Learning to Eat

In my former blog I used to get myself into a lot of trouble speaking out against various tenets of Fat Acceptance. Yeah well.

Of course I can agree with the idea that a person's physical traits should not define their value as a human being. There's pretty much no defensible argument against that concept. I was quite overweight for all my life and I certainly did not want anyone applying stereotypes and making unfair judgments about me because of it.

But some people try to wrap up this basic concept in a whole bunch of other ideas they feel support and reinforce it and are consistent with it. Like this well-known blogger whom I think is off the scale in her fundamentalist, hardline perspective. Oh you bet I have my issues with this HAES stuff.

What is it? "Health At Every Size." And yes some folks do mean EVERY size. I consider the tenets of HAES to be so totally subjective that I don't see how they make any kind of reasonable statement at all. I'd say a paraphrase of the Pro-Choice slogan is more appropriate to make the point I think the HAESers are after:

KEEP YOUR UNATTAINABLE BEAUTY STANDARDS AND OPINIONS OFF MY BODY

I was thinking about my post of the other day about how I archived memories of experiences to deal with food situations as they arise. One of the tenets of HAES is this statement which I find profoundly contradictory and ironic given the context and presumed intention:

Normalized Eating: Support for discarding externally-imposed rules and regimens for eating and attaining a more peaceful relationship with food by relearning to eat in response to physiological hunger and fullness cues.

You can only have a "peaceful" relationship with food if you "relearn" how to eat only when hungry and stop eating when you're full? THIS IS THE ENTIRE ISSUE OF DIET COMPLIANCE!! Hardly anyone actually does that with complete compliance. ANYONE.

I recently read a post by the blogger referenced above about how she believes you should feel free to respond to your hunger signals by eating. She is over 300lbs and 5'2". I'm sure she eats whenever she thinks she's hungry! I believe she ignores two important concepts:

1. She assumes that dieting to lose weight always means ignoring your real hunger and therefore denying your body something it needs. A correct diet should meet your nutritional and energy needs. When we talk about the pain and discomfort and denial of "dieting" we really are talking about denying ourselves from responding to other needs by eating from psychological hunger. Those of us who have gotten very educated about weight loss regimens know that allowing our bodies to reach a certain level of hunger regularly is counter-productive and triggers the body's famine defensive responses to reduce metabolism, preserve bodyfat, and raise calorie-use efficiency. We don't want to be hungry, dang it!!!

2. She assumes that all hunger signals are legitimate and necessary biological requests by the body for food. With respect to the tenet of HAES, she's assuming that people can and will eat when they're hungry in some natural way. But we don't really do that! It's probably safe to say that failure to recognize psychological hunger cues is the primary cause of obesity!!!

It has helped me greatly to do some research into understanding hunger cues so that I can understand and deal with my own. Give this some thought and I'm sure it will make sense to you:

Physical hunger builds up gradually starting with a little internal grumble and growing into hunger pangs. Psychological hunger usually comes on suddenly.

Physical hunger can wait if you have to. Psychological hunger seems to demand your attention and causes distraction.

Physical hunger appears a reasonable time after you've last eaten. Psychological hunger can happen at any time.

Physical hunger is usually a general desire for food and will precede the desire for something specific. Psychological hunger is often a powerful fixation on a specific food.

After eating, physical hunger goes away. Psychological hunger is not always completely quelled by the desired food. The root need may still feel "nagging."

You are more likely to eat to a comfortable fullness when responding to physical hunger. Psychological hunger often results in overeating, even to the point of inducing physical discomfort.

Eating for physical hunger brings a feeling of satisfaction (assume eating to a comfortable fullness and not overeating). After eating for psychological hunger, you usually feel guilt and regret.

Do you see your own behaviors here? Everyone deals with this!! If this were so simple to "re-learn" no one would struggle with obesity or ANY food issues! One of the most powerful tools you can take into your arsenal is to simply learn to STOP and reflect even for a moment on WHY you want to eat something. As I mentioned in an earlier post, ask yourself "Am I hungry right now?" How often will you find yourself saying NO! Stop and try to assess what you are really feeling at the moment you believe you are dealing with psychological hunger. Which points out the REAL advantage of learning to identify psychological hunger cues: You can address THE CAUSES. Which you may find are issues in your life that need to be resolved with something other than a brownie!

