Milestone: 7 Week Followup, Plateaus in Diet And Some Potential Exercise

Today was my 7-week followup to the surgery. My wife came with me for information and support. There wasn't really much to it...a few question and answer things, primarily, and my doctor put me on vitamin B12 and B-complex pills now. I'm going to pick them up from WalMart soon.

I tried asking some questions about how plateauing works, but I don't know if I sufficiently communicated this idea to the doctor. I'm beginning to wonder if I can't get anyone to understand where my knowledge is insufficient for this. She primarily focused on how we...barry patients...no longer fit the profile of the typical dieter now because we have both smaller stomachs and malabsorption issues. I think I'm asking a very plain question, but either I'm not communicating clearly or I'm not understanding their responses.

I'm trying to ask this...if you view dieting as an engineering problem, the body is reduced to a bag. It's like when I was in school and had to balance equations in chemistry...you put food in, you burn energy and excrete waste. The in-processing matter is what comprises your mass, and on the planet that translates to your weight.

You drink a pound of water, you weigh a pound more. You eat a pound of food, you have a pound of weight added.

As you go through your day you sweat, you go to the bathroom, and you convert some calories into work...movement, heat, etc...and some food/drink is converted into other cells to repair the body while others are shed (hair falling out, skin shedding, internal cells are flushed out as waste...). This is weight lost.

You are a walking chemical equation. Now, if you figure out your basal metabolic rate, you'll find the approximate number of calories you burn if you didn't do jack squat for the day. Lay in bed, this is the number of calories you burn. These calories are used to keep you alive. Your brain activity, your organs functioning, etc. would burn this many calories. It takes calories to maintain your current weight, believe it or not. If you eat less than the BMR, you should lose weight. If you eat more, you gain weight.

If you figure out how many calories you add on to your BMR from exercise you can adjust accordingly.

Now, if you're taking in a very low calorie diet as I once did many moons ago...600 calories, more or less...there is no way I could be going over my BMR. I'm not putting more calories into the bag...my body...than were flowing out. Yet still I hit a plateau. In the current case if you follow the rules my doctor said that we should hit no more than 1200 calories a day; this is still below most people's possible BMR count.

Okay. Body needs...at my weight one time it needed over 3000 calories to maintain it's weight. I'm putting in...1000. Matter does NOT just appear. Matter does NOT become magical. The body needs 2000 more calories here, so something has to give. Normally it means you lose weight. So when you're plateauing...where is the energy coming from? I'm not putting in to the bag the amount it needs to maintain the weight level it is accustomed to. Remember, if you have fewer calories than BMR, you lose weight. Equal BMR, you stay the same weight. Over BMR, you gain. There's a 2000 calorie difference in this example...so how does it stay the same??

The answer I normally get is that the body is adjusting to the changes and lower calories.

That's not quite clicking to me. If I don't put gas in my car it doesn't just adjust. It needs fuel to run. Your body needs calories to run, and if it doesn't get them it will start shedding components...fuel stores in fat, or excess tissue, etc...to survive. The closest I could come to an understanding from my conversation today is that I should feel tired and sluggish as the body "conserves and adapts" by screwing with the rate at which it metabolizes energy stores.

Oh well. Seven weeks in and now I'm adding some vitamin B stuff. AAH! MORE PILLS! My doctor also gave me her email address to address concerns I may have or develop.

My wife and I also went out and she gave me a Father's Day gift from her and my son. A NEW BIKE! YAY ME!

I am not a bike nut. It is something I enjoy periodically, though...I'm not good at riding up hills, I usually rode around buildings on paved and generally flat surfaces, not running through the woods or along roads. It's one of two or three things that both I enjoy and are generally classified as exercise. Unfortuneately when I hit a heavy enough weight I just threw the bike into storage. I took it out over the weekend now that my son is trying to get a bike and found it to be rusty and generally in need of a tuneup.

I lamented to my wife that I was going to save some bucks to get a bike and she took me today to Dick's Sporting Goods just to look around. I ended up really liking a Diamondback Edgewood 09, and she said, "Happy Father's Day!"

She also bought herself a Diamondback Lustre 09, so we can both ride with the little dude. Yay us!

So that was my day for the most part. Not bad. Unfortunately I'll have to return to work tomorrow, but we'll not let that dampen spirits right now...