Break's Over

This is my first day back from Spring Break and let me tell you that this past few days have been a complete disaster. At least, food-wise. For the past week and a half, I've been trying to watch what I eat but it is almost impossible when I'm not the one cooking. There was also a lot of eating out. Because of all the eating out and the lack of control over the kitchen, I wasn't expecting NOT to gain any weight at all. I thought I was going to come back home 1 or 2 pounds heavier. However, I came back almost 5 pounds heavier! More than twice of what I was expecting!

I was a little shocked and very dissapointed but now I truly know the consequences of eating out on a regular basis. What shocks me the most is that I was trying to order the healthy stuff. I was going for the salads instead of the burger or fried rice. Yet, I managed to gain 5 pounds back.

I was all depressed and really unmotivated when I saw the scale this morning because I just couldn't understand where I had gone so horribly wrong. After all, all I had was salad. Then, I found this video. Take a look.

Who knew that restaurant salads had so many calories? Usually, I homemade salad is very low in calories that's probably why we think all salads are low-calorie. I guess we never really know how many calories we are eating when we eat out. For the time being, though, I think I'll keep eating out to a minimum.

5. Nutrition Facts - Scary Carbs

Carbs are by far my favourite subject. Just up until recently, fat used to be the bad guy then carbs took over. There really is no doubt that carbs have become a subject of conversation all over the world. Some people say there are bad while others say are good. However, what I find so interesting is how passionate people get about the subject. People who believe that carbs are bad really take their stand very seriously. Just to prove my point, I know people who don’t mind having a pound of bacon for dinner because bacon has no carbs. They don’t really care if there are thousands of calories or enourmous amounts of fat in that pound of bacon. All they care about is the carb content. To make matters more interesting, whenever there is a discussion revolving around carbs, they get very opinionated. Who knew carbs could evoke such strong emotions in us?

Anyway, let’s get to the facts. In general, we have carbs in the form of starch, sugars and fibre and either of these types can be found practically anywhere except for a few animal products like meats and cheese. Other than that, everything else has at least some carbs. Because carbs are so abundant in nature and our supermarkets, we have evolved in such a way that our bodies can easily digest carbs. In fact, carbohydrates are the easiest macronutrient to digest. We even start digesting carbs right at the mouth. We digest carbs so easily and efficiently also because our nervous system, mainly the brain, can only use glucose or glucose derivatives for energy. By the way, glucose is the building block of carbs. Thus, we need carbs to keep our brains awake. You might then be wondering why is it that our nervous system keeps working when we are on a no-carb diet? The reason is that when we have no carbs, we start using our body’s lean muscle or the protein we eat to make those glucose derivatives (ketones) that our nervous system is equipped to use. This switch from real glucose to ketones is what is very well known as starvation mode.

The main problem that people have with carbs is that they supposedly make you fat instead of helping you lose weight. Unfortunately, there is some truth to that. In our bodies, only a limited amount of carbs can be stored as carbs and the rest cannot be converted into anything else but fat. So if you have a few extra carbs and your carbohydrate storage is full, these extra carbs will turn into fat. However, this only applies to the excess of carbs. Thus, only excess carbs are the problem. To avoid this unwanted excess, you should be having between 45 and 65% of your calories as carbs. There is also a minimum requirement set at 130 grams of carbs per day. It is estimated that our nervous system needs this amount per day. In case you’re wondering, there are 4 calories in every gram of carbohydrate. Finally, don't forget that complex carbs (whole grain) will help you lose weight as opposed to sugars. The reccomendation is that you should be having no more than 25% of your calories from sugar. Although these are the established recommendations, nutritional labels use a daily value of 300g of carbs per 2000 calories. No wonder why we are always so confused about how much we actually need?

There is some good news, though. The diet programs that have reported the highest rates of success were using diets that included carbs as the main component. This is because carbs often provide you with that sense of fullness or satiety. Thus, you don’t have as many calories in the day and you don’t feel hungry for longer periods of time. Remember that your weight loss depends on the amount of calories in and the amount of calories out – that’s all.

