Jim's Gym: Getting Started

Before you can improve your fitness, you have to understand where you are. That’s more than simply figuring out your body mass index (BMI) by plugging your weight and height into some website and then heading straight to your local Dairy Queen because it’s too depressing to contemplate. So spend some time determining your current status.

My suggestion would be to keep a log of both your food intake and your physical activity. Exactly what are you eating? How much? How often? What time of day? At regular meals or in many smaller snack sessions? Rather than simply vowing to lose weight by starving yourself until you binge in the other direction, approach this as if you were monitoring some person you don’t even know. I’ve always hated it when people refer to themselves in the third person (Jim really thinks that’s lame, and Jim knows best, dude), but this one time it’s okay to think of yourself that way. Does your subject eat more in the morning or at night? Does she mindlessly grab something just because it’s available or does she relish the preparation ritual? Will he eat more if he’s by himself or is eating a social activity for him? You certainly don’t need to turn this log into a major chore, but having a baseline and recognizing your eating triggers will make it so much easier to figure out changes that will work best for you. (You might even find that knowing you’re going to have to write down later that you crammed six cookies in your maw helps you to find the will-power to stop at three.)

If you get most of your calories from many small mini-meals throughout the day, then investing in some expensive ready-made meal plan with rigid breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack portions would be a big waste of money for you. If you consume your food mostly in social situations, then a plan that focuses on specialty items not readily available or palatable to other people will lead you to nowhere but failure. If your weakness is sweets, then a totally sugar-free diet will only frustrate you. The goal here is to get a handle on your patterns and preferences so you can alter them as subtly as possible, making it seem like the changes you make aren’t such a sacrifice. Sure you can have lots of small meals throughout the day if most of them are fruits or vegetables instead of potato chips or brownies. But before you can make those changes, you need to understand the eating habits which have led you to your current condition.

It’s also important to realize early on that diet is the single most important aspect to weight loss, if weight loss is your goal. Regardless of your level of physical activity, you cannot outwork your fork curls, especially if that fork contains cheese cake. You have to accept that losing weight will happen only when you cut calories. Remember: Our goal here is to face reality and not fool ourselves. A forty-year-old woman who is 5’5” and 150 pounds will burn 238 calories if she jogs for half an hour. That half-hour jog is the equivalent of one small McDonald’s fries. (A large would be 500 calories, or a 57-minute jog.) And that’s not taking into account the Big Mac (550 calories or 46 minutes of swimming) or twelve ounces of Coke (143 calories or 22 minutes of cycling) she would probably have with those fries. That one meal would take over ninety minutes of strenuous activity (or closer to two hours if she opts for the large fries) just to keep her where she started. You simply cannot expect to lose weight by physical activity alone; it won’t happen.

That doesn’t mean you don’t need to keep track of your physical activity, though. Regardless of your weight issues, the more muscle, flexibility, and endurance you have, the higher the quality of your life. Fitness really isn’t so much about how much you weigh as your ability to enjoy your life and to be free of pain/discomfort/illness/injury. Your physical activity is a key to those benefits. Our high schools are rife with young people whose weight doesn’t seem to be an issue, but because of their inactivity, their ratio of fat to muscle is totally out of whack. Just because you look svelte doesn’t mean you’re in shape any more than being overweight indicates your fitness level is totally horrible.

So, what do you do during the course of your average week? Do you spend any time at all in your job moving in a way that helps your body to burn calories? How often do you go to that health club you spend so much money on? Do you run around with your kids or relatives? Is there a spot in your basement where you lift weights or jump on a ski machine? Do you spend any time weeding, mowing, and/or digging in your yard? When Fido needs to go potty, do you take him for a twenty-minute walk or do you just let him out in the fenced area behind your house? Even a Wii or Kinect will make you move around some. But if your idea of exercise is getting off your butt to refill your bowl with popcorn as you watch The Bachelor, then you will need to find some other methods to tweak your physique. Nobody’s suggesting you need to start popping steroids and logging 50 miles a week running, but combining healthier eating with physical activity will make that “feeling better” goal happen much, much faster.

Along with keeping a log of your activities, it would also help to monitor the intensity of those efforts. An increased pulse and perspiration are probably the easiest ways to guess at how hard you’re working. If you aren’t out of breath at all or sweating the tiniest bit after doing your thing, then it would be categorized as “light” activity. “Moderate” would be a slight pulse increase and at least “glowing,” where panting and soaking your t-shirt would be “Intense.” Yes, those are subjective calls and what might be intense for you now, would be light for someone in better shape, but you’re not looking for a scientific measurement so much as a general idea of how much you currently do.

Now, if you have any medical conditions or family history of something that could be impacted by changing either your diet or level of activity, please go see your doctor before you try to change your current lifestyle. Bring your logs and seek some input from him/her on what your limits should be prior to gearing up for next year’s Chicago Marathon. Little is more discouraging than psyching yourself up for this big push to fitness only to have some preventable illness or injury stop you before you’ve even seen any results.

Remember that our goal at Jim’s Gym isn’t some quick, miraculous turnaround that only results in yo-yoing between a flurry of activity and dieting leading to giving up any attempts whatsoever as your fitness sinks to an even lower place than it was when you started. Most of you know exactly what I’m talking about here, so a quick physical exam and doctor talk will help to keep you on the slow, gradual, less-taxing, more fun road that will eventually get you where you want to be, and more importantly, keep you there forever. That’s the goal—not some quick fix that only enriches a diet book author, a health club owner, or an exercise machine salesman—but an inch-by-inch, cautiously thought through change in the way you do things that will make your life better.

Yes, we’re purposely trying to keep your expectations low so you will recognize that what you’re after here is an approach to the way you live that is better for you rather than some radical program that will “fix” whatever it is about yourself you don’t like. One way to think about it is to use a financial analogy: You could try to enhance your bank account, get that mansion, and quit your job by buying a lottery ticket. Hey, somebody’s got to win, and it might as well be you, right? Realistically, however, the odds of that happening are about equal to the chances you’re going to be eaten by a great white shark at the same time you’re being struck by lightning. Instead, you could start planning for your future now by investing 5% of every paycheck in highly rated stocks or mutual funds. No, you won’t be able to retire next week that way, but you will be laying the foundation for—you got it—making your life better.

A week or so is all you’ll need to get a good idea of both your diet and your activity levels. Once that’s done, assuming you’ve gotten the doctor’s go-ahead, you’ll understand the current situation well enough to start some modifications. Next time, we’ll start in on the most important aspect of any fitness approach—what you eat. ΁x4