May

28

Healthy Eating Habits, Part 1 - Many small meals are better than one big meal

Filed Under Eating Healthy, Nutrition, Weight Loss | 2 Comments

Thisentryis part 1 of 5 in the series SERIES - Healthy Eating Habits

This week we’re going to be talking about healthy eating habits.

The Problem - Big lunch, no other food.

One of the worst eating habits I used to have is eating a single large meal a day. At lunch, I would eat a very large amount of food and then nothing else for the rest of the day. I became known as a big eater even though I really didn’t eat that much over an entire day. My daily calorie intake was about 3000 calories, but almost all of it was coming in one large helping at noon, with a bit more coming in sodas and snacks spread through out the day.

There were times when I would eat a large pizza all by myself and then order another. For my birthday, my coworkers got me 30 McDonald’s hamburgers and cheeseburgers for lunch, and yes, I ate them. Even with these isolated incidents, I still thought I was being healthy because I wasn’t eating all that much.

Get your motor running…

When I started changing things and trying to be a bit healthier, I talked to a doctor who gave me a great explanation of how my eating habit was wrong. She told me to imagine my body as an engine. When I feed that engine a lot of fuel it revves up and spends that fuel. When you feed the engine no fuel it idles at a low level. If you feed the engine too much fuel at the same time, things break.

Now that’s not a perfect analogy, but it works. When you feed your body, you rev up your metabolism. When you don’t get food, the metabolism slows down in order to conserve energy. What I was doing was stuffing my body with so much food that my metabolism was overloaded.

Translating the problem into numbers

The large amount of food I was taking in was in fact revving up my metabolism, but there was simply too much of it. So my body was taking the leftovers and storing them as fat. Now in a perfect system, that fat would have been spent later in the day when I wasn’t eating. Unfortunately, our bodies are not perfect systems. Rather than waste the reserve it had built up during lunch, my metabolism would simply slow down during other parts of the day.

I was also having a problem in the morning time. My body was literally trying to recover from a famine of 8 hours during which I slept. It’s looking for food but it’s not getting it. So my body would slow down at the same time that it was sending signals to my brain “FOOD! EAT NOW!” This would cause me to spend less calories at the same time it would make me binge at lunch time.

  Morning Noon Afternoon Evening Night
Consume
 0 2500 250 250 0
Spend
 300 1700 400 400 200

TABLE 1

Take a look at this simple chart. The amounts aren’t exact but they get my point across. If you add up the amounts consumed you’ll see that I was eating around 3000 calories a day. That’s a large amount but it’s not incredibly excessive. However, if you look at the amount I spent, you can see the issue. My metabolism would spike around noon time and then spend very little the rest of the day. So the total calories I would spend would be 2400. That’s 600 calories a day my body would store away in fat.

Making Changes

So after listening to my doctor I decided to change. Most health experts would recommend five or six small meals throughout the day. However, this was unrealistic for me. I simply don’t have the time to stop and eat that many times a day. Since I was determined to make realistic changes to my body, I decided to go with the following plan:

  • Breakfast - 1/6 of my calories.
  • Lunch - 1/3 of my calories
  • Afternoon snack - 1/6 of my calories
  • Dinner - 1/3 of my calories

LIST 1

So if we look at that chart now, it looks like this:

  Morning Noon Afternoon Evening Night
Consume
 500 1000 500 1000 0
Spend
 700 700 700 700 200

TABLE 2

I split my food intake to even it out throughout the day. I also added a bit of a workout in the morning and in the afternoon to increase my metabolism at times when my food intake was a bit low. So now I’m spending 3000 and bringing in 3000. However, since I wanted to lose weight, I adjusted my calorie intake a bit to be around 2400.

  Morning Noon Afternoon Evening Night
Consume
 400 800 400 800 0
Spend
 700 700 700 700 200

TABLE 3

Summary

And there you go. I eat 2400 calories a day and spend 3000. I went from a net gain of 600 calories a day to a net loss of 600 calories a day. However, I only cut out around 600 calories from my diet. The other 600 calories loss came from properly spacing out my meals and keeping my metabolism from slowing down due to lack of food. Now that’s just a rough example. I also made some other changes such as working out that added to my weight loss, but you can see how spacing out your meals can have a positive impact on your health even without cutting out a lot of calories. Just make sure you don’t end up overeating at each of these meals. You’re trying to take the same amount of calories and space it over multiple meals, not eat the same large amount of calories at each and every meal!