No matter what happens, even if you give in and find yourself feeling regret, guilt and anger later, remember that incident and learn from it. You can learn from a mistake just as well as you can from a success. And over time perhaps you will be able to make your successes outnumber your mistakes!

Take this step and you will begin to find the power that is in you!! You may make significant discoveries about yourself! Be kind to yourself and seek out guidance if those discoveries reveal an issue that distresses you. Give yourself time and be patient. Forgive yourself for your mistakes by learning from them and reducing their frequency the best you can. This is very, very difficult but it is NOT impossible and it can help you grow in very positive ways.

As always, I wish you STRENGTH!

Those Whose Names Were Never Called

Home after another awesome workout! Despite the bitter Chicago cold I walked for awhile afterward anyway. My body does not want to immediately sit down; my body wants to keep moving so I move. My trainer is so great. She pushes me to do really interesting stuff. I can't believe sometimes that it's ME, the once dumpy, totally un-athletic, physically awkward and clumsy, not wanted on the softball team ME taking on all kinds of physical challenges. And doing pretty damn well at them! Hey my trainer costs $75 an hour if I don't work really hard at making sure my ass is getting soundly kicked I might as well throw that cash away!

Super-fun stuff today: She had a wheeled platform. I had to point my toes on it and walk across the gym on my hands. She said it was "sick!" You bet it was HARD! I also did pikes on it. Toes on the platform, hands on the floor, draw my butt up into the air moving into a pike position and slowly control back down. Wow. That is TOUGH.

I couldn't believe the awesome pain I got from this, oh man I was lovin' it. She gave me an 8lb medicine ball and had me stand arm's length from the wall. I push it into the wall, let it bounce just a bit back into my hands and pull it in. Push it out, pull it in. We did it for time. UNBELIEVABLE. Shoulders and triceps. Wow. I am rushing out to Fitness Factory tomorrow to get myself a medicine ball!! Like a lot of exercises, your form has to be just right on this one!

I had a very interesting experience that my trainer thought was strange. We started out with Get Up Sit Ups! I'm not sure how much weight. She had me do one side/one kettlebell at a time. Maybe it was a 15lber? Most of the kettlebells there are so scratched up you can't see the weight marking anymore. Anyway. I did 20 sit ups on one side then had to switch hands and do 20 more with no rest break. My abs were SCREAMIN'!!! But all of a sudden it felt like they simply tightened up hard and said LET'S GO FOR MORE. Like my muscles got a second wind. They felt tighter rather than hurting more. I pushed really hard through the end of that second set. 40 reps of Get Up Sit Ups! It was wild!

Another really cool thing my trainer did for me was to attach a super heavy thick band over a bar. I put my knees into it and it was just enough help to make it possible for me to do a real pull up! It felt amazing! My trainer says she has another female client who can just about do pull ups unassisted now so that's a goal!

Speaking of goals. She wants me to work toward bench pressing my weight. That's the standard for men! YES! I'm excited! We talked about it at the end of the session so it was not safe to even attempt higher weights then. Have to work at it when my muscles are fresh and ready to work hard!

Living Deliberately; Living with Intention

How many times have you heard "Diets don't work." Sure they do! If you follow them correctly! Compliance is the challenge. Many types of diets can sate our hunger and provide all the proper nutrients but we all still deal with cravings, triggers, and habits.

I had a severe food addiction and I live with the thought that tendency must still live in me. I do not want to ever find myself beginning to slip back into former destructive habits so I have taught myself various mental strategies. One of the strategies I learned very early on when my surgery was still recent was to simply ask myself, "Am I hungry right now?" I might feel like eating something but was I experiencing that because I was actually hungry? Very often the answer was NO and I'd take time out to assess what I really was feeling. Boredom? Habit? A need to have a brief distraction? By stepping back and evaluating the situation, I could choose some other way to address what I really wanted at that moment. Instead of eating mindlessly, I chose my response to my feelings at that time in an intentional and deliberate manner.

