The New Experiment

ANNOUNCEMENT: Claire is getting her social media worked out.
Many of you have complained about the pop-up asking for a password when you try to view my blog. That happened when I figured out that whenever you google my name, my Twitter account is the first hit. Since I use words like "shit" in my tweets, I found it necessary to block my tweets from prying eyes (potential clients). I have dropped the Twitter feed from my sidebar (tear) so that the password popup is gone. If anyone knows how to get my real name OFF my speedracer twitter account, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!

In the meantime I have recently created more professional Facebook and Twitter accounts that I will be updating more regularly sans the cursing and with more information than just "first satisfying bowel movement in weeks" as my tweet content. My newer "professional" twitter name is @ClaireLunardoni, and my Facebook is finally linked up to my real name (and if I went to high school with you, no I STILL don't want to be your friend!). Hit me up!

Winter is my season of experimentation. In the winter of 2008-09 I experimented with giving up sugar, caffeine, processed grains, and dairy. It was great but completely unsustainable. In 2009 I tried a training program to do 1000 push-ups in an hour that I KNEW was bunk. I proved it was bunk when I gave up on Christmas Eve after achieving 500 push-ups in an hour and 15 minutes. My shoulders are STILL rounded forward from it.

This year's experiment is a doozie... for me anyway because it requires me doing something that I absolutely LOATHE: counting calories.

Many of my clients ask me about Biggest Loser. Even though I personally love Biggest Loser for many of the same reasons I loved both the Anna Nicole Show and Lifetime Television, as a trainer I'm also obligated to poo-poo it because of the negative impression that it gives of our profession. (Although I don't know if ANY trainer should be complaining about a show that is basically a 2-hour commercial for their services). Nevertheless, despite practically living in a gym (my desk chair is a plyo box), I don't know any better what goes on behind the scenes at Biggest Loser than my clients do. How much are they eating? How much are they exercising? What exactly is the composition of their diet and exercise program? Are Bob and Jillian really like that behind the scenes? Uhhhh... hold on, I'll just pull out my How the Fuck Am I Supposed to Know app.

Some internet research told me that they're doing some 4-6 hours of exercise a day (including at least 90 minutes of intervals) and eating somewhere between 1000 and 1500 calories a day. With a deficit of several thousand calories per day, bodies that are screaming to be given a chance to heal, and cutting all the processed crap out of their diet, it's no wonder they get results. There's also some severe dehydration going on to cut weight, but that's beside the point.

In a quest for more detailed knowledge of their fitness and nutrition plan to report back to my clients (and because I'd recently had a dream that Jillian got drunk and insisted we have sex on her motorcycle), I picked up a couple of Jillian Michaels' books. Around this time, one of my heavier clients said to me, "Yeah, but it's easier for someone like you to lose weight than someone like me." Well that was it. Not only was it completely untrue, but the best way to get a Claire to do something extreme and possibly stupid is to make it into a competition, even if it's just an imaginary cage match with scrunchy-faced "fitness guru."

One of the Jillian books I had picked up was "Making the Cut," which promised me that I could "drop the last stubborn 10 to 20 pounds once and for all" in 30 days. Sure, okay, whatever. Who doesn't want that? Rather than being aimed at the morbidly obese, this "plan" is closer to what participants on her spin-off show "Losing It" probably do: a 30-day diet for drastic results for one specific occasion (wedding, high school reunion, that day that you finally "accidentally" run into the ex).

Here's a summary of the diet: you only get to eat your BMR's worth of calories, and you're supposed to do these high-intensity "advanced" weight-training circuits 4 times a week, plus cardio for like an hour every day. There's this 50-question questionnaire that tells you what kind of metabolism you have, and I'm a "slow oxidizer," which means that I get 65% carbs, 25% protein, and 15% fat (more carbs than the other two oxidizing groups).

Problem No. 1 with The Plan: I'm a vegetarian. Most of my meals are high in carbohydrates from vegetables and whole grains. My protein sources tend to be toward the high-fat (cheese, eggs), high-carb (legumes, whole grains), or no-no foods anyway (soy, tisk tisk). Of course I feel full after eating a lot of carbs, because I always eat lots of carbs. Of course I find high-fat meals satisfying if it's pretty much the only time I get both fat and protein in my diet. So how am I supposed to answer a question like, "You concentrate best when you eat: A. fruits and grains, B. nothing in particular affects my concentration, C. meat and fatty food"? Well, A is the only one I've tried so...

