Jack & Hill: A Beauty Blog - make-up, cosmetics, perfume, and the substance of style

Do Small Changes Add Up to Big Weight Loss?

Last week, Michelle Obama encouraged Americans to cut out that cookie or can of soda, in order to combat childhood obesity. Her message: even small changes can lead to big weight loss. Personal experience told me, this was not true.

Yes, it is a good idea to cut out too many sweets, and I personally think drinking soda as a thirst quencher idiotic. And sure, it's a step in the right direction to cut back on calories if you want to lose weight, indeed, it's mandatory, unless you start training like a freak.

But I have never successfully lost weight by skipping a cookie. It's only been with solid and long-term regimens that I have seen my weight budge. Earlier this week, I read a NY Times article that explained and confirmed what my body already knew:

Numerous scientific studies show that small caloric changes have almost no long-term effect on weight. When we skip a cookie or exercise a little more, the body’s biological and behavioral adaptations kick in, significantly reducing the caloric benefits of our effort.

This has been my experience, losing and gaining the same six or seven pounds over the past two years. Part of the reason is, I don't need to lose weight. At 5' 8", my body is very content being 141 pounds. It seems to be a set-point that it wants to continually maintain without much effort on my part. Being semi-athletic and enjoying the look and feel of being lighter, I prefer to be 134, which I have been able to reach several times in the past two years, but never when I just avoided dessert and whatnot. Once I break through the 138 ceiling, I can lose the rest, and stay there with relative ease, until, well, until I don't.

In the hopes this is useful to others, the only regime that works seems to be:

• Daily (or near to it) exercise, an hour each time
• Very little booze
• Regimented eating, meaning, I pretty much eat the same thing for breakfast and lunch, small and sensibly for dinner.

I like being on a regime; it leaves me time to think about other things, and we cook in the house so we're eating well, not prepackaged diets foods.

Do others have the same experience, of having to sledgehammer through the plateaus, then finding the next plateau easy to reach? Is exercise for you key? And what are your favorite regimes?

How Much Would You Pay to Get Rid of Cellulite?

Whatever it is, it's not enough, though Aina Hunter thought $1200 sounded about right, to rid herself of the lumps and bumps around her "waist and thighs. Plus that area just above my knee caps which has grown increasingly hateful over the past couple of years." She reports as to the treatment's efficacy in Cellulite Treatments: Do They Work?, not the sexiest title and, sadly, not the outcome we of dimpled thigh and ass would hope for, though I could have forecast that, for if a treatment of slathering, super-heating, and massaging eradicated cellulite, I would have years ago ponied up the twelve hundred smackeroos.

Did Hunter have fun while she still had hope? Not really.

I wanted the treatments to work. I felt that they should work. They were uncomfortable enough. To be fair, [masseuse] Iriana asked me several times if she was pressing too hard. I shook my head no as she dug her little hands into my screaming flesh. I covered my face with a pillow and bit into it. I wanted results, not coddling...

Expect cellulite treatment involving tissue manipulation — be it Endermologie, Vela Smooth, Syneron or some combination — to make you feel like the victim in a pre-code, post-mod Hollywood cult film. You will lie on a slab under fluorescent light in paper underwear and accept your expensive punishment. A few days later you'll return for more.

Hunter's results? "Negligible." But I did learn something interesting, which is that whether you develop cellulite is determined by the thickness of your dermis (your inner layer of skin) and, as Hunter writes, "the pattern of the connective tissue beneath it which holds your fat cells together that matters."

If you are lucky enough to have a sort of cross-hatch pattern, your fat cells are held in with double reinforcements. Regrettably, this pattern is most often seen in men. Most women have connective tissue patterned like columns... It's easier for fat cells to bulge out of columns than small openings.

I don't know about that "regrettably"; I see enough cellulite on myself so don't need to see it on my husband, thanks. Also, I cannot be the only one who's noticed that women who are slim through the hips do not tend to get cellulite. My daughter is this way, as are nearly all the women in her father's tribe. It's us curvy gals who develop it, even when we're thin. I personally like my waist and boobs, and thus, and especially when checking out Sophia, see a little orange peel as an okay trade.

Quote of the day

Gok Wan (at right), host of How to Look Good Naked, in an interview with the Observer Woman magazine:

The UK perception of beauty is totally out of whack. We're incredibly confused about what we think is attractive: women who are a size 10, but who hate their bodies; women who admire someone who is a 14, but who don't want to be a 14 themselves. We haven't a clue! We're told certain things, and we believe them. You're probably wearing that dress because you think someone else will like it.

[A UK 10 is a US 8, and a UK 14 is a US 12.]

Girl fight

Female Sumo wrestlers from the world championships in Japan.  Via the SF Chronicle's photo website.  The photo got me curious. According to this Russian website, women Sumo wrestlers have existed since the early 1700's:

Matches were organized between women and also between women and blind men. Some of female sumoists were actually skilled wrestlers. By 1744, onna-zumo's popularity had reached Edo (Tokyo). Tournaments were held at Asakusa Temple until authorities closed them down on the basis that it was immoral. However, due to popular demand, the matches continued at different locations in northern Japan. A few exhibitions even took place in Hawaii. But by 1926 this form of activity was completely banned for women.

Fascinating.  Apparently, the relaxation on the prohibition on women Sumo wrestlers may have something to do with getting the sport admitted to the Olympics, where one criteria is that the sport be open to both genders.

The Hacker's Diet

I'm getting tired of looking at my own ass (there is, after all, a reason it's behind one most of the time), so thought I'd put up another post about something--anything!

What I came up with, in part as a result of having just made such an--ahem!--large ass of myself, is a novel diet plan, designed by a multi-millionaire software engineer, John Walker, who describes the origins of The Hacker's Diet thus:

The absurdity of my situation finally struck home in 1987.  ``Look,'' I said to myself, ``you founded one of the five biggest software companies in the world, Autodesk.  You wrote large pieces of AutoCAD, the world standard for computer aided design.  You've made in excess of fifty million dollars without dropping dead, going crazy, or winding up in jail.  You've succeeded at some pretty difficult things, and you can't control your flippin' weight?''

Six months after this aha moment, Walker was down from 215 pounds to 145, and stayed there.  His diet book is a free download. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I like the idea of diet as an engineering problem. Though I still have my doubts. There seem to be plenty of nerds who treat sex as an engineering problem, and look where that's gotten them....

Does my ass look fat in these pants?

Actually, I think my ass looks better than usual in these.  When I heard that the Gap had come out with a new line of "curvy" cut jeans, I actually made a trip to the mall to check them out.  Even before I turned 40 and got fat I was curvy, and had a hard time finding good jeans.  The Gap makes curvy jeans in a size 0, which sounds oxymoronic, but isn't (my ass has been in the double digits since high school, however).  I would not be ashamed to wear these jeans out in public. I didn't buy them, though, because I'm pathological when it comes to paying full price for anything clothing-related. I will wait for them to go on sale, by which time I may yet be a size smaller, who knows?  I say with a handful of leftover halloween candy by my keyboard....Aw, what the hell, Nike and Gloria Steinem have declared the world safe for big butts.  I think we could use a few more of them to balance out the giant breasts that seem to be everywhere.  The key to it all is having a waist somewhere in the middle.....