I also find a lot of strength and actually a great sense of satisfaction and accomplishment in what I think may be similar to a strategy used in Method Acting. Think of it as archiving a specific feeling you want to remember and use when you need to draw on it.

It seems like my rides home on the bus after my training session have become an integral part of the whole ritual! I happen to take a bus I get on at its origination so I can choose my seat. I sit in the very last corner by the window. I feel tucked away in my spot where I can block out the people around me and spend the travel time in my own head. I always have that wonderful worked-out feeling and I love to simply sit and enjoy how good it feels and how great I feel for having worked as hard as I did. I think about what I liked the best about my training session and what I think challenged me the most. Whatever may have happened in my day before my session seems completely wiped out. There doesn't seem to be anything that could make me feel any less than WONDERFUL when I am in that reflective, almost meditative experience.

I mentally file away and store that feeling experience. I can use it when I am faced with a choice that might undermine what I work to accomplish by my training and hard work. It becomes much easier to make deliberate, intentional choices to maintain positive and facilitative habits in my daily life. I CHOOSE to avoid nutritionally-deficient foods and nourish myself correctly. I CHOOSE to exercise on the days off from my trainer sessions so that I can keep progressing in my physical development. I CHOOSE to get myself into bed to get adequate rest (TV is NOT that important!). I CHOOSE to maintain neat and orderly environments where I live and work so that my thinking and my sense of organization is not cluttered. All this gives me an overall sense of being in control of myself and my life.

I live deliberately.
I live with intention.

I hope this gives you some ideas how you might tap into a resource of powerful experience to put to work in your life! I wish you strength!

Kicked HARD!!

Home from today's session with my trainer. Oh you bet I've got THAT feeling! Last Monday at the end of my session a different trainer was starting a session with her client as my trainer and I were wrapping up. There's something they call the sled. Just a flat metal sheet with a post in the middle and loops for ropes. Load it up with weight plates. Pull it! So this trainer's client is pulling the sled with one tiny weight on it and I remark to my trainer that I pull a lot more than that. Oh yeah but that client is new. By the way, that trainer pulls 100lbs. Can I do that? SURE! Bring it on! I really don't know how much my trainer loads up when I do the sled so I'm not sure what I've just bragged I can do.

I did it today, first thing. 95lbs. The length of the gym and back.

SIX TIMES.

Turns out I'd misunderstood the challenge a bit! I thought the amount of weight was the big deal but the trainer pulls that amount for six rounds! Twelve lengths of the entire gym building. I did pretty much just about collapse to the floor! And I got pretty shaky. My trainer thought my blood sugar had crashed so she insisted I have a small cup of apple juice. That was crazy alright but I loved it! My trainer kept yelling instructions on form to me and I yelled back that I was just going to DO IT, any way, any how. There was no way I wasn't going to do it! I would have pulled that thing until I DIED!

It is getting hard for me to find exercises that truly challenge my abs. We did one today that I really liked! On the floor, on my back, legs up on a Swiss ball, knees bent, the ball tucked under my legs. My trainer held my feet; I'm not sure how these will feel if I try them myself. Just sit straight up! I'm very good at isolating the muscles that are the target without cheating so I will give them a try.

Another similar exercise is the Get Up Sit Up. Besides being an awesome abs move on its own, many people consider it a good learning step to developing a strong Turkish Get Up. I usually do this with two small kettlebells instead of one big one. The phenomenal Anthony DiLuglio has a perfect video to show you how to do it.

Learn the Get Up Sit Up

It's Not That Kind of Pain

Something I read somewhere had always stuck in my mind though I'd long forgotten where I'd read it.

I got the idea to create this website and blog less than two weeks ago. The very first visitor to be logged by my site stats was a referral from a Live Journal site. And there it was:

I don't understand what's so attractive about the phrase "No pain, no gain" - my daughter overheard it somewhere and said it to me this weekend and promptly got an earful about the fact that pain means your body is saying "NO! STOP!".

I remember when I first read this thinking about how this person must have never even attempted to work her body to a point of challenging her physical limits and has no idea what it's like. I think that's very unfortunate and exceptionally unfortunate that she's passing this complete misconception on to her daughter.

