The Secret About Calories In Food

This article isn’t about the number of calories in food. It’s about why you’ve come here looking for the calorie count of  foods. Now, be honest!

In my experience it’s for one of two main reasons:

1. You’re on a calorie controlled diet and looking to reduce the number of calories you are  eating.
2. You’re eating sensibly and are just curious and  wanting to avoid the most calorie-dense foods.

Now I’ll bet my pension that 9 out of 10 of you will be here because of (1) and a measly 1 out of 10 because of (2).

If you’re one of the latter – Congratulations! You are thinking about what you eat, looking for advice on what to avoid, and hopefully accept that weight loss has to be slow, steady and sensible.

If you’re in the first category, it’s not too late!  Throw away that “latest fad diet – lose 9 lbs in 3 days” that you got from your friend Caroline and continue reading. Become one of the very few that lose weight and keep it off.

For most of us in the developed world life has just become too easy and comfortable. I’m not saying there aren’t people who are poor and who don’t have many possessions, but very few people in the western world and in particular the United States are so poor they can’t afford to eat. The problem is these days we are surrounded by cheap calorie-dense but nutritionally-poor foods – and unfortunately, we are programmed by nature to eat and eat and eat!.

In the old days, that would be a good thing. We would desire foods that would ensure our continued survival. What happens, though, when we don’t have to work for our food (we don’t have to expend energy catching it!) and we can eat cheaply any time we choose? What happens is our survival programming becomes a curse. We overeat on a massive scale and we get the obesity levels we are seeing now. And they are getting worse – our younger generation now is suffering the curse of fast-food and obesity.

Combine this abundance of food with the “quick fix” mentality which teaches us we can satisfy our desires immediately. All you have to do is whip out your credit card and you can have whatever you want tomorrow, no waiting or patience required. Why do think the weight loss market is so huge? Billions of dollars spent on the latest gadgets, diets, drugs and exercise equipment that just are not going to work on their own.

Nothing you can buy will do you any good if you are not prepared to put in the effort required to make it work. Buying the equipment isn’t going to remove that excess flab. You are.

Accept that you don’t get anything for nothing and be prepared to put in some effort to make it work.

My guess is that by now 9 out of 10 people will have left this web page! They will have become uncomfortable realising I’m not selling some Lose-Weight- Quick –No –Effort-Required product and that they are not hearing what they want to hear.

To be honest I could earn a small fortune just selling people what they really want to buy! What they want is the magic bullet for weight loss and they don’t seem to mind how much money they spend in their search for this mythical holy grail.

Sigh, if only I could. But unfortunately I can’t. Because I won’t. Because it’s not true – the magic solution does not exist and people who tell you it does are only after your hard-earned bucks and not your long-term health and happiness.

On the other hand, there are a few weight loss products that - dare I say it - aren’t too bad and at least won’t do you any harm! If you would like to check them out visit my Weight Loss - Diets section. If I feel the products aren't effective or safe I'll tell you.

All the best,

Robert E. Bartram
(Hypnotherapist & Pilates Instructor)

Calories In Food

Fat Burning Foods

Could it be possible? Are there really foods out there that, when eaten, will burn our fat away?
Or is that just too good to be true? Tubby investigates….

The definition of  fat-burning foods is that these are foods that take up as many calories to digest as they actually contain. If you were hoping that Cheeseburgers were included, then I’m afraid that you’ll be disappointed!

Digesting food is work for our bodies – and work requires energy in the form of food intake. Just how much energy depends on the food itself. It has been proved that processed food takes little energy to digest and is mostly stored as fat – much of the nutrition is stripped from this type of food. Vitamin and fibre content is depleted; food such as takeout burger with fries offers very little that is good for you, and much that is bad!

This type of food is digested too quickly, causing sudden rises in your blood sugar, followed by an equally sudden drop, which causes you to feel tired and unsatisfied and quickly hungry again. Hardly any calories are expended during digestion of such food.

Fat-burning foods are the exact opposite of this; the less a food has been bleached, processed and “messed with”, the more filling and nutritious it will be, the longer it will take you to digest it, and the more calories it will take to do so. Fat-burning foods also have the effect of waking up your system and kick-starting your metabolism, and assist in flushing fat out.

So here is a list of great fat-burning foods:

Wholegrains (oats, barley, wholewheat etc.)

Choose granary bread, brown pasta and rice, wholegrain cereal with no added sugar or salt, oatmeal porridge and so on – the more unprocessed the better. The wholegrain part is called insoluble fibre, provides bulk and is not digested by the gut – it passes through the bowel and “cleans up” as it goes. Insoluble fibre helps clear out fatty deposits and is essential for bowel health. In some African countries where all food is unprocessed, colon and bowel cancers are completely unheard of, whereas in the developed world, these cancers are in the top 5 fatal diseases.
Needless to say, foods containing fibre fill you up for longer as they take longer to digest.

