Weight: 228.4 (-2.8)
Fat: 36.4% (-2.9%)
Meals: Not available
Exercise: Light Cardio (Treadmill 30:00 WL2 - 214 calories, 1.52 miles)
Pictures: Front/Side/Back
Losing weight is complicated. It's complex and difficult to figure out. People with degrees in nutrition and physical fitness argue constantly about what's important and what's not. Reporters file stories every day about some new diet, drug or workout that will help you melt the fat away. Searching on amazon.com for "diet" books gives me 408,344 results. Searching on "exercise" books gives me 745,640 results. Everyone is struggling to figure out how to lose weight.
Yet, if I asked you how to lose weight, I'm pretty sure everyone would come up with one or both of the following suggestions:
- Eat less
- Move more
All those books, all the experts, all the different approaches to losing weight comes down to those two simple suggestions. And they both have one thing in common: calories. Or if you want to be all anal retentive about units, kilocalories, but for the purposes of nutrition everyone agrees that we can drop the "kilo".
Eating less means taking in fewer calories. Moving more involves using up those calories. If we eat more calories than we need, we store that as fat. If we eat less than we need, we shed that fat for calories. There's a bit more to it than that, especially depending on who you talk to, but ultimately it comes down to that one magic number: calories.
It's weird but in my entire life whenever the subject of nutrition or eating healthy, no one has really talked about calories. Most of the discussion seems to be centered around macronutrients, which I'll discuss in more detail in a future blog post. Macronutrients are better known as protein, carbohydrates and fat. And it seems like every diet these days focuses on which ones you need to avoid or which you need to focus on.
When I was growing up it was all about the fat. No fat, low fat, reduced fat... it makes sense to think that fat in your food equals fat on your thighs, but all that low and no fat food didn't seem to stop people being fat. Then Atkins came along and told us it's all about the protein. Stop with the carbs; eat all the protein and fat you want just don't eat that roll!
Then there was good fat and bad fat. Saturated, unsaturated and transfats were all to be examined and consumed differently. Oh, and there's good carbs and bad carbs too: whole wheat, unprocessed grains are so much better than white bread. And just so proteins aren't left out, red meat is bad, but white meat is good. Fish is even better!
Even getting away from macronutrients, so much of our eating recommendations have been based on specific food choices. Quick: are eggs good for you or bad? Depending on when you got your information, they could be the work of the devil, full of cholesterol and filling your veins with liquid death, or they're a healthy and excellent source of protein. But are the yolks good or should you stick to the whites?
Same with milk: is it an excellent source of calcium or loaded with fats that you just don't need. Fruits and juices: healthy alternatives to candies or full of fructose which might be just as bad as processed sugar?
Are substitutes safe? Saccharine or aspartame? Is high fructose corn syrup worse than good old cane sugar? Is Olestra a healthy alternative to natural fats?
What about cooking methods? Fried or baked? Do steamed vegetables retain as many vitamins as raw? Does your cooking oil make a difference? Animal fats vs vegetable oil vs olive oil?
And then there are food movements that are peripheral to nutrition and wellness. Raw foods, free range livestock, organic farming.
There's so much information out there, so much of it contradicting other pieces of information. Misleading studies or misrepresented research. Who can you believe? When two medical doctors advocate completely separate approaches who do you believe? It's overwhelming and those who don't muddle through it often just shut down and eat what tastes good, knowing that it's not good for us.
And I haven't even touched exercise. So often I hear people complaining about people looking for the "magic pill" and that they're unwilling to work hard. And there's some truth to that, I won't deny it. But when you're swamped with conflicting and incomplete information, if you follow several recommendations and they fail to pan out, you start to wonder if the problem is just too big for you to deal with.
I know a lot of people would still struggle with weight issues, but I still can't help but think we'd all be better off if we all recognized that the number one cause of obesity is simply too damn many calories. It's printed on every nutritional label, but we're too busy looking at all the other numbers there that we often overlook the information when it's there.
Even worse, we're so bad at thinking in terms of calories that we often underestimate how many we are consuming or don't know how much we need. Restaurants are finally starting to put calorie information on their menus, but the portion sizes are so big and the healthy choices so few, I think a lot of folks have given up on picking the good stuff and go straight to the comfort food. I know I have.
Knowing Outback's cheese fries were 2900 calories didn't stop me from ordering them. Or eating a steak and loaded potato after eating them. Oh, and some bread too. Not to mention those refillable sodas. The fries alone are more calories than the average person will burn in a day. And you know it's not their only meal! Do the women in line at Starbucks getting a 16oz Caramel Brulee Frappuccino® Blended Crème know they've blown a third of their calorie budget? On a drink?
There's no denying that genetics plays a role in how quickly we burn calories. Similarly, there's a number of folks that have trouble engaging in any form of physical activity. And our culture, so often centered around food consumption works against us. Mentally, we have an unhealthy relationship with food as well, using it to comfort us instead of just fueling our bodies. And thanks to government subsidies, dense, high calorie food is often the easiest and cheapest alternative. No wonder that so many overweight people feel helpless to contain their calorie intake.
As our country continues to shift from farming and manufacturing to service and information technology, we are less active at our jobs. We go to aerobics classes and buy exercise equipment. We watch television where we see a montage of people working out and losing extreme amounts of weight while we sit passively watching, failing to appreciate the hours and pain and work involved in losing that weight. We listen when people tell us that just 15 minutes a week of simple and trivial exercise will make us look like the actor who works out every day with a personal trainer and carefully monitors their diet.
We're too confused to focus on the most important factors. We stress about minor details and gloss over major ones. We emphasize the wrong things, we underestimate how many calories we consume and we overestimate the calories that we burn. How many people work out, burning 400-500 calories, and then fix a smoothie with 800 or more calories?
Losing weight is hard work, but losing sight of the important things makes us work far, far harder than we have to. You don't have to calorie count every day, but try writing down everything you eat for a few days and then calculate the number of calories you ate. You might be shocked. And if your exercise equipment doesn't have a calorie count you might be shocked at how few calories you burn through cardio. Check out the beginning of this post. I ran a half an hour on the treadmill, a total of a mile and a half. And I burned just 214 calories. A small fry at McDonalds? 230 calories.
Bottom line: Yes there are important considerations in the composition and preparation of the food you eat. But as for weight gain or loss, it all comes down to the calories. Or as was said at the beginning of this post: eat less, move more.
