Scale It Down

The sneaky thing about calories is they not only accumulate by way of fat, but also in things where you least expect them to.

One of the most difficult mindsets we changed was our belief on where calories came from. And the biggest demon on this front was our misguided thoughts about fat. Fat Free meant pour it on to us. (We thought we'd died and gone to heaven when Nabisco came out with Reduced Fat Oreos). When we designed our own diet based upon counting fat grams, we became experts at 'pouring it on'. We figured out that if 40 fat grams were the normal dietary allowance, we'd eat only 20 fat grams a day to lose weight. What ensued were Jethro Bodine sized bowls of cereal and Corningware casserole dishes of rice and pasta. It was our thinking, at the time, we could eat as much as we wanted of all the very low fat and fat free things we could find as long as we didn't go over the 20 gram limit. We'd consume boxes of Snackwell cookies and Entemann Lite coffee cakes at one sitting because they were fat free. We definitely had the most fun following this diet because we thought we had bucked the system: Eureka! We're eating like pigs and still losing weight! As soon as we stopped counting fat grams ('cuz you know, the only reason we were doing it to begin with was to drop weight fast), we went right back to eating all the high fat foods we had denied ourselves to begin with and ultimately poured the pounds back on once again.

The fat gram diet was obviously a fiasco because of the jumbo portions being served and the lack of balanced food choices that were made. What we find most surprising now, is that it never occurred to us that all those fat free foods were loaded with sugar and flour - two of the biggest resources of calories. For some reason, we always thought that baked goods were high in calories solely because of the butter. When you add the flour in at 400 calories a cup (most recipes have at least 2 cups worth) and sugar, at 773 calories a cup, the caloric totals begin to soar. If the recipe also calls for brown sugar, another 828 calories (per cup) gets tacked onto the total. Butter, wasn't the only culprit there after all.

Diets promise weight loss. Dieting is the process of reprogramming your eating habits to lose weight. This is something that overeaters never want to do to begin with and what many of us just can't seem to do successfully on our own. We think this is why the Weight Watchers' system is so successful. They did all the calorie counting for you and called it something else, points. (Talk about advocating a reward system for food!) Not only is this a huge boost for the overweight mentality but also a shrewd marketing move to say the least.

Logistically speaking, counting 20 something points for the day (much better than fat grams) as opposed to thousands of calories is an easier diet pill to swallow. WW also conquers the denial files because you can eat your points in any manner you chose. That means on days when you want to eat pizza, you do, and cut back in some other way for the day as long as you stick within the total points allowed. What this actually does is teach you to think twice about what you're putting into your mouth and plan ahead. The only problem we heard of that people have with this system occurred when they encountered foods where the points weren't clear because it was tough to guestimate what they should be.

Weight Watchers were also pioneers in the creation of "maintenance plans" - the way you were supposed to start eating once you reached your weight loss goal. They knew the fact that once you lost the weight, if you didn't modify what happened next you'd gain it all back. We know all this, because we first encountered Weight Watchers in the 60's - when we were kids. Back then, the program was intensely based upon low-cal food preparation. For example, a WW breakfast danish consisted of a piece of dry toast with a ½ cup of cottage cheese on it and cinnamon sprinkled over the top. ( The concoction was bland beyond words.) It was also at some point during this era when WW came out with their first frozen food entrees. From what we can remember, these meals came in white and pink thin boxes of fish and green vegetable duos. (Also very tasteless.) Needless to say, diet foods have come a long way since then.

The worst diet we went on as kids… …and we shutter to think about it now, was the medical profession's standard hand out to fat people. We knew it as, The 1,200 Calorie a Day Diet, which consisted of pages of boring pre-calculated meal suggestions made up of rye crisps, grapefruit and baked fish. (We're convinced these menus were compiled by evil nutritionists in anti-flab laboratories.) This diet plan reeked of denial dilemmas - especially for grade school chubbers like us, who lived for after school snacks of cookies and milk. Whenever we were forced to go onto these plans, we'd cheat at every opportunity we'd get.

If you want most of the work done for you, (and isn't that what going on a prefabricated diet is all about?), the Weight Watchers program is the most realistic plan out there in our opinion. With regards to all those other wacky diets out there - fat gram counting included - we all know better. There really is something to the concept of losing weight slowly. In doing so, you have a better chance of revising your eating habits while making changes gradually toward the things you need the most work on. Maintaining weight loss then, becomes a natural process of weight control.

We found the biggest thing wrong with relying upon a published weight loss plan or latest weight reduction fad was that whenever we went on a diet, we set ourselves up for going off of it. It always came down to a mental battle of semantics. It's as if an instinctual trigger goes off when you tell yourself you're going on a diet that calms your inner fat mentality into thinking you can handle it because it's a temporary adjustment only. We realized the only way we were going to bury that smoking gun was by completely changing the way we thought about and approached weight control. In other words, it was time to stop going on a diet just to lose weight.

There are a lot of experts out there who pooh-pooh the idea of focusing on "maintenance". We disagree. We believe that if a heavy person concentrates only on losing weight first and then on changing what they do to maintain that weight afterwards, they'll most likely be heading for disaster. Keeping it off, whether you call it maintenance or something else, is ultimately the desired end result, not losing it.

Even if you lose the weight slowly and modify your approach to food along the way, (as we have), maintaining the new weight will be a consistent process to permanently stay off the vicious yo-yo cycle. Thin people are very succinct about this whole process, they simply "watch their weight". For heavy people, this is something that doesn't come naturally because if you've always had a weight problem you've never been able to master the concept to begin with. When you decide to manage your weight, the success ratio skyrockets. We like to think of it like this: weight management = weight control.