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May

29

Healthy Eating Habits, Part 2 - Slow and steady wins the race

Filed Under Eating Healthy | 2 Comments

Thisentryis part 2 of 5 in the series SERIES - Healthy Eating Habits

We’re discussing healthy eating habits this week, and using me as an example of things not to do :) So in the spirit of learning from my own mistakes, here’s another simple habit you should try to pick up.

Bedtime stories

Until the age of 7, my father had me convinced that my stomach was divided into compartments. Each of these compartments was dedicated to a different kind of food and there was a whole crew of people down there who sorted out the food and put it into the right compartments. I have no clue where this story came from, but I believed it.

I’d separate all my foods into different piles to make it a bit easier on my stomach crew to sort things out. I didn’t drink while eating because I thought that would make their job a lot tougher. I also ate fast because I believed that would give them more time off between meals. Yah, I know, it’s all pretty silly. Did I mention I was 7? :)

Oddly enough, this little story ended up shaping my eating habits. To this day I still don’t mix the food on my plate and eat each component separately. However, there was one unhealthy eating habit that I’ve tried to change, and it brings us to today’s tip.

Eat slow

Yep, that’s it. That’s the whole tip. Sounds a little meaningless, but it can have a huge impact on your waistline. You see, our bodies and don’t communicate very well. In many cases, the communication is slow and hard to understand. That’s especially true of hunger and satiety signals.

When we eat, our body signals us when we’re full. Our stomach tells us “no more!” Unfortunately, our stomach’s communication methods are not the best or the fastest. So it takes a little bit before those signals reach our brain. In fact, it takes an average of 20 minutes between our stomach being full and our brain knowing about it. You can consume a lot of extra calories that you didn’t really need in those 20 minutes.

Back to personal history

Even after I outgrew the compartment story, I still loved eating fast. I ate so fast, my friends used to joke that I didn’t even chew my food. If we went out to eat, I would be done before anyone else and then of course I would order seconds. At a buffet, I was working on my third plate while most people were still clearing their first.

Problem solved

These days I slowed down a bit. I take smaller bites, I chew a bit more and I actually enjoy my food more. I’ve also realized that pausing every few bites and taking a drink of water will fill me up in a healthy way. I feel just as full as I used to when I would quickly gorge at the buffet, but I’m eating a lot less. I’m giving my stomach the time it needs to tell my brain “stop!”

So put down your fork, or that giant burrito, and take a break. Stop for a minute and give your body a chance to catch up and communicate with you. Take a drink of water, talk to whoever is with you. If you can, do that after each small bite. You’ll find yourself becoming full after a lot less food than usual.


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May

30

Healthy Eating Habits, Part 3 - Don’t clean your plate

Filed Under Eating Healthy | 4 Comments

Thisentryis part 3 of 5 in the series SERIES - Healthy Eating Habits

This special edition of 60 in 3 is brought to you from El Camino Hospital where I’m sitting waiting for my fiancé to get out of surgery. Just a minor procedure, in and out in under two hours we hope, although it’s been an hour so far and she hasn’t even seen the doctor yet. Anyway, we’re talking about healthy eating habits this week, so let’s find one more thing I used to do which was really bad.

Childhood advice

Do you remember what your mom told you when you were little? Well, besides “clean your room” and “wash your hands” that is. Go back to when you were at the dinner table and your mother (or your dad) would give you some advice about your meal. You’d hear “eat your vegetables” a lot, but you’d also hear the following “clean your plate, there are kids in Africa that would be happy to have your food”. Well, as a 6 year old, I was pretty scared of those kids taking away my food, so I cleaned off my plate each and every meal. Your parents might have had a variation on this theme, but quite a few of us grow up with some kind of ingrained habit to finish the food that’s put before us.

Adulthood problem

Unfortunately, things that were good when you were young, are no longer so beneficial to an adult. When you were a child, your parents controlled the size of your portions. Hopefully, they made sure you were eating kid sized meals. As an adult, you’re cooking for yourself and eating out a lot. Home cooking gives you a bit of control over portion size, but restaurants do not. When you’re at a restaurant, you receive whatever amount of food the restaurant sees fit to serve you with.