"Pain" is figurative of course. The expression isn't meant to refer to the kind of pain that signals actual injury but rather the "pain" of effort and hard work and a high level of challenge. And yes, the discomfort that you fight through when you meet your body's limits and a bit of the soreness that will naturally occur when you work intensely. But essentially, the sentiment refers simply to the idea that anything truly valuable to acquire and achieve will require exceptional effort.

To speak literally for a moment, however...I find the feeling in my body immediately after a very hard training session to be absolutely exquisite. I am so disappointed if I don't have that "worked out" feeling the next day. I want to spend all day being reminded of how hard I am working. It drives a sense of motivation for the kind of person I want to be on all levels. That is the mind and body connection that hard training has created for me.

The work I do in physical training has extended out to all areas of my life, creating a sense of overall motivation and drive in me. I've always been the kind of person who worked very hard for what I wanted. But it's different now. Feeling in control of my body was the one thing I couldn't achieve for all my life. It's like a major link has been added to the chain and that chain is made of titanium!

I also think of the "pain" as challenge that I welcome and get excited about. I greatly enjoy learning new exercises that are very tough. The sense of accomplishment I will achieve when I master them will be enhanced by the fact that I pushed my body's abilities a little further once again.

Some Swiss ball work my trainer had me try recently is very difficult. First, she had me do the Hamstring Curl with one leg at a time. That is the next step progression in difficulty for that exercise and it's a big step! Next, we worked on pikes. WOW that was tough! I started out by simply trying to hold a push-up-like position on the ball. That is what I had to work at mastering first before moving on to the pike.

I don't have a name for this exercise! To try it, roll out on the ball like you're going to do push ups, all the way to your toes and hold that position. Your hands are on the floor, your arms fully extended, and your legs are straight out, toes pointed on the top center of the ball. Just like the top position of a push up, except your feet are on the ball instead of the floor. The degree of balance that is required is INTENSE!!! When I first tried this with my trainer, I could only hold this position for 15 seconds with great effort! When I got home and tried it the next day though, I was able to do it well! I have the strength in my abs; I needed to be very focused. Sometimes I can do something when I focus on the part of my body that is engaged to accomplish the exercise. I actually surprised myself that I just rolled out the ball and I DID IT. I held the position as if I were doing a full-arm-extension plank on the floor, steady as a rock!

Myths of Building Muscle

The scale doesn't move and some people excuse it away saying "Oh I'm building muscle." Usually NO THEY'RE NOT. I've noticed two generalizations. People who attribute weight loss failure to muscle gain almost always are not working out ANYWHERE near the level that they'd actually be building ANY muscle and people who dodge exercise programs by claiming they "don't want to get big and bulky" are the types who would never train ANYWHERE near the level for that to be even the most remote possibility.

It's much more difficult to build muscle than most people know. A young man, working under optimum conditions and expending serious effort can build about a pound of muscle a week. Most people cannot devote the time let alone put forth the effort it takes to start looking like a bodybuilder. It takes obsessive devotion and commitment. Really.

Hilary Swank packed on 19lbs of muscle in three months for her role in "Million Dollar Baby." What did it take to do that? Nearly five hours of training EVERY DAY, a brutal diet including 210 grams of protein consumed around the clock (yes she got up in the middle of the night), and working with world-class trainers. Doing absolutely nothing else. Twenty-four hour focus. Every day. For three months. That's all she did. Under conditions no regular person could duplicate.

For a woman to do what she did has been controversial. The bodybuilding community has expressed some skepticism about the 19lbs claim.

So do you think you're building muscle? Not if you're on a treadmill or lifting a three-pound weight or doing Pilates. Muscles grow when they are stressed by intense, focused work. They go into a state of repair and grow back a little larger. You HAVE to have the soreness to know it's happening. And you MUST feed your muscles with clean protein or you will undermine the potential effects of your workouts.

You should be sure to consume high-quality protein shortly after an intense training session. When I go to my trainer, I carry a protein bar that I eat on my trip home. Get on the bus, eat that bar! I usually choose a Myoplex Lite bar (a former recommendation of the famous MeltingMama) or a Power Crunch. At home, I have a protein drink after my workout.

