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Article:How to Lose Weight: Food for Thought
When it comes to weight loss, most
of us would like to engage in what psychologists call "magical
thinking." We'd like to believe that some easy trick or ritual would
allow us to shed pounds while eating anything we liked. Wouldn't it
be nice if consuming all our food before 6 p.m., doing yoga, or
hopping on one foot for five minutes would allow us to chow down
with all our favorite goodies and still lose weight?
Unfortunately, despite what legions
of people with a book or a product to sell might claim, it's just
not so. Yet it really is possible to come up with a system for
losing weight. The real secret is this: It's all about the
calories.
Most of us have heard that sensible
weight loss involves some combination of diet and exercise. As a
physician, I'm surely not going to tell people to avoid exercise.
For most people, exercise is a very healthy thing to do. But when it
comes to losing weight, unless we're training for the Olympics, the
effect of exercise is minor. What matters most is how many calories
go down the hatch.
This bears explaining. Our bodies
use the calories we consume to fuel our basic life-processes. The
heart needs lots of fuel (calories) to beat its usual 100,000 times
in 24 hours. The brain, liver and kidneys also require lots of fuel
to perform their many chemical reactions and metabolic tasks. Most
of the calories we burn in 24 hours (about 1500 for women and 1800
for men) we would still burn even if we were in a coma.
It's true that working the muscles
in our arms, legs and trunk requires fuel (calories) as well, but
you'd be amazed how long you would have to row, jog, swim or walk to
burn off the calories in one slice of cherry pie. (Answer: In order
to burn the 486 calories in a slice of cherry pie a 175-pound person
would need to row for 35 minutes, jog for 37 minutes, swim for 41
minutes or walk briskly for 63 minutes.) For most of us it would be
more practical to just not eat the pie.
Each of us has a calories-per-day
figure for maintaining body weight. If, on the average, we eat that
many calories, then we will maintain body weight, neither
gaining nor losing. If we consistently eat more calories than our
break-even number, then we will gain weight. The unused
calories have to be stored somewhere, and will probably go into our
body's fat cells. If we consistently eat fewer than our break-even
number of calories, then we will lose weight. The body will
get its fuel somewhere, and will burn off calories that have been
put into storage in fat cells.
This is how it is. We just can't get
around the basic biology and physics.
So, if we're trying to lose weight,
how do we choose what we do or don't eat? Well, sometimes, our
choices are haphazard. A useful analogy concerns shopping. How in
the world could we do a good job of shopping without knowing the
prices of the items we're putting in our shopping carts? Without
knowledge of the prices our choices in merchandise could easily
exceed our budgets.
The same holds true when it comes to
eating. If we wanted to budget our calories, how in the world could
we make good choices if we didn't know the calorie count of the
foods we eat? We just couldn't do a good job. Our calorie intake per
day would probably exceed our break-even point for maintaining body
weight, and we would gain.
So, in order to make sensible
choices, it's crucial to know the approximate number of calories in
the foods we eat. An easy way to do that is to buy a paperback book
in the check-out line of your grocery store that lists the calorie
content of usual portions of commonly consumed food and beverages.
(Or look them up online.) We don't necessarily need to check the list
each time we sit down to eat, but knowing typical figures for our
favorite foods will enable us to know if we're keeping or exceeding
our daily calorie budget.
This is not as awful as it sounds.
In fact, there can be pleasant surprises. Suppose I typically get
the munchies in the evening, and I roam the house in search of
goodies to snack upon. Here is where knowledge of calorie contents
can pay off. If I satisfy my munchies by eating cookies, French
fries, potato chips or candies, then I'll blow my daily food-budget
in just one sitting. But what if I substitute pretzels or unbuttered
popcorn? They might be just as satisfying, yet contain fewer
calories. So these alternative choices might spare my daily calorie
budget at no loss of satisfaction.
As a physician I often encourage my
patients to lose weight. Being overweight can increase blood
pressure and cholesterol which, in turn, increase the likelihoods of
heart attacks and strokes. Heart attacks and strokes are the number
one and number three causes of death in the U.S., respectively, and
strokes are the number one cause of disability. So we're talking
about real conditions that afflict real people. Moreover, our
overweight bodies put more stress and strain on our spines and our
knees, making them wear out earlier, hurt more, and interfere with
quality of life.
Some patients with whom I have this
conversation look at me like I'm crazy. They're eating barely enough
food to keep a small bird warm, they say. The problem—or the
solution—couldn't possibly lie with the food they eat.
The incentives are clear. The
choices are ours to make. We shouldn't blame our metabolism. And we
shouldn't delude ourselves that we consume barely enough to keep
ourselves alive, and yet still, unaccountably, gain weight. We need
to take our health into our own hands and start making choices that
increase the quality and quantity of our remaining years.
(C) 2005 by Gary
Cordingley
Gary Cordingley, MD, PhD, is a
clinical neurologist, teacher and researcher. For more
health-related articles see his website at: http://www.cordingleyneurology.com/
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
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