That wouldn’t be an issue if restaurants tried to serve healthy meals, but here in the US, many of our restaurants serve massive portions of unhealthy food. The food itself is bad enough, usually consisting of nothing more than fat and protein, but the sheer amount of it is overwhelming. The average fast food lunch, like a big mac, fries and a coke is around 1000 calories total. The average dinner at a place like appleby’s, Denny’s, TGIFridays or Cheesecake Factory can easily go as high or 2000 calories. That’s ALL of the average calorie intake for an average American woman by the way. That’s right, the average woman will eat her entire daily intake of calories by consuming one of these dinners.

Why do they do it?

Why do restaurants serve such unhealthy food in large quantities? Well, because it’s cheap and draws people in. As consumers, we’re drawn to places that provide us with a good deal, and a restaurant that gives us a lot of food for our money seems like a good deal. Unfortunately, it’s not a good deal for our health. Restaurant food is bad enough due to its quality and high reliance on fat, it gets even worse when you consume too much of it.

The solution

Here’s the easy way to avoid it. Use yesterday’s tip of eating slower. Make sure to drink plenty of water as you eat. Then, when you get about half way through your grand slam dinner, stop. It’s that easy. Stop eating and ask the waiter to box up your food. It sounds easy but it’s actually relatively hard. That childhood advice you’re your parents is now an ingrained habit. You’ve been taught to finish the food on your plate and it’s difficult to change your ways now. So think of it this way. You’re still finishing your food, you’re still getting a good deal and no food is going to waste. You’re just spreading out this good deal over two meals instead of one. In fact, you’re getting an even better deal out of it since you just got two meals for the price of one.

If you’re eating at home, serve your food on smaller plates. The plate will still look full but you’ll be consuming less food per serving. When you’re finished with a plate of food, wait. Don’t immediately go back for seconds. Remember, it takes your stomach a while before it can tell your brain that you’re full. So give your body time to talk to you. 20 to 30 minutes later, if you’re still feeling hungry then eat a small portion. If you’re not feeling hungry, you shouldn’t be eating.

Summary

You’re not a kid anymore and you’re not dealing with kid sized portions. You do not have to finish everything on your plate. You don’t have to finish everything you prepared. You’re much better off saving some for later. If you can’t save it for later, you’re still better off not eating some of it. That extra food is not a bargain, it’s extra calories you don’t need.


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May

31

Healthy Eating Habits, Part 4 - Stop drinking your calories

Filed Under Eating Healthy, Health, Weight Loss | 4 Comments

Thisentryis part 4 of 5 in the series SERIES - Healthy Eating Habits

We’re going through some healthy eating habits this week. Today’s topic is something we’ve already discussed in the past, liquid calories.

Liquid calories

When I first started changing my eating habits, I took a week to measure my calorie intake. I wrote down everything I ate in a little notebook. I put it all in there, from the biggest lunch to the smallest snack. I even included the vitamin supplement I was taking with its zero calories.

At the end of the week, I added everything up and calculated my average daily calories. They came out to about 3000. That’s high, but it’s not that high. For a man in his late 20’s, who is physically active and is around 5′11″, 3000 calories is going to add some fat, but it’s not going to make you obese. Yet here I was, 90lbs overweight and not losing anything.

I was a bit frustrated. Why was I overweight when clearly my diet indicated that I was doing reasonably well. So I did more research online and found an article about sodas juices and other sources of liquid calories. Turns out, I had completely ignored these. For some reason, I thought of these as water substitutes which therefore had no calories.

Simple math

So then I started writing down my liquid calories. Here’s a small sample:

  • Lunch - Glass of coke with two refills. That’s about 315 calories.
  • Afternoon - Two cans of Nestea ice tea. That’s about 180 calories.
  • Evening - One giant big gulp from 7-11 full of coke or Mountain Dew. About 400 calories.

LIST 1

Now let’s do the math. That’s 900 calories a day or 6300 calories a week. In other words, I was drinking an extra two lbs of fat every week and not even noticing it. Even worse, these are completely empty liquid calories. My body does not consider these food, so even if I fill it up with these calories, it still tells me I’m hungry. The 315 calories I drank with lunch did nothing for my satiety. I still felt as hungry as if I had drank water.

More bad choices

Coffee, fruit juices and some teas are just as bad. That mocha frappuccino you had at Starbucks this morning? It had somewhere between 200 and 300 calories and possibly as high as 500 calories. That delicious fruit juice you had at Jamba juice at lunch? Somewhere between 200 and 400 calories depending on the size you picked and possibly as high as 600 if you went with a smoothie rather than a juice. Check out these links for more information:

Jamba

Starbucks

By the way, I don’t mean to pick out these two companies. All juices and coffees are essentially the same. So don’t run out to Peet’s coffee thinking that you’re getting a healthier choice. The healthiest choice you can make is to simply avoid drinking calories.

