How To Eat More And Weigh Less
Let me start by explaining the title of this article. No,
I don’t have a new pill developed from decomposed rhino horn. When I say “eat
more,” I mean more bulk, more size, not more calories. There’s a big
difference.
I find the idea of “calorie density” is often very
confusing to clients. Let’s start by defining just what a calorie is. There
are lots of complicated technical definitions for a calorie. A simple one would
be, “a standard measurement for what your body uses for food/fuel.”
In other words it’s that part of food that lives on your
hips if you eat too much of it. The complicated thing about calories in food
(calorie density) is that you can’t judge the amount of calories by just looking
at the size of the food. Some food can be rather big, for
example, a head of lettuce, but contain very few calories. Some food can be
rather small, or in liquid form, for example, a half cup of oil, and have a
tremendous amount of calories.
One way to illustrate what calorie density will do to your
body is with a great picture from Joel Furman’s book, “Eat To Live,” the picture
I’ve placed in the center of this article. The average size of a stomach is
about one liter. The picture represents three, one liter stomachs. I could
title this picture, “Someone trying to fill up, or have the sensation of
fullness by eating different foods.” We’ll call this someone, Joe Stomach.
Notice
the first stomach on the left with 400 calories of oil. After eating 400
calories of oil, do you think Joe Stomach would feel the sensation of fullness,
or as we say, feel full? I’d say the answer is no. After all, Joe’s stomach is
still mostly empty. In the middle is a stomach with 400 calories of chicken.
I’m sure with that stomach Joe would still feel hungry. Now the stomach on the
right, that’s a full stomach. How do you think Joe Stomach would feel after
eating 400 calories of spinach, eggplant, and beans? The word stuffed comes to
mind.
So you see, in this case, it’s not how much you eat, but
what you eat. I always feel sorry for people I meet on “diets”
trying to eat calorie dense foods. They end up trying to eat portions about the
size of the average bottle cap. That’s not willpower, that’s torture. Feeling
full, satiated, is a primal need, so such diets are almost always doomed to
failure.
Adding to this concept Fuhrman shows some examples of
common foods in his book, using the chart below. The “calories per
pound” column is interesting, but what is really interesting in this case is the
“calories per liter” column. Remember, we said that the average stomach holds
about one liter of food, so essentially the calories per liter column is showing
just how much of a food you’d have to eat to fill your stomach and feel full.
I’d like to go over a couple of these just to bring home
the idea of what a drastic difference there is between foods. Notice that
if you tried to fill yourself and your stomach up with cheese, it would take about
3400 calories to do so! Make you rethink that whole fondue idea? If you tried
to fill up with chicken/turkey white meat (once considered a radical diet idea)
it would still take about 1600 calories, just a little more than white bread.
It seems to me that Fuhrman is directing us to is the bottom of the
columns, beans, fruits, and vegetables. Notice the difference between
getting full with green vegetables (200 calories) and getting full with potato
chips or French fries (3000 calories). The difference is 2800 calories! The
average American female needs to eat about 2000 calories per day (24 hour period)
to maintain her weight. For the average American female, the difference in
calories between these two meals (2800) would be more than her daily calorie requirement.
Choosing vegetables over chips or French fries, in time, would make the difference between being fat or thin.
So, eat more and weight less, isn’t that what we all want?
Going around hungry all the time is not the way to live if you don’t have to.
The fact is, in our abundant circumstances, going around hungry will probably
never really happen. Your
gnawing hunger will compel you to partake at one of the ubiquitous pleasure food
centers that are situated about every 50 feet in America. What you eat
makes all the difference. So stop denying yourself and kidding yourself.
Expand your
horizons and learn to love real food.
Happy Thinning,
Rudy