Take Two Weeks to Testdrive a New Lifestyle

Alright, the haters are BACK!! YEAH!!! I just got a comment that was caught by moderation but I am happy to respond to it. (I'm going to turn off moderation by the way and allow anonymous commenting.) The commenter "kindly" pointed out that I was contradicting myself by insisting that you could do something for two weeks and get results if I'm also saying that changing your body takes a long time and lots of hard work.

Well YEAH. And no I am not contradicting myself. I think you should give something new at least two weeks. Try it out. Give it your best. It's not forever, you can do it! See how you can fit it into your schedule. I feel two weeks is a good way to start testdriving a potential new lifestyle habit. Do it conscientiously and YOU WILL see some results in two weeks! You will feel really good about having done something that takes a lot of effort. But if you eat correctly and train the hardest you can for two weeks YOU WILL feel some physical changes starting. You should feel a little perk up in your energy level. You might notice some sleep changes. You could sense some shifts in your appetite and your cravings. And if you honestly follow a correct diet, you should drop some weight.

The more of a JOLT to your body that you experience, the more changes you see. But yes, these changes will be like the tiny seedling sprouts of something much greater to come with much more time and much more work.

Real changes don't happen unless you take a first step and START. I'm urging you just to GET STARTED!

Psychological Benefits of Exercise Plus How to Do a Dead Lift

I know someone who has a LOT of stress in his life. He recently started trying to work out regularly and I talked with him this week about how much I hope he will really make it a part of his life. I'm certain it will help to relieve a big percentage of the stress that is always weighing on him.

I always feel really good and I sleep extremely well even considering how many millions of things I always seem to have buzzing around my mind. I feel especially great after every training session, whether I'm working with my trainer or here at home. IT CLEARS YOUR HEAD!!! Doesn't matter what's going on in my life after a good hard training session I will feel happy, calm, and very relaxed. Since I do this all week long, the effect is cumulative and spreads out over the rest of my time.

Yesterday my knee was bothering me just a little so my trainer decided we'd do a "heavy lifting" session. Dead lifts, bench presses, no real jumping around. Focused work that requires a lot of control.

The dead lift is my trainer's favorite exercise. It's easy to do incorrectly. The dead lift really works your BUTT and THIGHS not your back and arms! I was able to assume the exactly correct posture because the starting position is the same as the start of the kettlebell swing. It's critical to have your back in the correct position. This is what it means to "lift with your legs not your back"!

Here are some excellent detailed instructions on how to do a dead lift correctly: Dead Lift Video

Of course you can do the dead lift with a kettlebell! This trainer has put together a perfect video for perfecting the kettlebell dead lift and I really like how she points out that the posture is the same as doing the swing: Kettlebell Dead Lift DAMN look at that woman's ABS!!! She's had a baby, people. Believe it.

The more lifts I learn the more I realize what a solid, foundational exercise the kettlebell swing is. Get a kettlebell and swing that sucker EVERY DAY and don't be afraid to go for it with a challenging amount of weight!

Prepare for a Long Hard Road Ahead!

People drop their New Year's resolutions with incredible speed. I'm sure the commercial gyms are already emptying out. People really don't stick with anything long enough for it to work! I urge you to do something EVERY DAY FOR TWO WEEKS to see what it's like to have the habit. Get your schedule worked out; learn how to fit in what you need to do. Get through two weeks. Then give it two more. If you work at something for a whole month, you've got a good chance you'll keep going.

Changing your body and health in significant ways requires a permanent lifestyle change.

I saw the article below yesterday. The New York Times does not use permalinks so I have copied the text here. Gina Kolata is an outstanding fitness and exercise journalist who has written several books I highly recommend. She can be kind of a downer though I'll warn you! She will drive home the point that CHANGING YOUR BODY IS VERY HARD WORK. It's also very interesting to me that people in the article talk about how regular exercise and changing their bodies changed much more about their lives overall.

I have been training seriously now for about one and a half years. I am very consistent and train at a high intensity. I have achieved what my doctors and my trainer consider an excellent degree of muscular development. But it's stuck under a layer of fat I have had difficulty reducing! Oh you can feel what's under there! Yes, that's my issue. Lowering your bodyfat percentage is tough, especially for a middle-aged woman. I'm workin' on it....


