How do you change the quality of your life? First, we have to define the term “Quality of Life.” University of Toronto researchers have chosen a good definition. They define it as, “the degree to which a person enjoys the important possibilities of his/her life.” I like that. It is simple and to the point. We should also agree that the degree to which you can enjoy these possibilities will be determined by your physical and mental condition. Nothing will more negatively impact your quality of life than poor physical and mental condition. Beyond showing you some examples of how to throw the mental switch that helps you better your own physical condition, I am not qualified to write a book on mental health. I am, however, qualified to show you how you can improve your physical health.
The improvement of your physical health starts with “the numbers.” I told you in the previous chapter that the recipe for good physical shape was simple. It is. That said, your journey to improved physical health will not be measured by some qualitative descriptions like, “I feel fine” or “I feel so much better than I did two months ago!” This journey is going to be measured with numbers. How much do I weigh now? What is my BMI (I will tell you shortly)? What is my blood pressure? What is my cholesterol level? How far am I walking? How many calories am I burning? How many calories did I eat yesterday?
Are you getting the picture? The solution to improving your physical condition starts with these questions and the answers to them, which quite simply are, the “numbers.” I know…we hate numbers. Numbers don’t lie. You can’t hide behind them. They are objective. They are unforgiving. They are accountable. They will also become your best friends. You can depend on them. They are honest. They are the yardstick by which your journey will be measured. We now agree on something, the numbers will guide you.
The Journey Begins Here..
Your new physical condition and the transformation that will accompany it will be the journey to your new life. So, like any other journey we take these days, we shall begin by using a familiar process. We will go to a good Map website like Google Maps or Mapquest. Go to your computer and go to your preferred Map website and click on “Directions.” What are the first two things you need to know? Correct! Your journey requires two things, a starting point and a destination. You can’t even begin to know HOW you will take a journey without those two things. Like any decent computer application, your Map website only deals in facts. Nothing but data. Tell me where you are. Is it Boston, MA? San Francisco, CA? How about the street name? Using data, they can pin this down to an accuracy level of feet/meters. If you answer “in a city” or “a lovely neighborhood,” your map website will not respond. “Just give me data, just the facts.” It wants to know latitude and longitude.
Your physical condition is exactly like this website. We start with your ‘begin’ point. You cannot get where you want to go without knowing where you are at all times. In choosing this starting point, we can estimate, but we should try to refine the information as much as possible. You must try to define your starting point as well as you can. Let’s look at some potential candidates for your “numbers” together. The obvious statistic is height and weight. Your height will not change but, hopefully, your weight will. Weight is the most common statistic for measuring a person’s physical condition. It is the base metric for any physical conditioning program. Your height, when combined with your weight, also gives you a commonly known measurement of your physical state called BMI or Body Mass Index. You can take some of the more medically related measurements too. There may be many reasons you have decided to change the direction of your personal health, some of which may be medical. Measurements such as blood pressure and cholesterol are a few of the big ones.
There are also performance statistics that you can add in to your “numbers.” How long does it take you to walk a mile? How many pushups and situps am I doing? How much weight am I lifting and how many repetitions does that take? You can measure in distance, time, strength, etc. The last two metrics are the big ones because, like weight, they will be thought of every day on this journey. They are also the two most critical components of the ONE SIMPLE FORMULA you need to keep in your head every day for the rest of your life. Stick with me on this chapter and at the end, I will reveal those two metrics and the SIMPLE FORMULA. Our first step in this journey will be capturing and recording your current numbers. Let’s figure out what your starting point is on this journey.
