This is a do-it-yourself weight loss and control plan using five inexpensive and readily available tools. The challenge for most of us today is not the struggle to find enough to eat, but taking care not to eat too much. The food and restaurant industries are interested in fat bottom lines, much less so our waistlines. Most of us need a plan, an eating scheme, to help us stay at a healthy weight. All it takes is a little effort and five simple tools.
Tool one is a kitchen scale to weigh the food in grams. Tool two is a basic calculator. The third item is a comprehensive calorie guide. Tool four is a record keeping means such as a notebook or spreadsheet. The final tool is a bathroom scale.
We simply have to convert the foods we eat into calories, add them up and get our feedback from the bathroom scale. And it doesn't have to be painful and intense, like a television show, where it’s so entertaining to watch overweight people suffering under a commanding weight trainer. Our weight gain wasn't fast and intense. It was done gradually and painlessly, with just a few extra calories eaten each day. The weight should come off the very same way.
This is not a nutrition or exercise plan. For nutrition guidelines the US Department of Health and Human services is a good source . This is a food metering program designed to control weight. Unregulated, unfettered eating got us here. Careful, smart, food metering can take us back.
Start Counting Calories
To start out, we need to find out how much we have been eating. For a week or two, eat the usual way, but count the calories. Record the daily total. Then get a daily average for that first week or two. Use that calorie intake amount as a baseline and set a goal for weight loss. For me, the beginning of counting calories was an eye opener. Some of the foods I had been casually snacking on were very calorie dense. I was eating raisins and mixed nuts by the handful and often many times a day. These are healthy foods, but raisins are 130 calories for just one ounce which is about 1/4 cup, and mixed nuts are 160 calories for an ounce. The act of counting calories affected how I was eating right away. I did this for about ten days and I wasn't trying to lose weight. During this calorie charting process, I actually lost 4 pounds without even trying. Apparently I had been eating far more than the 2,300 calories I averaged per day those first ten days. While counting, just be self aware of this possible effect. At first this counting process is somewhat time consuming and tedious. It will get easier as it becomes a habit.
 |
| "Hey, I wasn't trying to lose weight!" We need steady feedback from the bathroom scale |
For finding the calories in a given food, the calorie guidebook is an indispensable resource. I use “The Doctor’s Pocket Calorie Fat and Carbohydrate Counter.” Most any food, including chain restaurant items can be found in this one handy guidebook. Some foods, such as home cooked meals, with multiple ingredients, are challenging to count. Sometimes we can estimate from a similar item in the guidebook. I have modified some recipes for easy and accurate calorie counting . My favorite fruits are apples, oranges and raisins. So I go to my book and find an average apple or orange is listed at 80 calories. Chips are a high calorie food, per volume. Just one ounce (28 grams), which barely fills half a cereal bowl, is 150 calories. Grabbing handful after handful out of the bag is a quick way to over-dose on the calories. Foods like this need to be weighed.
