Perhaps because of the high publicity the obesity epidemic in the United States has received, everyone seems to be struggling with losing weight or obsessing about not gaining an ounce. Many hours and tons of money are spent on gym memberships (unless you’re fortunate enough to be a University student with access to a variety of physical fitness facilities for free) and for many, the battle of the bulge can be a frustrating life-long fight. But what many forget about weight control is that it’s not just about exercise. The simple truth about weight gain and loss is that it’s about calories in versus calories out. Exercise helps with the latter part of the equation, but the most effective way to control weight is by limiting caloric intake.
For most, myself included, limiting caloric intake is easier said than done. When we think of cutting back on what we eat, we tend to focus on the foods that we know are bad, so-called “junk food” like your aunt’s delicious chocolate cake or that bag of Doritos for an afternoon snack. Don’t get me wrong, the first thing to limit when you’re trying to lose weight are foods that are dense in calories, meaning they don’t pack a lot of nutrition, aren’t large in volume and have tons of calories per ounce compared to other foods. But junk food isn’t the only food group to limit. Overeating even healthy foods can cause you to gain weight. Thus, the important concept to remember about limitations on caloric intake is portion size control. Additionally, it’s important to limit your calories to what your body needs and avoid the temptation to eat too much or too little. We also cannot lose focus of our overall goal, which is achieving and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, so it’s important to reach your caloric needs through eating healthy foods.
The following steps are adapted from a great nutrition handout from Student Health (which contains all the details I won’t delve into here) and various nutrition lectures and talks I’ve attended during my time at the Medical School.
First, you must determine your body’s caloric requirements. These vary by age, gender, height, weight and activity level. For example, an average 20-year-old woman who partakes in 60 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity on a daily or almost daily basis would require about 2400 calories a day. An average man of the same age and physical activity level, on the other hand, would require about 3000 calories a day. And if you’re a 23-year-old man who has won eight gold medals in Olympic swimming, you might even consume upwards of 8000 calories a day to meet your needs. But the requirements are different for people who are less active, meaning their physical activity is that of daily living without daily exercise. If you take the woman and man from the aforementioned example and remove their physical activity, they would require 1800 and 2400 calories a day, respectively.
You might also be wondering about that mysterious 2000-calorie diet that is the benchmark for all those numbers and percentages on the back of your food boxes and why I have not mentioned a single person who would require 2000 calories. The fact is for the general population, 2000 calories is actually fairly close to a person’s average needs. But food packaging, as we all know, can be slightly misleading — like the “fewer calories” foods that have about 10 less calories per serving — in the sense that though 2000 might be a good average, it does not actually apply to anyone. Thus, we must each adjust our caloric intake to what our own body’s needs are and this can change based on our activity level, our health status — you need more calories when you’re sick — and our age.
But determining how many calories we need is the easy part. Controlling how we meet those needs is also fairly simple if all we’re consuming is pre-measured packages, like those convenient 100-calorie packs or a yogurt. Not all food comes so conveniently packaged, however, especially the healthiest foods like vegetables. Thus, once we determine our caloric needs, we need to ensure we reach those needs by eating a healthy balance of fruits and vegetables, grains, protein (meat and beans), dairy and healthy fats and oils through portion size control. An easy way to determine if you are eating the correct amount of fruits and veggies — arguably the most difficult category to eat enough of — is the half the plate rule. Simply visually divide your plate in quarters: one-fourth should consist of fruits, another fourth of veggies, another with protein and the last fourth of grains. Another way to estimate portion size to ensure that you don’t unintentionally consume extra servings is the use of references to estimate the amount of food you’re eating. For example, a cup is about the size of your fist and a teaspoon is about the size of the tip of your thumb. So if you want to know how many servings of dried fruit you’re eating, which is one-fourth cup per serving, you could estimate about one-fourth of your fist. There are a variety of other tricks to estimate portion size using familiar objects like tennis balls and body parts. And it’s a good idea to actually measure out portions of food when you’re first starting out to learn what a cup of rice really looks like.
The hardest part about portion control and healthy eating is making the choice between delicious, convenient junk food and healthy vegetables that might need a little TLC before they can be eaten. And if, as I stated earlier, weight is simply a matter of calories in versus calories out, why does it matter if you get your 2400 from bags of Cheetos or pounds of veggies? Because while weight is intake versus output, a healthy life involves more than just weight. Recent studies have even shown that being physically fit and eating a well-balanced diet but still being technically overweight is healthier in the long-term than someone who is an appropriate weight but leads a sedentary lifestyle and does not eat healthily. While it’s important to make healthy food choices to reach a healthy lifestyle, it’s not to say you need to completely deprive yourself of all things that aren’t completely nutritious. In fact, if you allow yourself to consume goodies like cake and chips in moderation, you are less likely to binge on junk food and are more likely to eat a well-balanced diet and lead a healthy lifestyle because you will not feel trapped by self-deprivation of all things super tasty.
For more details about portion control and healthy eating, visit Student Health and pick up their colorful and informative packet on nutrition. Plus, it helps you learn how to incorporate things like alcohol into your diet. As a final note, alcohol in moderation has been shown to have health benefits, but remember that one serving of alcohol can have 100 to 150 calories and very few nutrients, so one to two drinks per day for men and one per day for women is considered a healthy max for alcohol consumption.
Katie McBeth is a University Medical student. She can be reached at k.mcbeth@cavalierdaily.com.
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