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 the calories in
one slice of cherry pie. (Answer: In order to burn off 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

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