The first number will be the most obvious one. What is your weight? You don’t need anything more than a good scale to answer this. If you don’t have one, go get one. A digital scale would be best. Most people think a piece of exercise equipment should be the most used item in a journey to better health. Not so. The scale should be. If you heed my words, you will use this daily for the rest of your life. You will hear many diet professionals tell you that you shouldn’t weigh yourself every day. I will tell you that that is crap. Sorry, I don’t have a better or more accurate word than that. So long as you understand that you are looking for a number that is intended to give your journey direction, you will be fine. Your body weight does fluctuate daily and during the course of your day. You can adjust for this by using a few rules. Weigh yourself at the same time every day. I weigh myself first thing in the morning. I get out of bed, go into the bathroom and do my business, and weigh myself. Weigh yourself in the same condition. Don’t weigh yourself fully clothed and then, the next day, weigh in while you are naked. Don’t weigh yourself after breakfast on day one and then, on day two, before breakfast. Use the same condition every day. Next, record that weight daily. Put a cheap calendar on your bathroom door and write the weight down right after you weigh yourself. Sorry. I know there is nothing worse than putting it down on paper. That is called accountability baby…deal with it. For some of you, weighing yourself may not be as easy as I make it out to be. I have weighed as much as 285 lbs and most house scales max out at 300. Some of the new digital ones go as high as 400. The reality is, for some of you, you may need to see your doctor or find other less regular ways to weigh yourself until you bring yourself to the point where you can use the household items. This is not an excuse to skip weighing yourself. This is an invitation to be creative. Weigh yourself daily, or as frequently as humanly possible, and record it.
The next number is actually a formula combination of both your height and weight. It requires a bit of explanation because it is frequently misused and misinterpreted. It is your BMI. For this, you need to know your height, which you will combine with your weight and get the calculation for your BMI. BMI is your Body Mass Index. You can go online and search for an online calculation using the terms ‘free online BMI calculation’ and simply plug in your height and weight. It will give you the result. This metric is supposed to calculate your percentage of body fat based purely on your height and weight. It is the most common calculation used in most government and institution charts that determine your physical status. It typically has 5 levels. The first level is underweight. This means that based on your height (H) and weight (W), you have very little fat and probably not enough body fat to be considered healthy. There are broomsticks that outweigh you. The second level is ‘on weight.’ If you are here, the government says you are fine and meeting their standard. You are perfectly fine and dandy. The third level is overweight. This means that based on H and W, you are between 25% and 30% body fat. The tables say that you are carrying too much body fat at this point and that maybe you should re-examine your relationship with fast food restaurants and desserts. The fourth level is called ‘obese.’ This means you are between 30% and 40% body fat. If you are here, you are approaching the top limit of most standard house scales and home exercise machines. When living your life requires industrial strength equipment, you need to take a hard look at yourself. ‘Obese’ used to be the last and worst category and was classified as greater than 30%. In the past years, due to the ever increasing size of our population in the United States, they added a new category called ‘morbidly obese.’ This is what you classify as if you are greater than 40% body fat. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when people become so big that doctors need to coin a term worse than ‘obese.’ When your doctor refers to you in this category, he/she should be wearing a black hooded robe and be carrying a sickle. I am sorry to say this, and don’t mean this line to be funny, you are killing yourself.
BMI is an important number because it is used in many government health assessments and, maybe more importantly to you, tied to things like life insurance tables. If you are overweight or obese, and you want life insurance, it will cost you dearly. Moving your BMI to a better place can help your wallet as well as your health.
I do need to state one thing for the record. I don’t personally like the BMI calculation. BMI, as a metric, has one major drawback. It does not account for people who are well muscled or just have a solid body frame (big bones). I have both. I can hear you laughing as I write this. “The unforgiving diet guy has his own set of rules!” I actually come from a family that is, stop laughing, big boned. My ancestors were a combination of French trappers and Native American Indians. I have had doctors tell me that the bone density of men in my family is higher than the average. I also have a very muscular frame as I have been very athletic my whole life. When you calculate my BMI, for a standard 6 foot tall male weighing 205 lbs, it says I am at 27% body fat, which puts me in the category of overweight. At issue here is the fact that muscle weighs more than fat and if you have a lot of muscle weight, the charts refer to it as all fat. Every height and weight chart I have ever seen says that I should weigh less than 187 lbs to be considered NOT overweight. I run about 15-20 miles per week and am in peak condition for a 48 year old male. I currently weigh between 200 and 205. At 187, I would be emaciated. As I said earlier, government charts use this metric. When I was in the Army, I did not fit any of their charts. The U.S. Military actually recognizes the deficiency in this metric and then sends the soldiers who are muscular for a body fat composition test. Based on that measurement, they reset your minimum. My acceptable weight was reset to 210 lbs. That was 23 lbs more that the chart’s 187. I recently had another body fat composition test done and I was at 16% body fat, versus 27% on the chart. That kind of supports my stance on BMI and will, perhaps, make you stop laughing at me. Let’s be clear though, if your BMI is 35% and you have a skinny neck and skinny wrists and have never been athletic, your BMI is not ‘muscle.’ So I personally can use the BMI, so long as I discount the government’s interpretation. You can use it too. You just have to look at these numbers as directional indicators. If you are 40% body fat right now, you should try for something lower, like 30% to begin with. Only a qualified health professional with additional metrics can tell you what your BMI means to you personally. No one else should interpret that number for you, but you should be aware of the role that number will play in your life.
