Tips to Help you Stay within your Calories

One of the things that most if not all people on calorie restricted diets will run into are times when they just seem hungry even though they have eaten. For some this is a constant struggle. For others it happens from time to time with a day or two where they just don't feel satisfied no matter how much they eat. When those times come what can you do to help you stay within your calorie allowance?

First if you do overeat, don't beat yourself up. Instead get back to eating well as quickly as possible. The only true failure is when you give up completely. A momentary failure will not destroy everything. In fact you can use this as a learning experience.

That leads to the first piece of advice. Examine what you have eaten to see if it might be the cause of this hunger. If there is something that was different from your normal eating that may have been the trigger. In general triggers can be sugary foods, foods low in protein and fiber, or for some food with artificial sweeteners. If you ate foods like this they may have triggered your hunger. If you see a food, even one not mentioned here, that may be linked to your hunger because it is different from what you normally eat., cut it out for a while and see if it helps.

Related to this look at what you are eating. Is it high in fiber and nutrients? Are you eating sufficient protein and fat. Often "diet food" is high in carbohydrates, but very low in fat and protein. The reason for low fat is both the misunderstanding the fat will make you fat, and the fact that fat has a lot more calories per gram than both carbohydrates and protein. The thing is protein and fat will both help you feel full longer. My personal preference for them is 40% of your Calories from carbohydrates, 30% of them from protein and 30% from fats combined with eating at least 30 grams of fiber (more is better).

The other possible trigger is emotional stress. Many people, myself included, have an unhealthy tendency to deal with stress by eating. When stress comes, they want to eat and eat and eat. If this is you I can suggest what often works for me. I exercise. I take that stress energy, and put it toward something positive for my health. Often this will be enough to get rid of that desire to eat. So do something physical.

All this is fine, you may say, but what about when I am hungry? Is there anything I can do to help? As stated exercise can help, especially more endurance types like jogging, cycling or even a long walk. Also try drinking several large glasses of straight water. Sometimes people mistake thirst for hunger, and water will deal with the thirst not to mention fill your stomach. Another thing that can help is brushing your teeth with a minty toothpaste. This will often remove the desire to eat, and will make food that you might eat after brushing taste much less appetizing.

Hopefully these hints help you. Do you have any to add?

It Is Working

Just a quick update. My knee is recovering well, and the approach of putting together an upper body only exercise program has helped me keep on track with my eating. Other than Saturday when I attended a 50th wedding anniversary of good friends of ours. Then I took the approach I usually do, eat and enjoy as it is only one day. Taking this approach has worked in the past, and it did this time as well. I actually lost a pound over the weekend.

Upper Body Exercise During Injury

Needing some sort of exercise program for while I am recovering from the flare up of my meniscus that won't aggravate my knee further I decided to put together an upper body only exercise program.

In designing this I took several things into consideration.

First, what upper body exercises do not require stabilisation from my legs. Things like standing exercises are out for sure, and kneeling exercises like stability ball roll-outs or one arm dumbell rows may be a problem. After some experimentation I found that stuff from knees like one arm rows and stability ball roll outs work fine.

Second, I want to make sure to work more than just one muscle group. This can't be all pressing exercises. It needs to work chest, back, shoulders, and ideally core muscles as well. Of all these the core might be the hardest to work well since core exercises often require at least a partial use of legs.

Third, I want to get my heart rate up. Interval training is out for now so I need to design the workout in a metabolically challenging manner. Thus some sort of cardio strength training would be good.

With this in mind I decided on three supersets with no rest between exercises, but rest between the supersets would do the trick. Exercise wise I settled on the following:

With each superset go through all exercises without resting between them. When the superset is completed rest for one minute, and repeat.

Warm-up going through Superset 1 twice at 50% of weight you plan to use. Rest one minute after each time through.

SUPERSET 1

DB bench press x10

Pull-ups x8

SB rollout x12

(Go through Superset 3 times with 1 minute rest after each time)

SUPERSET 2

Seated DB shoulder press x10

Supermans x10, (3 second hold)

One-arm rows x8/side

(Go through Superset 3 times with 1 minute rest after each time)

SUPERSET 3

Incline DB press x10

Hanging leg raise x10

Reverse DB raise x10

(Go through Superset 3 times with 1 minute rest after each time)

Finish with stretching.

Injuries

For the past year or so I have been dealing with a torn meniscus. For those who don't know what that is, it is part of the cartilage in the knee. It is not a constant problem, but flares up when the torn piece moves out of position thus causing a fair amount of pain, and locking up my knee.

Yesterday that torn piece did just that, and while the pain is not overwhelming, it is substantial. At this point any lower body work is out, so I am going to try to focus on upper body stuff. Carrying weight around is also out, so changing the plates on the barbell will be limited. I plan to focus mainly on bodyweight and dumbell exercises since I can have my powerblocks right where I am working out so I can change the weight easily without walking around with them.

All this is meant to lead up to my main comment. My past experience is that when I am injured and unable to work out, my eating gets really bad. I eat way to many calories, and can't seem to stop. This has been very unhelpful in maintaining my weight loss, and since I have had these flare ups fairly frequently has resulted in fairly substantial gains. With this pattern in mind, instead of repeating it yet again I thought I would make a plan.

