Bonus! Summary of Every Diet Book Ever Written!
It’s true! Aren’t you glad that you’re reading this! After many years of exhausting research I have discovered the secret that “they” don’t want you to know.The bottom line is this.
If you burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight.
Now for your bonus, as promised. Here is the summary of every diet book every written.
Eat and exercise the way we’re suggesting and you’ll consume less calories than you burn, and, consequently, lose weight.
Less carbs, more carbs, low fat, high fat, high protein, cabbage soup, diet shake mix, mail order food, on and on ad infinitum. The golden rule of dieting seems inviolate. If you consume less calories than your body burns you will lose weight. While they all may guide you to eating less calories through different methods, usually without you having to count calories, guide you there they will. It seems like every year there’s a new gimmick to get you to the same place.
Diets Don’t Work, But… In a Way They Do
The irony is that, if what you’re looking to do is lose weight, most diets probably work, but if what you’re looking to do is lose weight and keep it off… well, that’s where I think they fail. Quick weight loss, through often unsustainable methods, may get you to the weight you want to be (usually not) but then what? Then a paragraph or two about how if you somehow get to your goal you now need to entirely change everything you’ve been doing in order to stay there. Is it any wonder most of us just go back to the way we used to eat and gain it all back and then some?
The Balance is Delicate
So if you eat just the same amount of calories as you’re burning through normal life processes and exercise your weight will, theoretically, stay the same. Care to know how delicate that balance is? Consider the following example.
A hypothetical man is in perfect balance and maintaining his ideal weight. His job circumstances change, and he decides that on the way to work each day he is going to treat himself to a cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts.
A medium cup of Dunkin’s coffee, with cream and sugar, has 168 calories. That’s 840 extra calories a week, 43,680 calories a year. The majority of extra calories will be stored as fat. A pound of fat has 3500 calories. That means that at the end of a year our poor hypothetical guy will have gained about 12 pounds, just by adding a cup of coffee a day to his diet.
How I’m Losing Weight. How I’ll Reach My Goals. How I’ll Stay That Way.
A short distance down this weight loss road I found a podcast that I really can’t recommend highly enough, called Fat2Fit Radio. Their common sense approach to weight loss is very helpful to me, and their approach can be summarized as follows:
“Live like the person you want to become.”
This means that if I want to be a fit man of 175 pounds, I should live the lifestyle of a fit man of 175 pounds, and, eventually, that’s what I’ll be. That means eating about the number of calories of that guy, and exercising like him. Then, when I get there, there’s no such thing as maintenance. I’ll just keep doing what I’ve been doing. It’s not a diet. It’s a lifestyle change.
Figuring Out What Thin Me Eats
Getting to know thin me means I need to know how many calories that guy should eat. That involves figuring out something called my basal metabolic rate (BMR). That is basically the number of calories I’d need if I was in a coma. Add to that just normal sedentary calories, plus an allowance for exercise. Over on Fat2Fit Radio they’ve created a calculator that can figure out all that for you (there’s a lot of them on the Web). Using that calculator I find that thin me will eat around 2300 calories a day. Knocking that down just a few hundred calories to speed things up some gives me a nice round 2000 calories a day. It’s not an exact science, but the goal is for me to lose 1 or 2 pounds a week (up to a max of 1% of my body weight if that’s a bigger number, and it is).
Now for the tricky part. I am literally, at least to the best of my ability, logging every food I eat and how many calories are involved. 2000 calories is a lot. Sure, I could hit the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet and consume that in one meal, but eating healthy, delicious, mostly unprocessed food I can tell you that many days I’m trying to think of what I can eat to get up to my minimum calories for the day.
Counting Calories. It Ain’t What It Used to Be.
There’s nothing new about counting calories. I remember my Mom doing it back in the 60′s, but it was difficult. Hence the proliferation of a thousand diets that mask calorie counting as something else. In Mom’s day counting calories meant sitting down with a notebook to write down everything you ate, plus a calculator, plus a handful of reference books to tell you calorie content. Even then, many foods and almost all restaurant foods weren’t in the books. It was a daunting, if not impossible task. Not so today.
Today, thanks to the Internet, we have all kinds of tools to help you log your nutrition and exercise, attached to huge databases of nutrition info. There are computer and smart phone apps, and no lack of good tools. My tools of choice, at least at the moment, mostly reside over at sparkpeople.com. I could, and probably will do a whole article about SparkPeople, but for the moment I’ll just tell you that the site is loaded with tools to help you log your food and exercise, a huge food database, tools to add your own foods and exercises, and a treasure trove of information and recipes. What’s more, not only can I track calories, but also dozens of other nutrients, so not only am I eating to lose weight, I’m eating to be healthy. For example, for the first time I’m dutifully paying attention to the amount of sodium I consume.
Of course, as good as SparkPeople is, I still supplement it with a handful of other databases and applications. I have used the food database on Lance Armstrong’s livestrong.com site, as well as others, and I use 4 or 5 applications on my iPhone for things like referencing nutrition info for restaurant food. I’m always finding new tools and adding them to the system.
So, in a nutshell, that’s what I’m doing nutritionally. My lovely wife is also following this plan and we’re both having success. So far. So good. Watch this space to see how it goes.
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