Dan Cantor Fitness
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Excellence in Fitness Training
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Excellence in Fitness Training
Dan's original articles about working out, proper diet, and wellness
Caloric intake v healthy eating 11-13-10
There’s been a lot of publicity recently surrounding an experiment designed by Mark Haub, a professor of nutrition at Kansas State University who decided to prove a point to his students that the most important factor in managing your body weight is caloric intake, not necessarily the consumption of “healthy” foods. His Twinkie diet actually did achieve results, don’t worry he did take multi-vitamins during the course of this experiment. He also drank a protein shake and ate vegetables, which I propose to be a key to some of the beneficial health results he experienced. Many people whose lifestyle includes the “Fast Food Diet” as he terms it, do not take multivitamins or consume vegetables, and therefore wouldn’t experience the beneficial effects of the diet if they also limited their total calories as the professor has. One last comment here is that the professor has just barely achieved a healthy weight and based on his stated plan to increase his daily calories by 300 to 2100, he will most certainly increase his base weight back into the unhealthy weight range.
As a certified nutrition consultant, I’m well aware that the key to our base weight is a simple formula of calories consumed vs. calories used. It’s really amazing how little food we actually need to fuel our bodies for our daily activities. I believe that our eating habits are the last bastion of the wasteful consumer lifestyle that we’ve all been living these last numbers of years. When we’re really ready to make changes to our eating habits, we will really see the changes we desire in our body image.
When I was in personal trainer school one of my instructors used to tell us that all we need to know about nutrition was to tell our clients to cut their meals in half and they would achieve their goal weight (he wasn’t the nutrition professor). This may seem simplistic, but he had over 25 years of success to back him up. His premise was that people ate 25-30 foods repetitively, and that habit and culture were the primary forces behind what people eat. He also insisted that most people will cheat and lie about what they’re eating on a daily basis when monitored by a fitness or medical professional so why bother trying to micro-manage their eating habits.
If we take the lesson learned above and are looking to translate that into a tool for healthy eating, a good way to move forward would be to start by reducing the size of our meals, eliminate or reduce to a greater extent those few foods that are the “worst” in terms of saturated fat, sugar, and highly processed flours. Be sure to consume fruits and vegetables on a daily basis, drink an adequate amount of water, and maintain a habit of daily physical activity. These few changes will allow you to continue in your basic lifestyle and should not cause you to feel deprived or imposed upon.
A more deliberate guideline would be to select your target weight and add a zero to that number, which becomes your total calorie count for your daily needs. I’m not going to argue the science behind this, but I have found this to be a very effective method and very similar to the formula used by one of the healthiest and most popular diet regimens. The fact is that the average person cannot count calories accurately and almost always consumes more total calories than they think they are. Apply the above-listed principles to your diet and presto! You now have a custom diet that you will most certainly enjoy, and should allow you to successfully accomplish your weight loss and fitness goals.