The Kitchen Scale
Enter the kitchen scale. The kitchen scale I use is inexpensive (Great kitchen scales at Amazon
), battery operated, and with a couple of buttons and a small LCD display. Any type of bowl or plate or cup or even nothing at all can be used for the weighing vessel. I use the serving plate, or cup, or bowl I will be eating from. When the scale powers up it will also do a zero. Therefore, anything on it when powered on will be cancelled out (in scale terminology, "tared”) so all that's weighed is the food. There is also a “tare” or zero button. With the scale powered on, pressing that button will again cancel out the weight on the scale. |
| 85 grams of raisin bran is lookin' good, but where's the milk? |
Set the scale up for grams. Grams are great, forget ounces. The ounce is too big for measuring small amounts of food. Cumbersome conversions become necessary, such as a half or quarter or tenth of an ounce. One ounce is 28 grams. Using a scale allows to avoid volume measurements like cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons. It’s so much easier to weigh the serving in grams, with no extra dishes and utensils to wash. There are two different ways to do it. One method is to weigh a manufacturer's listed serving amount from the nutrition label. But what if we want more, or less, than the manufacturer's serving? I prefer to weigh the food in grams on my scale and multiply the weight by the “calories-per-gram” of the food. Why calories-per- gram? Using this number makes it very easy to find the calories in any amount of any food. I keep a list of the calories per gram of foods I commonly eat inside my guidebook. I also made my own list: Calories-per-gram for common foods
Using Calories-Per-Gram
Here’s an example using calories-per-gram and food labels. Let’s use our scale to find the calories in a bowl of cereal with milk. Now with your calculator, divide the box label calories per serving by the grams per serving. The result is the very useful calories-per-gram. Reading the nutrition label on a box of cereal we find a one cup serving is 190 calories and weighs 53 grams. 190 divided by 53 equals 3.58. Write that number down on the box with a marker. That’s the calories-per-gram of this particular cereal. Put your empty bowl on the scale and turn on the scale. It will auto-zero and read “0”. Pour out the quantity you want to eat. Forget about the package serving size. Just pour however much you want to eat. Multiply the gram reading, say 85 by 3.58 (calories per gram, now in marker on the box). The result is 301. Your serving is 301 calories. Enter that number in your food diary or spreadsheet. Suppose now that you want to add milk to your bowl of cereal. Hit the tare, or zero button on the scale with the bowl of dry cereal on the scale. It should read "0."
Now add some milk. The milk weighs, say, 245 grams. One gram of skim milk is .36 calories. 245 times .36 equals 88 calories. Our desired serving of cereal and milk is 389 calories. That was easy. One bowl, no measuring cup gets dirty, and we have exactly the serving size we wanted. Now please log it.
Keep counting like this, using food labels along with the scale and guidebook to get an accurate calorie tally. This is a precision operation as we are carving off just a bit of caloric intake each day.
 |
| It would be nice if they did this calculation for us so we didn't have write it on the label |
Record keeping is absolutely critical. It can be done on paper but I prefer a spreadsheet. For sensible weight loss set a goal about 100 calories a day lower than your starting, or baseline, calorie intake. Another way to find the your baseline calorie consumption is to use to use the 15 calories per pound rule. Keep counting and counting and counting and weighing and weighing to see the effect of the intake level on the bathroom scale. We need to weigh ourselves on rising in the early morning dressed (or undressed) the same way. It may be necessary to tweak the calorie intake a bit, since we have different metabolism and exercise levels. There is no correct daily calorie goal for all. We have to find the range that gets us the results we want. And stick to it.
Today I use a spreadsheet for my record keeping. I keep a laptop handy on my kitchen counter and simply do the data entry and let the spreadsheet do the math. I recommend doing calorie and weight averages by the month. That is the best way to find out the long term weight results of a given calorie consumption level and make adjustments as desired. Weight management is a long term process but requires only a few extra minutes per day.
 |
| Column E is the product of C and D. E31 is the day's calories summed up. F31 is the monthly average of calories consumed per day. F30 is the current weight. |
Here is a video demonstration of counting the calories in a bowl of cereal and milk, with the calculating and recording done with a spreadsheet.
Count up for Weight Loss
I used this counting method diligently for 13 months. During that time, I shed about 16 pounds. I'm back to my original waist size. feel great, I have good energy and I want to stay at this weight. For me, a year of calorie counting was enough to change my eating habits and to be more aware the calorie dense problem foods and snacks. So I stopped counting full time after 13 months. I check my weight a couple times a week and I still do weigh portions of dangerous foods like chips and nuts and raisins. But for the most part I don't count anymore. But given the rich food environment we live in, we will tend to gain weight gradually. When I put on three or four pounds, I break out my scale and count for couple or three months to take the weight off. They're still out there, that triple bacon double cheese burger, that bag of potato chips, that box of raisins...they're waiting. We can look them dead in the label, weigh a portion and eat them. We can count them and we can beat them.
No comments:
Post a Comment