Secret number 1: Don’t snack after dinner.
Secret number 2: Don’t snack between breakfast and lunch.
Secret number 3: Just because you work at home doesn’t mean you should sit around all day until the kids get home from school.
Yes, OK, this isn’t very insightful. But, heck, it took me a while to figure this out. I started working at home about three years ago, and starting gaining weight. Not a lot — about 10 pounds, ultimately, and not all at once, but this after I had finally lost the last of the baby weight and even bought some new pants (genuinely new new clothes, not from the thrift store). And I’m small, so 10 pounds make a significant difference.
In any case, for quite a while, I told myself, “this must be due to that post-40 hormone-change weight gain. Too bad.” It took me quite a while to realize that, while the weight gain started after I hit the big 4-0, it was more likely related to beginning to work at home: not having the exercise of walking to the office from the train station, and instead having the temptation of the fridge and pantry. Besides which, my schedule changed from three days working, two days hanging out with a preschooler, to five days of working five hours per week, with the late afternoon spent supervising homework — and that preschooler was now old enough that I couldn’t pop him into the stroller to go on a walk.
So it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this out. First I started exercising, both going (sporadically) to the local cut-rate health club (no, not Planet Fitness; it’s Fitness 19 — $9 a month, if you don’t mind not having showers at the facility) and, starting this past fall, using the exercise bike at home when I can manage to get up early enough. And that was enough to stop gaining any more weight.
Then, say, at the new year or so, I finally realized that the biggest change in the past couple years was that I was snacking a lot more than in the past. So — finally — for Lent, I gave up after dinner and morning snacking and have managed to lose half of that weight gain, and have come to the realization that I have to give up snacking permanently.
I say this not because I think my readers are especially interested in my weight gain-and-loss adventures, but because it has me thinking about weight gain and loss in general.
Really, I’ve never had any weight troubles, back in my college and grad school days. I always just thought of myself as someone who could eat whatever I wanted — but the reality is that I didn’t really overeat and I got in a lot of exercise, not necessarily running or working out, but just a lot of day-to-day walking. When I started working 40 hours, I gained, say, 10 pounds or so, but I didn’t worry much, and I gained a ton of weight when I was pregnant, and the lost it again.
Do I have a “fast metabolism”, a near-magical ability to metabolize food so quickly that I just don’t gain weight? I don’t think so, really. Until my first pregnancy, I just didn’t have a big appetite.
I look at my middle and oldest son. My middle son is skinny — very skinny. Does he have a fast metabolism? No. But he’s very active — not super-involved in sports, but always in motion. When he talks to you, he has to walk around the living room rather than standing still. And, though he likes his sweets, he’ll be just as happy to eat a bag of baby carrots. My older son isn’t overweight but always shows up on the growth charts as “just right” — and I’ll sometimes watch the two of them; the younger pacing around the room and the older slumped on the couch.
So I know that Glen Reynolds/instapundit.com is a big fan of Gary Taubes and super-low-carb diets. And to me, that just seems like magical thinking. Really — I did read the book, though I admit I don’t remember the details. And, in general, I just don’t buy the idea that different people can have different metabolisms that mean that, solely by the metabolism alone, some people can eat hardly anything and still gain weight and others can eat the entire fridge and stay skinny.
So this is a completely fact-free post.
But, anyway, what do you think?
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