Calories do count but there IS good news too....

Today's Post: Thursday, 6-30-2011

There ARE many ways to cut net calories that do NOT cut back much on what you eat, make you hungry, or trigger your body to start its famine response.

Amazingly, in some cases, people who use these methods wind up losing fat each month and eat more calories each day than many people who stay fat!

My first ever weight loss success was when I used the Weight Watchers point system then in use to decide where I could cut calories from what I had been eating regularly.

I saw that they listed nonstarchy vegetables as having zero points. So if I ate more nonstarchy vegetables each day, that might help. And, I saw that if I could cut back on my alcoholic drinks per week, that would help.

(Disclosure: I was already getting regular exercise including strength training and interval cardio each week, BEFORE I made these changes.

Had I not been doing this, I’d have had more fat to lose to start with and what I did may well not have been so effective.)

Based on my calculations, it looked like adding the vegetables each day and the cutting back on my weekly alcoholic drinks I was willing to do would cause me to lose about 10 pounds.

I made the cuts in my alcohol each week and ate a medium to large medium serving of cooked broccoli each day with my dinner and added a serving of vegetables to my daily lunch during the week.

I simply continued to do this and weigh myself once a month.

After a month or two I lost the 10 pounds I expected to lose. The two changes I’d made were not that hard so I kept doing them. (I also didn’t want the 10 pounds of fat back!)

But something else was going on!

After another month or so, I lost a SECOND 10 pounds!

I was pleased but felt that was a nice extra I’d not expected.

Of course I kept up the two changes.

But that wasn’t all! After another month or two I lost a THIRD 10 pounds. So in a few months, I’d lost 30 pounds.

Two things allowed that to happen.

1. Instead of making big cuts that would have made me feel deprived and extra hungry, I made SMALL cuts. That meant that I had no trouble doing what I decided on or continuing to do it. It also meant that my energy level stayed high and my appetite was normal.

(People who make much larger cuts become extra hungry, lose their energy, and their appetite feels as if it has tripled. These are caused by their body’s famine response. Then all the weight and fat they lost comes right back.)

So a key to successful fat loss and weight loss is to make sustainable SMALL cuts in net calories and keep doing those lifestyle upgrades.

2. How did I lose 30 pounds instead of 10?

Eating more vegetables gives you food to eat that does come very close to adding no calories. Doing so also gives you superb nutrition.

But I discovered that this strategy does far more!

Because you chew the food and take in the extra fiber, when you eat vegetables, you stop being hungry – so much so that WITHOUT EFFORT you eat less of other foods that have more calories almost automatically.

I found out that means you get triple or even quadruple results by eating more nonstarchy vegetables.

Dr Dean Ornish even wrote a book about this called Eat More, Weigh Less.

3. When you do cut calories, if you eat ample protein foods now, continue doing so or even add a bit more.

Besides fiber, eating protein foods satisfies your hunger best and longest of all the kinds of food.

In fact, there is ample research to show that if you maintain a good protein intake, you can cut back on net calories a bit more without triggering your famine response or causing health problems.

4. And, if you combine eating the same or more protein with cutting back net calories modestly and do strength training and interval cardio every week, the weight you lose is FAT. That means you are far less likely to gain it back.

You burn calories when you exercise. You burn calories after you exercise if the exercise was quite vigorous. And, the muscle you add or keep burns more calories than you would burn without that muscle.

This is NOT an unproven theory either.

In the recently released study of nurses and health professionals, the ones who took in relatively moderate amounts of junk foods and soft drinks and did not exercise gained a bit over 16 pounds of fat over 20 years. The ones who DID exercise regularly gained 8 pounds. (The ones who exercised took in virtually no junk foods and soft drinks gained ZERO pounds.)

The ongoing study of people who have lost 30 pounds or more and kept them off found that over 90% of them exercised regularly. And, their average is about 400 calories a day or 2800 calories a week.

(Vigorous strength training and interval cardio can have similar effect with fewer calories directly burned during the exercises. That makes them more doable for those of us who haven’t the time to do that much walking or other less focused exercises.)

5. The calories (and carbs) to cut virtually 100 % of without becoming more hungry are those in packaged snack foods and desserts and in soft drinks.

(For the vast majority of people, diet soft drinks fatten about as well as regular soft drinks, so it helps in two ways to not drink those either. Tomorrow’s post will cover that in more detail.)

Why?

Soft drinks and sugar added drinks and even to some extent fruit juice add calories but do NOT make you less hungry!

But that’s not all!

They cause your blood sugar to surge. That causes an insulin surge to get you back to normal. That tells your body to hang onto the fat it has and not allow you to burn it for energy. But even worse, after the insulin surge lowers your blood sugar a bit too much, you get hungry for something to boost your blood sugar back to normal!

Does that mean that these drinks add calories and not only don’t reduce your hunger, they turn it up?

That’s EXACTLY what that means.

That means that the calories you cut by not drinking soft drinks and sugary drinks is one of the very most effective ways you can cut calories.

It’s almost like free money! (In fact it IS free money. When you stop buying these drinks, the money you were spending is available to you to spend on other things.)

6. Packaged snack foods and desserts are made with refined grains. These foods and breads made with refined grains and white rice have a very similar effects on you as soft drinks.

Many of them have additives such as MSG that make them more addictive to eat.

And, most of them are made with cheap omega 6 oils that cause heart disease. Worse, many of them are still made with hydrogenated oils and trans fats. That stuff is like heart disease starter!

Some have some protein and some have some fiber, so they turn down hunger at first a bit better than soft drinks. But they have the same hunger rebound later.

Low carb diets produce fat loss. And virtually every successful person who loses fat and keeps it off eats virtually none of these foods.

These foods and soft drinks are the carbs that do the most good to cut.

What about whole grain foods and homemade desserts or desserts made as if they were homemade?

Three strategies work.

a) Only keep eating the ones you like most. STOP eating any of them that you find just OK.

b) Eat them less often or far less often. Back when people were so much more active they burned as many as ten times as many calories and only had desserts a few times a month, desserts were hardly a problem. So eat the desserts you like most but from a few times a year to a few times a week.

(People who eat them every day or several times a day will stay fat.)

c) The one I’ve used is gradual but effective.

I didn’t eat a lot of these foods to begin with. And I’ve now cut my intake of them in half THREE times. That means I eat an eighth of the sugar and whole grains I once ate.

7. Always eat breakfast.

This works for men. But it works about three times as well for women.

People who always eat breakfast have better health than those who do not.

They are less fat than people who do not.

(That’s in part because the are less hungry later in the day and less hungry for sugary foods.

So part of the effect is that they eat less by the end of the day than people who skip breakfast.

Even better, they are far less likely to eat junky snacks or desserts due to hunger between meals when the foods available easily are in vending machines or convenience stores.)

But there is an added benefit too.

Calories eaten at breakfast are both used more efficiently in some ways AND seem to give you less net calories.

In fact, I once read that people who always eat breakfast eat more calories a day than those who do not AND they are also less fat.

The protein foods many people eat for breakfast help do this I suspect. But eating breakfast may also lift your energy and help you burn more calories.

So, always eating breakfast and including some good protein foods when you do is yet another way you can cut net calories without eating that much less.