Citrus fruits (fresh)

Oranges, grapefruit, lemons, limes, tangerines…there’s got to be something you like in there! Choose loose, unwaxed and eat as soon as possible. Squeeze fresh lemon on your cooked vegetables like the Greeks do, try lime juice on fresh salmon. All contain Vitamin C which helps dilute fat and loosen cholesterol deposits. Vitamin C is also essential for the absorption of iron into your body – drink a glass of freshly-squeezed orange with your main meal instead of tea or coffee (which actually block iron absorption). Vitamin C cannot be stored by the body, so snack on fresh fruit every day.

Other fruit

Apples, raspberries, strawberries – in fact all types of berries. Apples are an absolute star, containing pectin and soluble fibre as well as vitamins. Soluble fibre helps the gut and lowers cholesterol, while pectin limits the amount of fat a cell can store. Apples are inexpensive, available all year round and weigh in at only 50 calories!

Salad vegetables

Tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce (as dark green type as possible), celery, radishes – all contain few calories, are loaded with vitamins, minerals and anti-cancer compounds, flush out your kidneys as they contain mostly water, and burn more calories during digestion than they contain. Add to every meal – sneak them into every sandwich; put a bowl of salad on the table even if you’re only having egg and chips. Eat a rainbow of colours every day!

Fat burning foods certainly do exist and adding them to your diet every day will make a big difference to your health, weight and wellbeing. So you’ll not only look good, you’ll feel great!

All the best, and good luck to you,

Carol J Bartram
(Personal Trainer, Pilates Instructor & Massage Therapist)

Fat Burning Foods 

Why Low Fat Diets Don't Work - Part 2

In Why Low Fat Diets Don't Work Part 1, I told you about Margaret and her efforts to lose weight quickly and without exercising. Here are the facts about low-fat low-cal diets - too late for Margaret, sadly…

1. Food is fuel to your body. Your brain gets nourished first, then your organs, then the rest of you. A certain amount of fuel is needed just to keep everything “ticking over”. This varies from person to person, but is roughly 1000 – 1200 calories per day. That’s before you get out of bed and start moving around.
    
2. Protein (meat, fish, eggs, nuts, soya) is used for repairing the body and building muscle. Your body can function on a mainly-protein diet, but it is not the preferred fuel and has side-effects (see section on High-Protein Diets).
    
3. Carbohydrates (rice, pasta, cereals, potatoes, bread, veg, fruit) are the fuel that powers the engine. Without sufficient carbs in the diet, your body starts to self-cannibalise and break down muscle tissue for fuel. Muscle tissue is the body’s furnace; the less muscle you have, the fewer calories you burn and the weaker and more lethargic you feel.
    
4. Fats are an essential part of a healthy diet – in small quantities and preferably from such sources as nuts, oily fish and unsaturated oil such as olive oil. Some fat is necessary for vitamins A, D, E and K to be absorbed into the body.
    
5. By the second week of a low-fat low-cal diet, your body has decided there is obviously a famine and goes into meltdown! Excesses of a natural enzyme are produced to make fat storage super-efficient, as fat stores are what will keep you alive in the long run.

From this, you can see that the low-fat low-cal diet has had the opposite effect to the one you wanted. You have become a Slow-Metabolism Fat-Storing Machine that is nervy, irritable, feels sick and can’t sleep! Worse (if anything could be worse), even when you start eating properly again, your fat-storing remains super-efficient, and your metabolism sluggish (no muscle, remember?) so the weight simply piles back on – more than before. Your body will not be fooled again to shed so much weight so quickly, so subsequent “quick” diet attempts make the situation worse – and you have the Yo –Yo effect.

Once in this situation, it’s mighty hard to get out of it. But it can be done. By giving up the “quick fix” idea for ever, and accepting that change takes time and that it’s time for change, you can persuade your body to trust you again. Remember; if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got. In this case, fat and miserable! Eat small portions of healthy, quality food regularly and set aside some time every day to get some exercise, and within a month you’ll start to see results. And you’ll feel so much better that you won’t believe it!

Carol J Bartram

Article 

Why Low Fat Diets Don't Work - Part 2

Why Low Fat Diets Don't Work - Part 1

For many years there have been the Low-Fat Low-Calorie Diets everywhere we look. Diets that promise amazing results in the shortest time - you couldn't open a magazine without seeing one, usually advertised by an incredibly skinny model. You needed a microscope to find an excess ounce of fat on her.

These diets certainly appeared to work in the short term; one lady I knew called Margaret had shed over 60 pounds and had been named Slimmer of The Year. She kept the photo of her Award Ceremony on her desk and showed it to everyone who came by.

But you wouldn't believe it to look at her. The photo was a year old. In that year, she'd not only put the 60 lb back on, but another 20 as well. She was morbidly obese and had developed diabetes because of it and she was very unhappy - the photo and her past slimming glories seemed to be all that kept her going, and were her main topic of conversation.

