Doing the math with calories

By Dr Brigid Monda

The number of calories in food is a measure of how much potential energy the food possesses. Your body burns these calories to release their stored energy for its use. If you weigh 68kg, your body uses only about 1,800 calories per day to do everything you need to stay alive. Your body is also extremely efficient at storing excess calories in the form of fat. It takes only 3,500 excess calories to create about half a kilo of new fat in your body.

So if you are taking in just 500 extra calories daily, then you will gain about half a kilo of fat per week. This is the idea behind most diets — and most fail because they are not sustainable. When the person returns to normal eating, the weight returns as well. What you need is a sustainable diet and exercise plan that lets you live a normal life, eat normal foods in a normal way and still maintain a normal and healthy weight.

Consider food the way you would a drug; you have to take it correctly in small doses. Take in a slow controlled supply of nutrients and not a large dose at once. Unfortunately, our eating habits involve imbibing large amounts at a sitting.

Daily calorie limit

Get a qualified nutritionist to help you do this. Start by counting the calories you consume in a day. Build a food calorie database so that you know, just how many calories you are taking in whenever you eat something. Then pick your ‘ideal weight’ and calculate how many calories a day you can consume to maintain that weight using the ‘12 calories per 0.45kg’ rule. Compare these two figures and you will be surprised by the difference between the number of calories you need and number of calories you take in per day.

This is where the extra kilos are coming from. You can bring these two numbers in line by watching and counting everything you eat and drink every day and sticking to your daily limit. You will soon realise that 1,600, 1,800 or 2,000 calories per day is not too much.

Recording your feeding

Be conscious of every calorie you consume by keeping a daily record of everything you eat and drink. Cut out all calories that enter your body through drinking by taking only water. You take in 140 calories when you drink 300mls of orange juice but it does nothing to curb your appetite. Eat the orange instead, which contains fewer calories, the flesh fills you up and chewing the orange has a psychological effect on your appetite.

Cut out empty calories like white sugar (contained in foods like cookies and cakes) and fried foods in whatever form.

Eat low-density foods

Replace high-density foods with low-density ones. A cookie is a high-density food and contains a lot of calories due to high sugar and fat contents. A banana, on the other hand, is low-density food, which fills you up without giving you as many calories. It takes many bites to eat a banana, yet you only take in only 100 calories.

Most people would not find it hard to eat a dozen cookies — about 600 calories. But imagine trying to eat six bananas at one sitting — you would explode! Yet the two contain an equal quantity of calories. Finally, add exercise to the mix to raise the number of calories you are burning. Burning about 500 calories per day through exercise can make a big difference to your weight.

Fitting in exercise

In an attempt to be fit, you join a gym and go once or twice a week. For two hours or so, you work up a sweat and believe that you have done something good for your health because your muscles ache after pumping weights and you get sore all over. But is this true? The answer is no. You need regular physical exercise on an ongoing basis and cramming an overdose that makes us sore into two or three days is not the answer.

Exercise for at least 30 minutes and try to exercise every day because it is easier to remember to do something if you do it every day. Aerobic exercise helps control your weight by increasing the number of calories you burn in a day. Fit micro-exercises into your daily life. Instead of taking the elevator, take the stairs. Park farther away from the supermarket when you go shopping.

These little things add up. Exercise with a partner. A partner will also help make exercise a routine. Wear form-fitting clothes instead of sweats. The tight clothing acts as a reminder of what you are trying to accomplish.