Weight Management and Your Eating Habits

As we noted in our last post, weight management is primarily a function of eating habits rather than exercise habits.  The likelihood that you will manage your weight in a healthy zone by exercise alone is only slightly better than no likelihood at all.  To manage your weight by exercise alone simply takes more time and energy than most of us have available.

More importantly, managing your weight by exercise alone, assuming you are successful in doing that without regard to what or how much your eat, offers little hope that you are consuming a healthy diet. Malnourishment means improper nourishment as well as the more commonly understood meaning of lack of nourishment.  You can be well fed; yet, be malnourished if you do not have a balanced nutrition eating plan.

Rule number one for healthy living in my healthy eating book is this: Stay away from diets.  A sensible diet can sometimes get things kick started and may be an alternative beginning for 6-8 weeks.  They can help with some rapid early weight loss if you need that to get you started. However, just keep in mind that beyond a possible bit of early weight loss, diets are always ultimately useless and more often than not they are counter-productive to weight management.  Have you ever dieted before? There you go! If they worked, you wouldn't be thinking about dieting again. Point made.

Rule number two: Eat mostly fruits and vegetables. That one is simple. Avoid adding sugar and salt to your fruits and veggies. You will be pleased to find that they actually have a unique flavor of their own. Cherry pie is not a fruit. In fact, you will have to walk about 4.5 miles to work off one slice of cherry pie. You get the idea.

Rule number three: Limit red meat to once a week. I know there are those who will argue this but the fact is that too much red meat will give you more saturated fat than you need. Have fish/seafood at least once a week. I know, they can be expensive; so are heart attacks. AVOID FARM RAISED FISH. Many will not agree with that bit of advice and I do not mean it for an absolute. A cigar twice a year may do you no good but it will also do you little harm. You get the point.  Here is a link to the best fish to eat: http://health.usnews.com/health-news/diet-fitness/slideshows/best-fish/8  Chicken (white meat), turkey and lean pork are always good. Scratch the fried meats. That is for special occasions. Yes, you can have fried chicken once in a while. (Remember the cigar?)

Rule number five: You are going to love this one. Eat snacks. Fruit, yogurt, cottage cheese, veggie pieces (carrots, bell peppers, celery with low fat cream cheese, almonds and walnuts (no more than 15 nuts) are always suitable snacks. Don't go more than three hours without eating. Eating regularly stabilizes your blood sugar, helps maintain an even energy level and prevents the urge for the whole cow at the next meal.

Rule number six: You knew this was coming sooner or later, didn't you? Eat no more than you need. 50 calories a day more than you need will add about 6 pounds a year to your pant size. How do you know how much you need?  Determine the goal weight you want to reach and maintain. If you are female multiply that number by 13 to  depending on age and activity level. That is your calorie goal for the day. If you are male, multiply by 16. How do you determine activity level? Easy guidelines: If you are on your fanny more than you are on your feet, you are sedentary unless you engage in a regular daily exercise program. You may need to use 12 as a multiplier if you do not see the weight moving downward. If you are on your feet most of the day and engage in some exercise each week, you are most likely moderately active and the multipliers given will be close to your needs. If you have a physically demanding job and/or engage in regular daily exercise you will probably want to increase your calories a bit. As long as you are not dragging for want of energy, try not to make upward adjustments in the calories until you have reached your goal weight. If you find you are falling below your goal weight, which should be somewhere near BMI chart suggestions unless you are athletic and heavily muscled, then is the time to add calories to maintain at goal weight.

Bottom line? As long as you are following a healthy diet of mostly fruits and vegetables, eat whatever you want. If you want an ice cream, have an ice cream. Just remember - calories. If you down 600 calories a day in ice cream you will pay. That may be 1/3 of you calories for the day, it will taste good but it will spike your blood sugar, dump out of your system almost as fast as you put it in and you don't get any more fuel until the next mealtime. With that in mind, enjoy your ice cream.


Watch for new posts of healthy meal ideas, recipes and snacks.

The Secret to Weight Management

There really is no secret. We all know that but we need to be reminded from time to time.  I am a Personal Trainer and personal training is generally considered to be about moving and exercising.  That is important to weight management and optimal health.  In fact, only about 20% of those who lose weight keep will it off unless they include a regular exercise in their weight management program.  That said, however, exercise alone, for most people, simply will not get the weight off.

I know, a lot of Personal Trainers are screaming heresy, but truth is truth and misinformation does nothing to help people.  Technically, yes, you could exercise your weight off and keep it off.  But we don't live in the "technical" world.  We live in the real world, and in the real world, the truth is that you have to create a 3500 calorie deficit to lose one pound. That is roughly the equivalent to walking 5 miles per day 7 days per week to lose 1 pound a week - assuming all that walking doesn't make you hungrier than usual. At an average walking speed of 2-21/2 miles an hour, that means spending at least 2 hour every day walking.  Given the reason most people offer for not exercising regularly, i.e. "I just don't have time.", walking two hours per day isn't going to happen for most of us. 

So, we have that bit of a problem with attempting to manage weight by exercise alone.  The other bit of the problem, for those few who actually do manage to exercise enough to keep their weight well managed without any other consideration, is the question of good health.  Being slim, trim and looking great is not the same as being healthy.  Being at a "healthy body weight" is not the same thing as being at a healthy weight.  You can neither conclude from BMI alone, as health screenings tend to do, that someone within in a "healthy BMI range" is really following a healthy lifestyle nor, as a matter of fact, that they are healthy.  All else being equal, a person who is no more than 20% overweight, exercises regularly and follows a healthy eating plan, is far more healthy than a person at the magical "healthy chart weight" who eats junk - and that is true whether the junk eaters exercise regularly or not.

And that brings us to the "secret" of weight management.  Your weight, and far more importantly, your health, depends on what you eat as well as how much you eat.  Ultimately, weight is about calories in and calories out.  I know, you see a lot of headlines and blurbs in the media now proclaiming that it isn't all about calories in and calories out.  There is a modicum of truth in that box of donuts but I wish they would find a better way to market their articles.  "It isn't all about calories in and calories out"  is just what overweight people who love their food want to hear. What did they just hear? Yep! They missed everything except "It isn't about calories in and calories out."  I beg to differ.  Folks, it doesn't matter if you eat nothing but donuts and candy bars, if keep it down to 1000 calories a day, you will lose weight. You won't be healthy, but you will lose weight.  Point No. 1 - Calories Count.

However, what you eat, the kind of calories you get, is just as important for weight management as the number of calories you eat and far more important for health.  In our next post we will talk about healthy eating.  Meantime I leave you to digest (I know, shameless.) what we have covered today.