Summary

If you’re thirsty, drink water. Water is still the best option when it comes to liquids. If you can’t stay away from nonwater drinks, at least be aware of the number of calories you’re consuming. These are calories you will need to keep in mind when you’re looking at your overall daily goals.


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Jun

1

Healthy Eating Habits, Part 5 - The endless cycle of binge and guilt

Filed Under Eating Healthy, Motivation, Weight Loss | 8 Comments

Thisentryis part 5 of 5 in the series SERIES - Healthy Eating Habits

For my last article about healthy eating habits, I thought I would talk about one I had a lot of difficulty breaking.

Making a mountain out of a mole hill

During my first healthy year, I would set goals for myself in terms of eating and weight loss. I knew I needed to eat healthier and I knew exactly what I should do to accomplish that. Here’s the problem though. As soon as I ate a single bad item, a piece of candy for example, I would immediately start feeling guilty. It seemed like that one small piece of candy meant my entire day’s goal had been destroyed.

That feeling of guilt would inevitably lead into “well, if I already messed up today’s goal, then I might as well binge! Because if the day is a failure, it might as well be a big failure!” I would then proceed to annihilate entire buffets, chocolate cakes and small Mexican restaurants.

Following the binge would be even more guilt. I knew I had eaten way too much, I could feel it. So of course I would vow to do better the next day. Tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow I will eat perfectly and not make a single mistake. There will be ZERO candy tomorrow and then I will instantly be healthy again. Of course that last for maybe a day or two. Then I would see that candy dish again and the whole cycle would start over again.

Sound familiar? A lot of people who try to lose weight and get fitter go through this. So how do we fix it? Well, first I had to realize a few things.

Failing a little is better than failing a lot

Yes, there is a difference between failing a little and failing a lot. If you eat 1000 bad calories, that’s worse than 10. So get out of the mindset that once you make a little mistake your whole day is shot and you can feel free to binge. A small mistake is just that, small. A binge at the buffet is not a small mistake, it’s a huge one! Remember, weight loss is simple math, eat less than you burn. So eating one small piece of candy is not as bad as eating one small piece of candy and then two giant burritos.

Fix your mistakes, don’t make them worse

Who ever said a small piece of candy is failure? Yes, it’s not the healthiest thing in the world, but you’re still fine. Go take a 30 minute walk and that small piece of candy is gone. Just drank a giant chocolate shake? Well, maybe you can make dinner slightly smaller. Remember, it’s all math! So you ate 100 extra calories at lunch? So what! Just make dinner slightly smaller or work out slightly more. It’s not a big deal!

Your calorie savings account

Save up some calories during the day. For example, I know I should eat around 400 calories for breakfast, but most of my breakfast options are actually around 300 to 350. So hey, there’s a 50 to 100 calorie cushion there. I don’t deliberately try to fill it but it’s nice knowing that the extra bit of dessert isn’t going to kill me.

Your calorie cushion

Give yourself a cushion. I know I should eat around 2600 calories a day, but I plan my meals for around 2400. That’s another 200 that can go to unexpected lunch room donuts without any guilt.

By the way, it may sound like I’m counting calories all the time, but I really don’t. I spent a few months doing a lot of research. I looked at everything I ate and how many calories it contained. I was especially interested in what ingredients had a lot of calories and what didn’t. After that bit of education, it became much easier to come up with a rough guess as to what foods are bad and what are good. For example, I realized early on that creamy sauces like ranch and mayo were high in fat and calories. So I can look at a variety of sandwiches in a store and tell that some are bad and some are good. I don’t care about an exact count because I know that I have some cushion built into my diet.

Realize why you’re trying to get healthier

Finally, stop punishing yourself. Yes you like candy, who doesn’t? Relax, being human is nothing to feel guilty about. Rather than punish yourself for enjoying something, how about using it as a reward instead? For example, on days that I know I did really well, ate healthy and had a great workout, I splurge a bit and eat ice cream. So what if I only lose .5lbs this week instead of 1lb. Who cares? I’m doing this because I want to enjoy my life, right? Not feel guilty all the time.

Summary

So stop the small mistake, guilt, big mistake, guilt, rinse, repeat cycle. Put a bit of cushion into your diet, save up some calories during the day and if you happen to still make a mistake, oh well. Rather than make it worse, how about fixing it?


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