Polly Kanavel is a personal trainer located is La Mesa, Ca and has an engineering degree with a focus in ergonomics.
Balanced Physical Fitness is built on a square with the four corners being: Nutrition, Strength Training, Cardiovascular Fitness, and Flexibility. If one of those corners is missing you no longer have the square.Did you know it takes 10 Calories per pound to maintain your current weight? That means you need 1800 calories daily to maintain 180 lbs. Do you know how much you eat right now? Do you even know your current weight?
Calorie basics:
- 1 gram of Fat is 9 calories
- 1 gram of Carbohydrate is 4 calories
- 1 gram Protein is 4 calories
But did you know that 1 gram of Alcohol is 7 Calories? To put this in perspective a Red Bull and vodka is about 180 calories, a regular Budweiser has 145 calories, and a typical glass of red wine has 130 calories. A special note about alcohol: your body sees alcohol as toxic and since it’s calories come from alcohol sugars your body burns those calories first before working on other calories to fuel your body. That means that those 300 calories you burned today only took care of 2 of the beers you had last night and didn’t even touch the brats, chips, and ice cream.
It takes a reduction of 3500 calories to lose one lb of fat–ultimately you should make this reduction over the course of a week for a weight loss of 1-2 lbs per week. This means a daily reduction of about 500 calories off your regular caloric intake should produce small, incremental weight loss. Over the span of a month this means losing 4-8 lbs, over a year it could be 40 lbs or more. Please remember that manageable, sustainable weight loss does not come in 8-12 lb weekly drops.
If you are overweight a food log is definitely in order. If you have an iphone try the Lose It app. Do not be afraid or ashamed to write anything down because this is what you are and this is what you do, but only for today, tomorrow will be different. After a few weeks of food logging you can start to see patterns and even begin to think of ways to make changes.
Here’s an example of how to make an easy change that makes a big difference. I went to a large, well stocked grocery store to build two tasty Ham and Cheese Sandwiches, but one is almost half the calories of the other!
The Fat Sandwich: This sandwich has 600 calories!
- 2 slices Orowheat 100% Whole Wheat bread
- 2 Tablespoons Kraft Mayonnaise
- 1 slice Tillamook Medium Cheddar Cheese
- Lettuce
- 2 Slices Oscar Meyer Chopped Honey Ham
The Thin Sandwich: This sandwich has 320 calories, almost half!
- 2 slices Nature’s Own 100% whole Wheat Bread
- 2 Tablespoons Kraft Lite Mayonnaise
- 1 slice Kraft Singles 2% Milk Sharp Cheddar Cheese
- Spinach
- 6 slices Buddig Deli Cuts Honey Ham
You can save a few more calories by using Miracle Whip or mustard if you like the taste.
If you’re thinking to yourself “well that’s great but one sandwich just isn’t enough for me” you could also reduce the amount of ham and mayonnaise on the thin sandwich by half, build yourself second one using the other half of the ham and mayonnaise and have two ham and cheese sandwiches for around 500 calories. Who doesn’t want to eat more food for less calories?
You may think that if reduced fat is good then fat free must be better but that’s not always the case. Take for instance mayonnaise–while fat free mayo is only about 10 calories it contains something regular and reduced fat mayo doesn’t–high fructose corn syrup! Also, all bread isn’t created equal. Check the nutritional facts. Sara Lee Light and Delightful bread is indeed light, a slice of bread weighs 4 grams less than a slice of Nature’s Own but to make it delightful they added high fructose corn syrup. Stick to more natural sweetnerss like molasses and brown sugar in your bread.
Remember, simple changes can help you eat the food you love, just make it better for you.
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