fat? Let me illustrate:

• When I was 180 pounds back in 2001, I could barely fit into a size 18 pair of shorts. I was actually more comfortable in a size 20, but it was embarrassing and shameful for me to admit I had become that fat. My worst was at size 22, and then I started to buy nothing but stretchy pants because at 220 pounds (my personal worst) I couldn’t fit into anything.
• I am currently 179.5 pounds, and I’m about to move down into a size 13. I fit into clothes that I had trouble wearing at 165 pounds. I understand now how some people can be larger on the scale and smaller in the dressing room!

Body fat percentages DO matter because the more body fat you lose the better you ultimately look. The other positive is if you lose the fat, you’re not apt to gain it back (or as fast if you slack off), whereas if you diet to lose weight, it will come right back because it’s usually water. You cannot treat “fat” and “weight” the same or you will definitely fail in your quest to find the skinny person trapped inside the beautiful YOU.

In future installments, I will share with you:

• A few more lessons on “weight” versus “fat” and why it makes a big difference in the way you look and how you eat.
• Go through my own exercising and diet plans of the past and relay what good aspects I have stripped out of them and how I created my own exercise plan, and how you can, too!

If you don’t like trying to find all the segments of this series, you can locate the links to them here and they will return you the exact spot on the socyberty.com site.

quazen.com articles by this writer can be found here

socyberty.com articles can be located here

relijournal.com articles are here

picable.com photographic images are here