"Fitness isn't an overnight sensation"
By GINA KOLATA
Published: January 21, 2009
New York Times
CARL FOSTER, an exercise physiologist at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse, was amused by ads for a popular piece of exercise equipment. Before-and-after photos showed pudgy men and women turned into athletes with ripped bodies of steel. And it all happened after just 12 weeks of exercising for 30 minutes three times a week. Then there was the popular book, with its own before-and-after photos, promoting a program that would totally change your body in six weeks with three 20-minute exercise sessions a week.

There are many examples of people who took up exercise and markedly changed their appearance. But how long does it take? And how much time and effort are required? Six weeks sounded crazy to Dr. Foster.

“We said: ‘Wait a minute. You can’t change yourself that much,’ ” Dr. Foster said. So he and his colleagues decided to experiment. Suppose they recruited sedentary people for a six-week exercise program. Would objective observers notice any changes in their bodies?

The plan was to photograph volunteers wearing skimpy bathing suits and then randomly assign them to one of three groups: cardiovascular exercise, weight lifting or control. Six weeks later, they would be photographed again.

Their heads would be blocked out of the photos, which would be shuffled. Then the subjects and judges would rate the body in each photo on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being spectacular.

The volunteers were men, age 18 to 40 (the university’s human-subjects review board looked askance at having women photographed and rated like that). And they were sedentary. “These were people who were just sort of dumplings,” Dr. Foster said.

Results were not surprising. The subjects rated themselves more highly than anyone else rated them, and female panelists rated the subjects lower than the male subjects or panelists rated them. But, over all, the subjects’ ratings barely changed, if at all, after their exercise program. And neither did objective measures, like weight or percentage of body fat, or waist size or the size of the bicep or thigh.

Exercise physiologists approach the whole new year, new you, total body transformation mania with a jaundiced eye. Yes, they said, people can change the way they look. But not overnight.

“I think it’s pretty clear,” said William Kraemer, a kinesiology professor at the University of Connecticut. Often the promises are just marketing, he said. “A lot of times when you are dealing with health clubs, they are trying to get new members who have made New Year’s resolutions.”

“To make a change in how you look, you are talking about a significant period of training,” Dr. Kraemer said. “In our studies it takes six months to a year.” And, he added, that is with regular strength-training workouts, using the appropriate weights and with a carefully designed individualized program. “That is what the reality is,” he said.

And genetic differences among individuals mean some people respond much better to exercise than others, said Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky, an exercise researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He added that although he does not think the before-and-after photos in ads are doctored, most people will not change so markedly no matter how hard or long they work. “I believe they are taking the top one or two people out of thousands,” Dr. Tarnopolsky said.

People who did change their bodies say six months is a bare minimum to see real change.

Schuyler Antane, 43, a research scientist, is one. He began in January 2006 with a diet, which meant, he said, “letting go of the foods that taste good, but are wicked evil. And no more beer.”

In three months, he had lost 10 pounds and was down to 190 pounds on his 5-foot-8-inch frame. Then he read a magazine article on 5-kilometer races and decided to try to run. He could run for only five minutes when he started, and it took two months to train for his first race. But he kept at it and improved. Within six months, he weighed about 150 pounds. Then he added bicycling and swimming, becoming a triathlete. That, he said, got him to his fighting weight of 140 to 145 pounds.

“My beer belly is long gone,” he said. “The only flab in my midsection is excess skin, but I am not vain enough to have an operation.”

Now, said Mr. Antane, who runs with a group in Princeton on Thursday nights, “everything changed — my outlook on life, who I hung out with, how I felt about myself.”

Jim Lisowski, 45, the owner and chief executive of SciTec, a research and development company in Montgomery, N.J., said he had let himself slip out of shape, going from 189 pounds to 225 pounds. He is 5-foot-10 1/2. Then his wife bought a joint membership at a gym within walking distance of his office. At first, he went sporadically, but he decided to get serious after about three years.

That was the end of February 2005. By the start of 2006, Mr. Lisowski, who goes to one of my gyms and whose company employs one of my best friends, was a changed man. He weighed 184 pounds and had a muscular, utterly transformed body. He did it with a routine he continues to this day — working out five or six days a week with more than an hour of hard cardio, first on an elliptical cross-trainer and then a rowing machine followed by lifting weights for about an hour.