Problem No. 2 with The Plan: Michaels gives me a formula to figure out my BMR, but doesn't take into account body composition. I have way more muscle than the "typical" person my size. I weigh 130 pounds, but I have 110 pounds of lean mass. I'm also WAY more active than most people. I'm a trainer. I'm lifting, spotting, demonstrating, and riding my bike around the city for 12 hours a day 5-7 days a week. According to Jillian, I'm not allowed to eat more than 1385 calories every day. According to the Katch-McArdle formula for BMR, my BMR is more like 1450, and my. My daily caloric expenditure is somewhere between 2500 and 3000 calories per day. Michaels' answer to any excuse I may have, "It's only 30 days -- suck it up!" (that's a direct quote).

The real reason that I tried the "The Fuck You Jillian Starvation Diet" (other than, I'll admit it, wanting "my sexiest body ever!"), was because I thought it was a terrible idea. I have several clients who are subsisting off of fewer than 1500 calories per day, and they're the ones who aren't losing any weight. But how do you tell a frustrated dieter that the best way to lose weight is to eat more? And how do you sympathize with someone trying to cut calories when your 5'2" frame has processed 2500-3000 calories pretty much every day for the past 10 years? Finally, I knew what was supposed to happen when you go on low-calorie diets, but I wanted to see for myself.

Diet Strategy Number 1: Don't Keep Your Diet a Secret
I told every single one of my friends, clients, and coworkers that I was doing this diet so that I wouldn't chicken out. Let me tell you, I would have given this stupid shit up on the first day if it hadn't been for that!

My typical day's eating looks like this:
4:30 am -- apple
8:30 am -- oatmeal with 1/2 a scoop of protein powder and a tablespoon of chia seeds
10:30 am -- lift weights for an hour. Feel like shit. Am able to lift way less than I usually would. Take extra long breaks because my recovery is shit. Am successful in not fainting.
11:30 am -- plain nonfat Greek yogurt and a banana
12:30 pm -- run, ride, do yoga, swim for 30 - 90 min, high intensity. Cardio actually felt okay through the whole experiment
2:00 pm -- eat some sort of grain salad with veggies
4:00 pm -- eat a fruit salad and worry about going over on my carbs
8:00 pm -- 4 egg whites, sauteed spinach, be glad for the chance to go to bed and not be hungry anymore

Diet Danger Number 1: If You Severely Restrict Your Calories, You Will Lose Muscle, Not Fat.
After 10 days on the diet, I had lost 2.4 pounds. I had lost 1.9 pounds of muscle, despite lifting weights for over an hour four times per week. Yes, this was a very short time for a weight training program, but I wasn't really looking forward to having lost 8 pounds of muscle by the end of the program.

Diet Danger Number 2: If You Are Hungry All the Time, You Are Unlikely to Stick to Your Diet and You Will Gain the Weight Back Sooner Rather than Later.
I was so hungry! I don't mean like tummy grumbling hungry. I mean like feeling like I was in a constant state of bonking hungry. I managed to stick to my calorie limit for 10 days, keeping all my macronutrients in the right proportions. Every time I stood up, I would be dizzy for a good 30 seconds. I would lose count while counting to 10. I couldn't remember what people had said to me that morning. I was nearly getting in accidents because I was driving around in a fog. I was loathe to demonstrate an exercise because I was afraid I would collapse and my muscles would burn for the next 10 seconds. I could think about nothing but how hungry I was. Walking past restaurants was torture. I began fantasizing about food.

I was a total wreck, not just energy-wise. I was going crazy. I turned into a control freak (more than ever, like I was when I was a teenager and I used to pitch a fit if somebody wanted to watch something else when it was my turn to watch Ally McBeal all alone and do my crunches). If something unexpected came up, I was more likely to cry until I get my way than to get it done. Clients would ask me to reschedule appointments and I would get extremely put out. "You want to come 15 minutes later? Fine! Let me put an ALERT on that so I don't FORGET." (Fucker!)

I was even more scatterbrained than ever. I would tell my clients to do 12 of an exercise and stop counting at 5. Supersetting squats and shoulder presses? I'll forget the squats. I'd spend eons staring at my phone because by the time I've turned it on, I've forgotten what I was checking, so it times out and puts itself to sleep. Then I'd turn it back on and try to remember.