The diet she had so religiously stuck to was low-fat, low-cal. It required much preparation and planning and the endless weighing of ingredients; and it must have been incredibly boring! She admitted that she'd often been hungry while following it - not surprising as the diet was only allowing 1,000 calories a day. I'd have been tempted to eat the plate as well! Her diet seemed to consist of mainly turkey (and not a lot of that) and veg or salad. The turkey had to be cooked without added fat, and in those days all vegetables were boiled to death, anyway, so her meals must have been utterly tasteless. No red meat, no butter, no olive oil, no cheese. Tiny amounts of bread, and she even had to weigh out a potato on the days she was allowed one - boiled of course!

The willpower involved must have been staggering. But, God love her, she'd stuck to that culinary Hell-on-Earth for 9 long months, although she admitted to me that she'd often felt nauseous, tired, nervous and irritable and had even had trouble sleeping. She'd "got her reward" (or so she thought) by seeing the pounds drop off on the scales - sometimes up to 5 lb in a week, she told me excitedly, her eyes shining with the fervour of the Truly Obsessed…

And of course, that was the problem. That amount of weight loss was far too much and far too quickly - it just wasn't natural. And no exercise was advised; she wouldn't have the energy to work out, in any case. She reached her target weight. Big party, photos, flowers, featured in a magazine; the whole enchilada. And then it was all over, and life carried on. She returned to eating "normally", but was given no advice on how to eat "sensibly". And the pounds came back. Quietly, insidiously, inexorably. In 12 months she put 80 lb back on and became almost suicidal. She was truly heartbroken - she'd tried so hard and done so well - where on Earth had she gone wrong, she asked?

She tried again, half-heartedly this time - lost a bit, put it back on and more, and that was how it went on. Yo-Yo dieting, getting fatter and fatter and more and more depressed, completely convinced she was an abject failure. Finally she gave up completely and just lived in the past, gazing at that photo for hours on end and sighing. From that point on, no healthy eating-and-exercise-plan on the planet could help her, because she was convinced weight loss just "didn't work" for her. She'd made up her mind and the facts didn't matter. If you'd like to read the facts that would have changed Margaret's life, please see Why Low Fat Diets Don't Work Part 2.

Carol J Bartram

Article 

Why Low Fat Diets Don't Work - Part 1

Diets That Work

We all seem to be always on the lookout for those elusive magical beasts that are rarer than a herd of unicorns – Diets That Work.

We dream of eating programs that are easy to use, simple to follow and contain ingredients that we can find at the corner store. We fantasise about eating what we like, having a treat when we want and still watching the pounds melt away…

But is this possible? Or are we living in a wistful la-la land, and the harsh truth is that to drop the weight we have to ditch everything we like and live on spinach? It isn’t Christmas; It’s Monday!

Tubby investigates some of the types of diet that are Out There:-

Low Fat, Low Calorie Diets

Used to be incredibly popular in the Callanetics era of the 70s & 80s, when you were encouraged to give up everything you liked and exist on 1000 calories a day. Weight loss was extreme and so was your misery, because the moment you reached your target weight and started eating properly again, you promptly put all the weight back on. And more. Read more about why Low Calorie Diets Don’t Work.

High Protein Diets

We’re talking Atkins here; you eat as much protein (meat, cheese and anything fatty) that you fancy, but very few carbs (as in bread, pasta, veg) and the pounds just fall off you.
Well, they do, but it’s not good for you. And you feel ill and lethargic, since your body needs carbs for fuel and doesn’t function well on pure protein – like running a petrol engine on diesel. And it can damage your kidneys.
And the weight goes straight back on again when you get out of hospital!

Meal Replacement Diets

These encourage you to replace some or all of your meals with a shake or a bar for a specified period; the replacements are carefully nutritionally balanced to give you all you need. LighterLife is an example.
If you have a lot of weight to lose, these can be a good kick-starter – but they’re not cheap and you can become very bored very quickly. You’ll most certainly lose weight, but the danger comes when you start introducing “real” food again, as the temptation is to go crazy! You must be in good health to even think of these types of diet.

Reduced Calorie/Increased Exercise diet

Most other sensible diet plans fall into this category, and these are the ones that will work long-term. Results may be slower than the other diets at first; you are encouraged to aim for 1lb weight loss per week and increase your exercise to around 30-40 minutes a day. No foods are forbidden, but you regard high fat, high calorie items as occasional treats and try to eat healthy, lower fat food such as lean meat, foods cooked without excessive extra fat and wholegrain carbs, combined with lots of fruit and vegetables on a daily basis.
Good examples are The South Beach Diet, Weightwatchers, Slimming World and the Zone Diet, to name just a few.

In future articles, the dedicated researchers here at Tubby will review these diets and more, so that you can decide which one would best suit YOU.

All the best,

Carol J Bartram
(Personal Trainer)

Article

Diets That Work