Nutrition, Fitness, Fuzzy Math and keeping balance

What is it about nutrition that can make a person start mentally negotiating with themselves?  How often have we all heard skewed logic discussing the math of exercise and nutrition like this:

“I exercised today, I’ll reward my hard work by having an ice cream when I am done”

They’re doing everything they should do to hit their goals but never reach it.

• It isn’t that their body is failing them,
• They most likely don’t have some type of condition,
• Their metabolism isn’t dead in the water, yet!

What could be happening? Let’s say the daily exercise burns around 300 calories, fantastic! The food reward at the end, equals 430 calories, not so fantastic. They consumed 130 calories more than they burned during the exercise session. 130 calories isn’t that much, but over time those calories add up, why you ask?

We’ll use the disputed 3500 calories per pound rule¹

Using math, 3500 calories divided by the extra 130 calories a day means a pound of weight gain monthly. That is a 12 pound annual weight gain. Think back to a group meal, I bet you heard someone say, “I got a good work out today so I can afford to eat more.”  The problem with that is they aren’t just eating more for one meal but each meal all day long. I am not talking about athletes, who require a lot of calories.

Bad calorie management is like poor accounting practices. You can’t over eat daily energy requirements and expended exercise calories each day and expect weight loss.

It starts with the ice cream reward at the end of exercise, then a dessert after a large dinner, and a late night snack before bedtime. If you look at the nutrition and exercise equation like a balancing budgets then you realize that you can only spend a dollar once, more than that and you risk going into debt. Your body gives you a budget of calories to use each day, exercise earns a few extra calories. If you are conservative (don’t consume your daily requirement of calories) your body goes to the fat storage bank and withdraws calories to cover expenses. If you overspend (over consume calories) your body saves the extra calories in the fat storage bank. The goal is to keep a balanced budget and maintain a healthy weight over time, the ultimate situation for anyone both financially and physically.  (*please see note below)

If you were to go to a financial planner trying to get yourself out from under the pressure of a lot of credit debt your financial planner would tell you to tighten up your budget. He’d advise trimming out unnecessary expenses and learn to live lean until you can get your debt paid off. It is the same approach to losing weight; you can apply those same rules to your nutrition:

• Tighten up your budget: Try tracking your nutrition for a week or longer to see where you spend your calorie dollars.  Most people guesstimate their daily calories intake and most often they guess low.
• Trim out unnecessary expenses: Once you have an idea where your calories are coming from then you have a better idea of what you can eliminate. Cut out sugar, soda, late night snacks, 2% milk instead of whole, the list is endless.
• Learn to live lean:  Eating at home instead of eating out not only saves your nutrition calories but it will also save actual cash. Home cooking costs less and tends to have less sodium, fat, and sugar (if you cook it that way at least.) Make your own lunch, brew your own coffee, and eat breakfast before leaving the house.
• Paying in cash: If you budget 1500 calories and log your nutrition, you will see exactly where you stand during the day. This helps you to decide exactly how much you have left in calories dollars to spend.

We live in an instant gratification society, using plastic to purchase desired goods and worry about paying or saving for it later.  This concept doesn’t work well when balancing a budget and it doesn’t work well when trying to eat healthy and lose weight.

• Budget your calories during the day: 1500 to 1800 calories is roughly three 400 to 500 calorie meals and a 300 calorie snack.
• Be Flexible: Calories per meal vary, adjust your remaining meals to hit your daily goal.
• Don’t skimp on breakfast it’s important for mental acuity and feeling energized.
• Snacks should be nutrient dense and slow digesting; keeping you fuller longer.
• Each meal should contain: carbohydrates, proteins and fats to feed all the systems in your body. Adjusting the percent of each macro-nutrient you eat, based on body type, can be help.
• Try different vegetable combinations, make your meals bright and colorful!
• Cook a variety of meals to vary vitamin and mineral intake.

* Please note that when trying to lose weight it is not recommended to lose more than 1 pound a week, which equates to 3500 calories. Creating a 500 calories daily deficit is done by reducing your daily intake and/or by increasing exercise. The old saying, “you have to spend money to make money”, you have to eat to lose weight. Often people try to lose weight by cutting their daily intake dramatically thinking they’ll lose faster. The plan fails when willpower caves and a cycle of overeating results. 

Livestrong reports that the ACSM recommends sedentary women no less than 1200 calories daily; sedentary men shouldn’t eat less than 1800 calories daily.²