“My approach was to get fit,” Mr. Lisowski said. “I knew I would lose weight.”

The nine months or so that it took to lose the weight and gain strength and endurance seemed fast to him. He attributes it to the fact that he had been fit before he let himself go, and to his attitude.

“You can go to a gym and spend time there and not make changes,” he said. “You’ve got to break a sweat, you have to increase the weights. You’ve got to challenge yourself.”

Then there’s Charles Reilly, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan and a marathon runner who took a 10-year hiatus from the sport when he joined his local school board. He just did not have time to exercise, he said. Along with exercising less, he ate more. Soon he ballooned from 159 pounds to 282. “It came on gradually, but it came on,” Mr. Reilly said of the weight.

On April 18, 2005, he had his last school board meeting — he’d decided not to run for any more terms. Eight days later, he went out for a run.

“After half a mile, I had to stop and walk,” Mr. Reilly said. But he kept trying. A month later, he could run three miles without stopping. After three or four months, he says, he could run for five miles. By the end of 2006, he ran 10 miles. In the meantime, he also changed his diet. “My goal was to lose 100 pounds,” Mr. Reilly said. He did it, hitting his goal on Feb. 3, 2007, in a little over 21 months.

Mr. Reilly continues to run and has maintained his lower weight. Many who knew him when he was on the school board no longer recognize him, he said. “They do a double take and say, ‘Is that you?’ ”

But, Mr. Reilly said, he never believed those ads saying you can transform yourself almost overnight.

“It’s not really possible,” he said.

If I Can Love Training YOU Can Love It Too!

I've always had a strangely ambivalent sense of discipline. I can be ruthlessly unyielding about some things and quite dismissive about others. When it came to exercise it took me a long time to reach that level of obsession I can exhibit when I undertake something I am determined to succeed at. When I was overweight working out just dragged me down, physically and mentally. I can't stand to do anything I know I am not good at and physical training would beat me up with my limitations.

I think back to my feeble attempts at what I thought passed for exercise in the early days after my surgery: A walk around the block. Ten minutes on a recumbent stairmachine. My mindset told me I was not athletic. I was clumsy. I was the fat sixth grader who dreaded gym class. I was the dumpy college student who spent four years working at circumventing the University of Florida's one credit hour phys ed requirement.

I will admit I did not become more receptive to physical training until I had lost a substantial amount of my weight. It was just so much easier to do EVERYTHING. As soon as I could afford it I started working with a trainer and I turned the corner. The discovery of how my body responded was staggering to me. My physical limits felt challenging instead of restricting.

It started with taking very long walks. Miles and miles. I would feel overwhelmed with a sense of total liberation that I could keep going, knowing with complete confidence that no matter how far I went I was going to be able to get myself home.

I have an addictive mind. I kept wanting more. I wanted to work out in more different ways and more frequently. I was able to reach a level of conditioning and endorphin release that allowed me to feel a thrill at pushing myself harder and harder.

My afternoon today was what I live for now. My trainer worked me so hard I've been shaky for hours. She pushed me through a solid hour of circuit-style training: One minute each at a variety of exercises with only the setup time to rest in between. I got so tired I kept feeling my form trying to deteriorate. When that happens I just focus--work slower and concentrate harder. I welcome the onset of failure and the feeling of my body trying to refuse to perform one...more...rep. I might let up slightly, just enough to be able to force out that one more.

I love what my trainer makes me do. Stuff like abs work with a 25lb weight plate on my stomach. Dragging a "sled" loaded up with plates all around the gym. Take it like a man: No girl push ups allowed.

I love to walk after my personal training sessions. Today in Chicago was still in the teens but sunny and very dry out. I walked about a mile and a half to a stop for a bus that would drop me at my front door. I probably stumbled about half the way like a punch-drunk boxer but I had this feeling that I just had to keep moving. Once on the bus I felt myself stiffen up and I became restless. I got off the bus a couple of stops early and walked it off. I felt my limbs obediently loosen and stretch. I quickened my pace to walk as fast as I could. Wrapped up in a sense of contentment.