The big issue for me is that working out and maintaining a good diet seem directly connected in me. When I workout I find it easy to eat well. When I don't, or in this case, can't workout, I eat badly. My plan then is to find a way to workout that works around my injury. Hopefully this will help me keep on track with food as well.

What all this does is give a reminder that we all need to watch for these patterns in our lives. When we find them, we need to come up with a plan to try to change them. Then we need to try that plan to see if it works. If it doesn't we need a different plan.

Hopefully this will work for me. I will post an update when I find out.

Getting Back to It

One of the reasons I started this blog was to help keep me on track. It was also meant to be a place where I could gather information and sites I found helpful, and to hopefully encourage others to seek to improve their health as well. I'm sure it would help with this if I stuck to it.  The thing is that is true about most things in life, not the least in terms of health.

The biggest challenge is to stick to it. Pretty much all diets will work if you stick to them. Pretty much all exercise programs will achieve what they are designed for if you stick to them.

What that tells me is that the key to success in diet and exercise is finding a program that you can stick with. Realize there are basic fundamental principles that need to be met, and find what helps you meet them in a way you can stick with in the long run.

Since I am posting this from my tablet, I am not going to get into details. Hopefully in future posts I will do that.

Are you in Denial

I was reading an article today that stated most Canadians are in denial about their health. They think they are healthy, and will report they are healthy in surveys, but at the same time the things that would be used as health markers are anything but healthy.

I bring this up because I know what it is to be one of those people. I thought I was fairly healthy, until it all came crashing down when I got pneumonia and then had a stroke. It was only then that I was forced to realize I had taken my health for granted because I was not really sick. The thing is, leaving it to that point could have meant the end of my life, and strokes can and do kill. Worse yet, it could have left me with major physical or mental disabilities due to the brain damage a stroke causes. If you think about it, would you rather own up to the fact you are not as healthy as you like to think you are right now, or would you rather wait for a major health crisis caused by your denial which might take your life one way or another? I am guessing you would rather not go through a heart attack or stroke to prove that you have let your body go.

The good thing for me is I was able use what happened to me as a motivation to change. It has been a few days over a year since I had my stroke. I am still dealing with some of the effects even today, and thanks to God I am still recovering and seeing improvement. In that time I have lost 66 pounds and gotten much healthier both in what in eat and how much I do.

My question for you today is are you ready to change? If so get going to eat less and do more.

Weight Loss and Diet

One of the things I like to do to spur me on in my continuing quest to loose weight and get fit is watch TV shows where people who are out of shape seek to get in shape. I find things like Biggest Loser can be very encouraging.

Having said that, I was watching the X-Weighted episode "Jill" from 2006 this afternoon while I did various administrative tasks, and I was very unhappy that the message they seemed to deliver at her mid-point weigh in was that it was her lack of exercise that was hindering her weight loss. Now she was the one who stated that first, but the trainer, Paul Plakus did not correct that view. Instead, he encouraged it by his response talking about how many calories (3500) she would need to burn to lose a pound.

The thing is, while exercise can and does help lose weight, the vast majority of a person's weight lose will be because of diet, not exercise. It all comes down to eating less calories than you use in a day. Exercise, when all is said and done, will contribute only be a small portion of that. Exercise gets you fit and strong.

My personal experience is that was true even for me back when I was on the various fad diets out there. The thing that made the difference was calorie consumption. If I controlled that I lost weight whether I was exercising or not. That is why most of those diets work be it the Atkins, South Beach or whatever. They all cut a persons calories consumed.

With that in mind in this episode of X-Weighted the person, Jill, was at the gym having a snack. Now the snack was an improvement on what she said she would have had before, but it was still rather high calorie for a "snack."

"What was that snack?" you ask. It was an apple, almonds and water.

While those are all healthy options, and are good for you, the almonds in particular are quite high in calories. It looked like she had about .5 to .75 of a Cup of almonds. That would mean just for the almonds (assuming dry roasted not salted) a calorie count of 412 to 618 calories. This assumes I estimated the amount of almonds correctly, and I was trying to be conservative in my estimate. Add a medium apple at about 95 calories and that snack come in at 507 to 713 calories. That is probably more than half the calories she should be eating a day if she wants to lose weight. By the way, it is more than most of the full meals I eat especially if the amount of almonds was closer to .75 of a Cup. I am guessing any of the calories she burned while on the stationary bike at the gym were replaced immediately with that "snack."

When she was disappointed with her weight loss, I can say based on what was shown, she was simply eating too much. A better snack would have been 2 apples and water or one apple and maybe and ounce of almonds. Better yet, if she could do it, just have the water with no "snack" at all.

The lessons from all this are pretty straight forward.

1) If you want to lose weight you need to know how many calories are in what you eat, and how many you want to eat per day or week. Without controlling your calories, you will not have significant weight loss.

2) Don't fall for the idea that exercise will make you lose weight quickly even if you don't take care of how much you eat. It simply won't happen. You will get more fit, a good thing in itself, but you will not get rid of the fat quickly with just exercise.