Calories- Shutting Out the Noise

Diet and nutrition can be a sensitive topic. We love our food, and for good reason. Most of us have tried a variety of diets or methods of eating with the hopes of losing weight or feeling better about our decisions and body. A common phrase in training is “you can’t out work a bad diet”. Not only is this true but the diet tends to be the easiest thing to screw up, as well as the toughest thing to control. We spend maybe 6 hours a week in the gym. Showing up is progress, and that singular hour helps build our routine towards our end goal. The same cannot be said for food. The other 23 hours of the day we are being bombarded by hormones, advertisements and other stressors that make food sound appealing. Food manufacturers have it down to a science: how can we make their brain go “I like that!” as loudly as possible. When something doesn’t go our way, we seek “I like that!” for comfort. Fighting that brain chemistry is a losing battle in the long run.

We estimate that there are about 3500 calories in a pound of body fat (figure below illustrates the volume of 1lb fat vs 1lb muscle). This means that if we eat a surplus of 500 calories a day for a week we gain approximately 1lb per week. This can be a large handful of nuts, extra syrup & dressing on our pancakes/salad, or a few cookies each night. Cookies are my favorite. Do this for a year and you have gained 52 lbs of body fat. Surprisingly easy to do. Stress and hunger hormones, lifestyle habits, environment and even hydration play a part in our drive to eat. Our response to be comfortable or soothe ourselves can drive us towards a perceived reward that our brain thinks will be met by food. Attempting to rely on will power to resist these biological urges is a battle we aren’t going to win. It is much more likely that we have success by adding structure into our eating behaviors, rather than setting up an impossible set of rules to follow.

We need to get an idea of how our body uses energy and how much food that equates to on a daily (better yet, weekly) basis. A building block for a sustainable weight loss program involves the necessary step of understanding our TDEE. Total Daily Energy Expenditure. Simply put, TDEE is the amount of energy (calories) our body uses on a daily basis: exercise, performing daily tasks, digesting food and simply your body existing all use energy, the total volume of calories used throughout the day is what’s called "maintenance". We NEED to know our maintenance calories if we expect to lose weight consistently over time. Next we need to do some simple math: 3500 calories per pound of body fat, if we have 25 lbs to lose that means we need to consume 87,500 fewer calories than we expend over the next ‘X’ amount of weeks (months or years). It is recommended to not try to lose more than 2lbs per week as that leads to “yo-yo” lifestyle (putting the weight back on and then some). I shoot for 1-1.5lbs per week, as this indicates a 500-750 calorie daily deficit.

Click the “Free Resources- Weight Loss” tab up top to download a Free Calorie Tracker. Here is a link for a Free Calorie Calculator (TDEE)

Now, back to building in structure rather than a militant set of rules and restrictions you have to follow. Making attainable goals, ones that the current version of you today can realistically follow for a lifetime, will send you in the right direction, which is the first step in getting to your destination. This could be a protein target, this could be eating your vegetables, it could mean 2 cookies instead of the box. I used to be proud of throwing away leftover Oreos because it meant that I didn’t have round 2 the next day and finish off the box. Whole foods, foods that require the fewest steps possible to get to your table, tend to be the least appealing to overeat. If we focus on adding veggies the sheer volume of food in 150 calories of veggies fills us up as much as a 600 calorie dessert. There’s your daily deficit. Hydration also plays a key role in hunger and calorie management. Simply put, one of the first signs of dehydration is hunger. Your brain confuses the two, and before you feel “thirsty” you will feel hungry. Prioritize drinking a LOT of water. You’ll feel better, pee more, and eat less.

Another image below illustrates the difference between 200 calories of veggies vs junk food.

I’ll leave the protein talk for next week. This week's takeaways are the importance of building structure, the necessity that we play the long game rather than the quick results game, and how sometimes adding is the best way to subtract. Eat 2 cups of veggies, 2 cups of fruit, and drink plenty of water: watch your cravings go away and your calories consumed drop effortlessly.