I couldn't deal with anything mentally trying, which really sucked because in day two of the Fuck You Jillian Starvation Diet (28 days till pizza), someone smashed my window right outside of work and stole my new bike out of my car. I don't know how I would have reacted normally, but as I dealt with insurance (bike's not covered), the autoglass guys (what do you mean you have a Massachusetts insurance company?), called the cops ("yeah, sure, we're on it."), listened to my coworkers tell me how stupid it was to leave my bike in my car in the first place, and filed a police report ("how does a bike even fit into the back seat of a Corolla?"), if I'd had a gun and ran into the crackhead who violated my car and my bike, I would have shot him in the face without thinking twice. Then I would have continued to shoot when he was on the ground. Yeah, sure, it's a violation. They stole something that I worked my ass off for; something that was perfectly fitted to me and only me with the tiny frame, extra long stem, and aggressive fit, and they sold it for $20 worth of meth. But I don't like guns. Still, I was feeling violent. That night I saw Scout and laid into her so bad that she told me that she didn't want to hang out with me anymore tonight.

Starvation not only affects your energy for exercise. I had no sex drive, and didn't even want to be touched... or be around other people. Meals are so precious and so restricted that any person demanding my time or my energy may rob me of precious calories, or worse force me to cheat. I might miss some of my 8 hours of sleep that are my only escape from this shit. They may demand a portion of my already severely-depleted energy stores. I started isolating myself.

Diet Danger Number 3: If You Aren't Eating Enough Calories, Your Workouts Will Suffer
I'm an athlete getting back into training. It's bad enough that my workouts have been shit. I've got an 18-mile run on Saturday where I'll be burning 1.5 times my daily calorie allowance in the race alone. I've got a 120-mile ride on New Years that will require about 2x my daily allowance. My workouts were already crap. I was ending them early and turning down the heat because I was so low on energy. I wasn't recovering properly. Things that normally wouldn't make me sore were tearing me up. I quit one hill repeat workout short because my hips were so stiff I was afraid that I would slip out on the 40 mph descent, not crap out on the 7 mph ascent.

After 10 days I was absolutely dead. I had been hungry and able to think about nothing else for a week and a half. I couldn't imagine another 20 days of this, and the mental fog and hunger were only getting worse. My job performance was suffering. I felt sick, not in my stomach, not in my head, but in my body. I already knew the answer to this experiment: It was a terrible idea. Did I really need 10 more days of this torture to figure this out?

Diet Danger Number 4: Most Dieters Wind Up Gaining Back More Weight Than They Lost/Hunger Leads to Binging
On the 10th day I got home from my ride starving and couldn't stand the thought of having to get through the next 4 hours on nothing but a container of nonfat yogurt (I'd already eaten the banana out of desperation to get through the workout at all). I ate the yogurt, then I ate another banana, then I ate my dinner, then I ate a granola bar that had survived the pantry cleansing I had done 11 days earlier.

Then I went to the mall to go Christmas shopping. But I couldn't concentrate on finding any gifts because all I was really looking for was a Sweet Factory. I found Godiva Chocolates and See's Candies, but I couldn't very well walk around the mall eating bonbons out of a box. I had to find something that would require as little unwrapping as possible and where I could reach into an opaque bag discretely as many times as I needed to until I had eaten so much sugar that I was going to throw up. Having walked 2 laps around the mall and not found the type of binge haven that I sought, I went to the Trader Joe's next door and bought a container of Almond Butter Toffee Chocolate Dipped Whatever Things at 170 calories each. I ate all 8 of them in the package as I bought gifts in Borders. Then I went out to dinner with Scout. I was jolly and happy again and willing to be touched.

The next day I felt alive again. I was able to focus on what my clients were saying and deal with the unexpected. I went to Target to pick up part of a Christmas gift and found myself wandering the grocery aisles wishing all the other shoppers would leave so that I could design the perfect binge in peace. I hadn't eaten this way in years! What was happening to me? In the car I couldn't shove foil-wrapped white chocolate pieces and blue corn and flax seed tortilla chips into my mouth fast enough. I ate so much that I thought I really was going to vomit, and then I had pizza for dinner. This was terrible. Normally I enjoy eating with friends and pride myself on craving healthy foods. What I was doing right now was addictive behavior. What had Jillian done to me?

I know that my eating will normalize shortly, and I look forward to getting back to my own workouts rather than Jillian's mind-numbing light-weight, high-rep circuits that use half the equipment in the gym.

I have also learned valuable lessons about myself in this experiment:

• I do have willpower when I have a very specific program, but when I relinquish any control, then I lose all control.
• I need way more than 1385 calories per day to function. I should probably go no lower than 1800 calories per day to avoid going crazy.
• I still don't eat enough protein.
• Everything that they say about diets is true. The hard part is actually following the only one that works: proper diet and exercise.