LOL

Who knew laughing could help you lose weight? There was this very interesting article published in the International Journal of Obesity about laughing and weight loss that I though would be fun to share. The article said that:

“…Just 15 minutes of laughter a day will burn 10 to 40 calories, depending on a person’s weight and the intensity of the laughter. That’s enough to shift between 1 and 4 lbs a year.”

The way they came up with this conclusion was by having 45 pairs of people. One person from each pair would watch a serious clip and the other would watch a funny clip. The rooms they were watching the clips in were set up with equipment ready to measure heart rate and heat. The people watching the funny clips often generated more heat when they were laughing. This means they were burning more calories since calories are units of heat.

Also, the article mentions that laughing is not only good for losing weight because you burn calories but also because it keeps you optimistic about your weight loss. Thus, you feel more motivated to keep going. So, there you go. Another great reason to laugh :)

1. Nutrition Facts - Calories and a Drizzle of Fat

When we’re on a diet, it is so important to use our calories wisely simply because we are not allowed that many. The word "wisely" what creates a bit of confusion among dieters, though. At the beginning of every diet, we are only worried about calories. Then, we hear that we have to watch our fat intake. And, to make things worse, we hear all this bag things about carbs and sugar. The truth is that we sometimes don’t know how to make all this information work to our advantage. I mean, even some information contradicts itself. How are we supposed to make sense of it all, then? I thought a good way to address all this crazy confusion would to look at those nutrition facts labels. You’d be amazed just at how much information these tiny labels contain. In fact, they contain so much information that I will break this mini-tutorial on nutrition facts labels into 10 parts. Yes, you read that right: 10 parts! That's how loaded these labels are with information that can be quite useful to us. Also, I figured that writing a 10-page post would be quite boring to read. Anyway, let’s get started.

As you can see at your left, there’s the nutrition facts label of the banana smoothie I usually have for breakfast. I figured this was a good example since it has a bit of everything. So, the first thing you want to look at is the serving size at the top of the label. Always make sure to look at the serving size – especially when reading the label on a diet food. Often times, they advertise the product as having only 100 calories but they don’t tell you that the serving size is super small. Thus, when comparing a diet food with its regular version, look at the serving size to see if it is really has fewer calories than the diet option.

The amount of calories in the stated serving size is the first piece of information that you’ll find on the label. Knowing the amount of calories, will help you budget your calories for the day. By now, you hopefully know how many calories you need a day. If not, click here.

Now, getting to the good stuff: fat! There has been so much bad press about fat that most of us are terrified of fat, right? Well, although a high fat intake can negatively impact your health, our body still needs it in moderate amounts. The general recommendation is: have 30% of your calories from fat and no more than 10% of your calories from saturated fat. So, if you look at the nutrition facts label, you can see that 1% right next to it. But, what does that one percent mean? The nutritional label is adapted for a person consuming 2000 calories a day. So, here’s how they calculated that 1% of the daily value:

1. 30% of 2000 is 600. This means that you could have 600 calories coming from fat if you were on a 2000-calorie diet.

2. We know that 1 gram of fat is equal to 9 calories. So, let’s convert those 600 calories into grams of fat: 600/9 = 66 grams of fat

3. Then, 66 grams of fat is 100% of the daily value or daily intake. Thus, 1 gram of fat would be around 1% (= 1*100/66) of the daily value. The label says 1 grams of fat but it might be rounded up or down so you calculation might not always give you exactly the same percentage as on the label but it should be fairly close.