The next set of numbers should come directly from your doctor. They are probably one of the major reasons you have taken a good hard look at your personal health. You will not see these numbers daily and you should know what they are to begin with. You should talk to your doctor about getting these numbers at least every month or two as you are changing your personal condition. These would be your cholesterol and your blood pressure. Get them and mark them down. Why are these numbers critical? Because they are the key ‘warning lights’ for a heart attack. High cholesterol over time can cause blood channel restrictions and blockages as more and more of that sticky cholesterol clings to the inner lining of your veins and arteries. Ever driven down a highway and have four lanes become three? Or two? What happens? We see the traffic flow slow to a crawl. If all lanes stop because of a traffic accident, you stop entirely. This is where the analogy ends. Traffic can stop but your blood can’t. It has to flow to keep you living. When your heart continues to move the blood around your body through smaller blood vessel spaces at the same rate of speed, the harder your system works and your blood pressure goes up. When you get a blockage at this point, it spells disaster in the form of a heart attack (the pump breaks) or an artery rupture (the pipe splits). This isn’t a pretty picture. You want low cholesterol to keep the blood highway clear and you want to know that blood pressure as a measure of how hard your heart is working within your blood system. There’s one other thing about blood pressure (BP) that you should know. As your physical condition improves, your heart, a muscle, will get more efficient with exercise. So long as you are not a risk due to some kind of heart health condition, as a measurement of your heart’s performance, your blood pressure is great to know. You would ideally like to be able to move your body around this world with as little physical stress as possible. Your BP metric will help you considerably here.
The next set of numbers is what I refer to as ‘performance based.’ They are the indicators that will tell you how well you are doing with exercise in your life. You should be able to calculate these numbers because all of you will have some form of exercise in your life from now on, right? Just say ‘yes.’ ‘No’ is not an option. I need to qualify that last statement with one comment.
MAKE SURE that you consult your doctor to make sure you are physically safe enough to start an exercise program. The larger you are, the more important this clearance becomes. If you have ever had any medical conditions that make exercise dangerous, again, get your doctor’s opinion.
If your exercise includes distance and time, record it. How far did I walk/run/bike over what time? I did 3 miles in 45 minutes walking. I did 2 miles jogging in 20 minutes. I swam 30 laps in 40 minutes. Whatever your exercise was, record it. Try to maintain a degree of consistency to your program so you can measure your improvements. The goal you should set is to do better every day. At first, based on how big and out of condition you are, the numbers may be shocking. Know this, as you continue to exercise, the improvement in the first month or two will be very noticeable and personally encouraging. Take that from my own personal experience. Every time I lost a large amount of weight, the exercise metrics were the ones (along with weight) that I focused on the most. It may have come from my history of athletics or my competitive edge, but that was very important to me and I believe it played a large role in my weight loss success. When you are done exercising, write your performance numbers on the calendar in the same blocks as you wrote your weight.
