May 21, 2003

• Need Versus Want

  
  

  If you've been reading my blog for the past few days, you are aware that I've become obssessed with losing five pounds.  So far my scale shows a total loss of .5 (be sure to notice that decimal there) pounds total for the past seven days.  I'm sure that there are people among my readers  shaking their heads right now in the sage awareness that it is normal for body weight to fluctuate by as much as a couple pounds per week even if the person isn't trying to lose or gain, so that little half pound isn't so impressive in and of itself.  Now if I were able to maintain that direction of flux so that the scales tipped down another half pound every week, then I'd be onto something.

  
  

  I've been looking into various diet plans and programs because I would very much like to tip that scale to a lower number.  FIVE pounds lower, that's all I ask (for now.)  I've learned that the difference between minimum requirements and the amount of food I actually eat, is well, you can insert your own analogy for an immense proportion here.  So for someone who wants to trim a little this borders on good news. 

  
  

  All food is composed of either protein, carbohydrate, or fat with trace minerals riding along as a bonus.  Some foods are purely one category or another, but most are a combination of the three.  The tricky part comes when you try to 'balance' the diet.  I don't know if I'd ever really thought about the term balanced diet except as a vague concept that meant that I had to consume one diet coke for every chocolate truffle I ate.  But I've learned that this is not what the term means.  Go ahead and laugh all you people who actually passed 4th grade health, I was busy with more important stuff that day.  One the assumption that it's never too late to learn, I've looked it up and find that the balance refers to calories consumed = calories expended. 

  
  

  Everyone burns calories at a different rate.  Our basic resting caloric expediture is combined with the activity caloric expenditure to determine how many calories are required to maintain our current body weight.  Just for exampling purposes, a 30 year old, 200 pound man will have a resting caloric expenditure of around 1800 calories.  Add to that the activity caloric expenditure of about 800, and any exercise (walking at 3.5 miles per hour for 40 minutes uses about 200 calories) and we can approximate the need for 2,800  calories of food to maintain his 200 pounds. 

  
  

  In other words, my husband can eat just about anything he pleases and he won't gain an ounce.  Or, let him skip that afternoon candy bar, and he'll lose 5 pounds overnight.  But then we figure me into the equation.  For accurate numbers, it's necessary to make an appointment with a Kinethesiologist and be hooked up to expensive equipment to measure caloric expenditure.  I'm not willing to pay for that just to research a Xanga blog, so we'll estimate that I need about 1/2 as much intake to maintain my weight as what it takes for my husband.  So now I have a number to work with in planning my diet.  1,400 calories a day will balance my intake with my output.  (And BTW, that's pretty well dead on with what I've learned by tracking my daily diet against the resulting changes on the scale.)  Below 1,400 calories I lose and above that amount I gain weight. 

  
  

  So then I start looking for information on planning a specific diet that will give me slightly less than 1,400 calories (I'm shooting for something in the 1,200 range) and will still meet my daily nutritional requirements.  Earlier in the week, I joked that if I limited my daily food intake to one grapefruit, that I might be able to lose that five pounds.  One cup of raw grapefruit (230 grams) contains 73.6 calories.  These calories come from .23 grams of fat, 1.4 grams of protein, and 18.6 grams of carbohydrate.  In addition, grapefruit weighs in with 79.12 mg of Vitamin C which wards off scurvy, 285 (IUs) of Vitamin A and 319 mg of Potassium.  So even after I eat my grapefruit, I still have over 1,000 calories I can eat and still (hypothetically) lose weight. 

  
  

  Now I want to lose weight quickly, so I want to know what's the minimum I need to consume of the various nutritional elements to avoid malnutrition, loss of lean muscle, beri-beri, scurvy and the like.  I need a minimum of 10 grams of fat for hormone production and absorbtion of fat soluble vitamins.  This is less than one Tablespoon of vegetable oil, which contains 14 grams of fat.

  
  

  The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA)  for protein for an adult is .8 g/kg body weight. So to figure your protein RDA:
  
  1. Find your body weight.  (If you are hoping to lose, you can plug in your ideal weight here.)
  2. Convert pounds to kilograms ( pounds divided by 2.2 = kilograms)
  3. Multiply answer to #2 by .8g/kg to get your RDA for protein.

  
  

  This means I need approximately 45 grams of protein per day.  (And if you take those numbers backward to figure out my weight, I'm telling you now, you are one sadistic puppy.) 

  
  

  Time out for a few more numbers.  Fats have 9 calories per gram so 9 x 10 = 90.  Proteins have 4 calories per gram so 45 x 4 = 180 grams.  (That's about 4.5 cans of tuna or almost 1 pound of extremely extra lean beef).  Now I have 270 of my 1200 calories.  That leaves 900 calories of carbohydrate, protein, fat mixtures.  Since carbs are also 4 calories per gram thats approximately 225 grams of carb.  You may recall that the cup of grapefruit was 230 grams, so why wouldn't the grapefruit alone fit the bill?  A cup of grapefruit has about 200 grams of calorie-free water.  It would take about ten cups of grapefruit to equal the calories I'm trying to work into my diet.  That would get really tiresome about midday. 

  
  

  You can see why high protein diets have such appeal.  In the first place we actually need a lot of protein to repair and maintain our muscles.  In the second place, in terms of nutritional return, Carbs aren't nearly so valuable.  Carbohydrates are needed mainly for the associated vitamins and fiber.  

  
  

  Now I'm a do-it-yourself-er through and through, so I'm reading nutrition labels and experimenting in the kitchen like some lunatic bio-chemist to develop a diet I can lose with*.  If you'd prefer to skip that and subscribe to a plan where someone else has done the work, you really can't go wrong with Weight Watchers.  They have done all the charts and graphs and translated the numbers into easy to calculate formulas that you can take into the restaurant or grocery store of your choice. 

  
  

  The first thing you will discover when you start looking at diet plans for weight loss is that we Americans have no idea what a 'normal' portion size looks like.  We eat out in restaurants that serve us the nutritional requirements of a small African nation with every super-sized value meal.  We buy convenience foods that are loaded with salt, fat and sugar rather than flavored with nutritionally neutral herbs and spices.  There is no magic pill that will allow us to eat as much as we want while ignoring the limit of what we need.  With our body weight, just like every other decision in life, we are only in control if we are able to exercise self-restraint and appreciate that enough is enough.

  
  

  *The Ideal diet includes at least one chocolate truffle per day. 

  • 10:10 am
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