However, keep in mind that if you’re consuming less than 2000 calories a day, this % daily value will be different for you. Unfortunately, you’ll have to do the calculation yourself since nutrition facts labels only consider the standard 2000-calorie diet. For example, I should have no more than 360 (= 1200*0.3) calories from fat which is the same as 40 (360/9) grams of fat since I’m on a 1200-calorie diet. Thus, I would be getting 2% (= 1*100/40) of the daily value of fat with this smoothie. The calculation for saturated fat is pretty much the same except that you use 10%  instead of 30% for step 1.

Some other things you might see under fat (besides saturated fat) could be: monounsaturated fat, polyunsaturated fats and trans fat. Also, some labels might even tell you their omega fatty acid content. However, omega fatty acids are a very interesting and broad subject that I will address in my next post since the recommendations are very detailed. For now, just keep these 4 categories (sat, mono, poly and trans) in mind. If you ever find a label that lists the amount of monounsaturated fat and/or polyunsaturated fat, you’ll notice that there will not be a daily value percentage for these categories. This is because there is not recommendation set for these yet. Ideally, you should be getting all you 30% of calories from fat in the form of monounsaturated and/or polyunsaturated fat. This is because mono- and polyunsaturated fats are the “good” fats so there is no limit for the "good" stuff. On the other hand, they put a limit (10%) on saturated fats because they are the “bad” fats. So, when having to choose between saturated and unsaturated fats, try to go with unsaturated fats.

There are many sites that get these daily values for you, but there’s a lot of information behind the calculation that I think is very useful. As they say: knowledge is power.

Let's Talk Calories

Even though I am not following any particular diet, I do watch my caloric intake – at least most of the time. Since most of you are also trying to lose weight, I thought it might be a good idea to share with all of you how you can figure out how many calories you need to have daily in order to lose weight. So let’s start with the very basic idea that the amount of calories that you spend has to be greater than the amount of calories that go into your body when losing weight. If you have extra weight, it is because we had too many calories that did not get spent so our body stored this excess of calories as fat. In order to lose the weight, we need to empty this storage of calories (a.k.a. fat). A way to do is by eating fewer calories so that our body will be forced to take some calories from our own storage so that we have enough energy for all body functions. Another way is by working out to burn some calories. The key idea here is to spend those stored calories.

Now, the question here is: how many calories should I be eating so that I lose weight? To answer this question you first need to know how much weight you want to be losing per week. As I mentioned before, I’m trying to lose about 1-1.5% of my body weight every week. Let’s say 1% to keep it simple. This means that I want to lose about 1.92 lbs per week since I weigh 192lbs. Now, a key piece of information here is that you need to spend 3500 calories to burn one pound of body fat. Thus, I would need to be spending 6720 calories (1.92 × 3500) from my body storage per week to lose that much weight.

We now know how many calories we should be spending, but how many are we allow to eat then? To answer this question, let’s first calculate how many calories need to come from our fat storage every day to achieve our weekly weight loss goal. If I need to spend 6720 calories weekly, then that would equate to a 960-calorie daily deficit. Now, let’s look at the estimated energy requirements (EER) tables:

Using the tables, find your age and match it to your level of activity to find out how many calories you should be having per day. Once you have this number, subtract the calories that you need to spend on a daily basis. In my case, I would need 1900 calories per day according to the table so that means that I should be having 940 (1900 - 960 = 940) calories per day in order to achieve my weekly weight loss goal. However, adults and teens should never have less than 1200 calories per day. Thus, I need to make a bit of an adjustment to my daily caloric intake. I will have my 1200 calories per day but I need to burn the rest by working out. In other words, I need to burn 260 (1200 - 940 = 260) calories at the gym every day. This way, I would use up from my storage all the 960 calories needed to lose 1.92 lbs per week, in my case. The point here is that you need to get rid of all the daily calories you calculated above either through diet or by working out. A combination of both is usually the best idea.

If you subtracted the number of calories that you need to spend daily from your estimated energy requirement and it was greater than 1200 or 1200 on the dot, stick to that. However, make sure that you re-visit your calculations for your caloric daily intake on a regular basis because all these numbers will keep changing as your weight changes.