The last set of numbers you want to know are the most necessary to achieving your weight loss and personal conditioning goals. All of these numbers have to do with your calories. Let me say right from the start that calculating these numbers will be very difficult because they will never be more than estimates. You need to know how many calories you take in each day and how many calories you burn each day. Measuring these numbers will take some diligence and will require some personal honesty on your part. If you are not honest about these numbers, it could disillusion you about how much weight you should be losing with your new lifestyle. Why are these numbers hard? It is because they require estimating. If you constantly underestimate your intake or overestimate the calories you are burning, you just will be disillusioning yourself about your goal. Most importantly, these numbers are how you will live your life every day going forward from today. They are the key to maintaining proper health conditioning. The process will be hard at the beginning but, over time, will become instinctive. At some point, you will not even calculate the numbers. You will simply translate the food you are looking at into good/bad choices based on your “gut.” Believe it or not, people who you look at that are in good physical health/condition have learned to do this at some point in their life. It is so natural to them that they don’t even notice. If you followed them around daily and marked what they ate, you would see why they are in the condition they are in. From quantity to food quality, they make better decisions than the fatties do. You have to learn this. You have to internalize it. You MUST train yourself now to prepare for the rest of your life. Lastly, these calorie counts are the key to the ONE SIMPLE FORMULA that you need to know to maintain your physical condition for the rest of your life.
We will cover the counting of the calories in two future chapters. One chapter is on the food you are eating and counting what you put in the tank. The other chapter is about the fat burning process and how you count the calories you burn.
There are many more numbers that you can use as the barometer for your success. My recommendation is to not overcomplicate, keep it simple. Pick the one you can measure daily, of course…weight. Pick a few you can measure monthly that are performance based and perhaps your BMI or blood pressure (which can be done by almost any professional for no fee). Lastly, pick a few you can measure every 3 to 6 months like your cholesterol.
This is where your journey begins.
The Journey Ends Here…
Where are you going? As we started this chapter we noted that every journey requires a starting point and a destination. Here is where we pick the destination. This part is not difficult. This is the part where you set the goal you want to attain. You will need goal numbers that compliment the numbers you chose as your standard personal lifestyle metrics.
I have only one suggestion. Make the goals modest by making them short term goals. If you want to lose 100 pounds, make the first goal 20 lbs. Once you get there, you can make a new goal of 20 lbs. If you set out on a boat to find an island, it is easier to do five 20 mile journeys to a set of islands you can see than it is to set out on a 100 mile journey to an island nowhere in sight. Keep the milestones visible.
How much do I weigh today? What is reasonable here? I would like to lose 10 (or 15 or 20) pounds in the next month. Here is where you pick the number.
I can walk 3 miles in 45 minutes. In four weeks, I want that to be 40 minutes. I also want to begin to jog a little, in spurts, while I walk. I swam 30 laps in the pool at the gym in 45 minutes. I want to increase that to 45 laps, it doesn’t matter how much time it takes. So long as your numbers take a reasonable approach to improvement, and so long as you work on them, whatever you pick is fine. Again, if you put a time limit on achieving the goal, and if you hit it early, reset and keep getting stronger.
What is my cholesterol? My bad cholesterol is 230. I want it to be 200 by my next screening. Better yet, for this one, ask your doctor. What do they recommend? Whatever they say, that is the goal.
How many calories (estimated) did I consume today? How many did I burn? We will do the math and apply the ONE SIMPLE FORMULA for our daily calculation of progress.
By this time it should go without saying but, I will remind you again, record these goals. Put it in a visible place, preferably on that calendar I asked you to keep on your daily weight as well as the other monthly, three month and six month metrics. At the end of beginning of every day you should look hard at these goals and see yourself attaining them. You should recommit to them every day. At the end of every day, you should look at them again and look at yourself in the mirror. Ask yourself this question. “Have you worked as hard on these goals today as you could have?” Be honest. Now look at your numbers. What are your numbers telling you? They will keep you honest. Tomorrow is a new day and the next step in your plan. Will it be a strong step? Only you can answer this.
That’s it. Your journey is now mapped out in a new game plan. You will look at your numbers every morning and every night and make an honest assessment.
We will get to the formula in a moment but I now have to give you the third lesson of the book.
Calculate and record your numbers daily. Commit your goals to memory. Dedicate your daily activity to making the choices that support moving the numbers. At this point in your journey, it is ALL about the numbers.
Are you ready for the ONE SIMPLE FORMULA?