Turning Point > > > We've always been in a rush to lose weight and gain it back. It wasn't until we finally, (that's a kicking and screaming all the way 'finally') admitted to ourselves that our Yeah-Butt habits did more to pack the weight on than to take it off, were we able to recognize that 'quick' was not a fix.

It's not about waking up on Monday 50 pounds overweight and greeting Tuesday with the mentality of a calorie deficit food Nazi - definitely been there, done that. It is about making a gradual transition from all the years of thinking and eating like a food derelict.

It takes a reduction of 3500 calories to lose one pound. Figuring out how to lose those 3500 calories on a weekly basis is the ultimate challenge. Regardless of what you call them or how you accumulate them, dealing with calories is a game of numbers and cognizance. No matter how hard we tried, (and we set records trying), there was just no way of getting around the simple fact that calories, are the ultimate determinant factor to weight control.

Somewhere along the line we picked up the preconceived notion that to lose weight, calorie intake had to be limited to 1,200 calories a day. (We think that mindset started with the evil nutritionists.) The problem was that 1,200 calories is an appetizer for those of us with a romantic mentality toward food. We couldn't help but wonder if there wasn't a higher number we could work with starting out. We gained new perspective on the matter when we began calculating the number of calories we could have without gaining weight.

Up until this point, we always focused on what we couldn't have, by category: NO desserts, NO fried foods, NO anything that could be construed as fattening. NO contest - a big manila for the denial files. One of the best tools we found to help us overcome the diet NO's, came by way of a simple formula called the Harris-Benedict Equation.

We were first introduced to the equation by renowned fitness expert, Jim Karas. In his book, Business Plan for the Body, Karas explains how important the Harris-Benedict formula is to weight loss. Very simply put, the equation takes into account your sex, height, weight and age and calculates the number of calories you burn in a normal day just living - no exercise, just what you burn by doing nothing at all - absolutely nothing. ( Technically speaking, this is called the basal metabolic rate. If you're a person who needs the scientific data on such things, we recommend you read Jim's book.) Here it is:

Females:
661 + (4.38 x Wt. in Lbs.) + (4.38 x Ht. in Inches) - (4.7 x Age) = Calories burned daily

Males:
67 + (6.24 x Wt. in Lbs.) + (12.7 x Ht. in Inches) - (6.9 x Age) = Calories burned daily

After we figured out how many calories we'd burn just by existing, (which by the way was higher than 1,200 a day to begin with), we just had to ask: what's the absolute highest amount of calories we can eat and still lose weight? The answer to this question came by way of activity over any given day. In other words, there are additional calculations to allow for all types of movement, which ups the caloric ante. The key word here is movement, we haven't even gotten to the X word yet.

These activity calculations can be done on a wide range of levels. On the low end of the spectrum, things like cutting the lawn or doing light housework, (yes, you get to eat more, just from doing that), will increase your daily calorie intake significantly enough to get excited about it. If dusting was going to allow us to eat more, we definitely wanted to know how many rooms needed cleaning.

In the beginning, it seemed like all we were setting ourselves up to do was counting calories and counting them was definitely a big turn-off. In reality what happened was, we began retraining ourselves to become consistently aware of them. And what evolved was an eventual progression to the mental level of a normal weight person without much pain and ultimately no gain.

The HB equation is a great starting point to figure out what caloric track you should be on to lose those 3,500 calories a week. We focused on a pound a week to start because changing mentality takes time. Approaching the matter on a long haul basis will increase your chances of really making some changes in the way you do things. When you begin approaching food differently, the amount of weight you lose over a time span becomes inconsequential to your ultimate goals.

There are diet charts out there that show daily caloric intake based on height and age. We found these kinds of resources restrictive and inflexible. We think food and flexibility go hand in hand to achieve good weight management. By constantly challenging ourselves to find all kinds of foods to eat and, of course, in the biggest quantities we could eat them without doing damage to the cause, the process became much easier.

Working with a food diary leads to calorie cognizance. We know, the thought of it makes you crazy - it's tedious, time consuming, a pain in the… butt you will be amazed at the results.

Thin Tale Food for thought: thin people keep a mental food diary 24/7. Shocking, but true. They are constantly aware of what they eat and how much exercise they get. AND when they overeat (yes, they really do) they consistently compensate for it. They maintain diet equilibrium. How? Mental conditioning. Once your awareness level is permanently tuned in, the process of weight control becomes second nature.

Making notes about what you eat works because it makes you think - twice. It's the same premise that works for so many other things; like taking notes in a class or making to do lists around the house. It's that actual pen to paper process that helps organize your focus and thoughts. Writing down what goes into your mouth every day definitely raises your awareness level. When you are aware of what you're doing, your subconscious works with you and not against you. Keeping a food diary also worked extremely well for our biggest motivating factor: having as many calories as we absolutely could and still lose weight.

Where you keep your food diary is also important - it should be stored in the room where you feed most often so you can write down eats as they occur. If you have a lot of meals outside of the home, pen and paper are a meal companion must. How you keep your diary will depend upon your personality and what works best for you. We went the detailed route by including total daily calories allowed, (how else could we keep track of how much we could eat and still lose weight?), water consumption, exercise activities and a weekly summary page. Seeing these items noted each day provided a gentle reminder of the goals trying to be accomplished. Whether you structure your diary simply for calories consumed or go into great detail, the format you choose has got to be conducive to your own personality. This is a tedious process, especially in the beginning, and making it as appealing as possible is a definite plus. If you want some ideas as to form, click

Food Diary.pdf

Weekly Summary Male.pdf

Weekly Summary Female.pdf

…okay, we're going to say it, eXercise. If you really want to boost the amount of calories you can eat on a daily basis and still lose weight click on Shvitz Factor.