The Weight Game

Fat, overweight, obese, gross, flabby, tubby, chubby, blubber - these are words that most in the Western society that we live in are more than familiar with, and that is no wonder, considering the total junk food lining most supermarket shelves, coupled with out-of-date information and pretty pyramid pictures everywhere. Pyramids are for the dead bones of Egyptian kings, forget about them - what you need is the right information.

Weight gain and indeed weight loss are all to do wth calories. Yes, I know you were hoping it was going to be something more exciting than that but that's really what it all boils down to in the end. You can get technical and talk about the intricacies of how the three macronutrients make their way through the body's digestion system, ending up as fuel for the body's cells, and we could talk about people's different metabolic types, etc., but at the end of the day whether you gain or lose weight is all about calories. And calories equal fuel, energy… heat. Simply put, get too little of them, you get thin. Get too much and welcome to weeble world, you may not fall down, but wobble you certainly will!

If you think of fuel in a car, say you want to go to Grandma's, she lives 10 miles away and you put enough fuel in for 30 miles. This is good because when you have sampled Grandma's homemade cooking and arrived home you've still got 10 miles in the tank to zip up the shops if needed. You see, all that was needed for that journey was 20 miles of fuel. This is not so good when it comes to us humans and calories, however. Our fuel comes from the foods we eat in the form of calories, and if you only need 2000 calories, for example, to supply the energy needed for your body's daily travels, but you intake 3500, what happens? Is it like the car and just sort of floats around and supplies some energy for you for the next day in case you don't eat enough food? No. It stores as fat.

There are of course a number of biological processes that this excess food we intake goes through before becoming fat, but for the ease of understanding for the majority of us, we'll just call it fat. So, it's as easy as that, you say? If I want to lose weight, all I've got to do is stop eating as many calories? Well yes, but if only it were that easy I suppose there wouldn't be any overweight people. Unfortunately, in reality, it's pretty tough to discipline oneself down to cress and walnuts when you've been eating cheesecake, burgers and pizza, etc!

Interestingly though, not all calories are equal. No, that's absolutely right, they're not. Yes, I know they're a unit of measurement, but the source the given total calories come from determines the effect that they will have on the body greatly. I can tell you right now that 1000 calories from a pizza or cheesecake are very different to 1000 calories from fruit or vegetables. I realise this might upset the thinking of some more traditional nutritionists etc. but I'll tell you right now that calories from such as pizza, cakes and pastries etc. will stack the weight on, but the same amount of calories from fruit and vegetables will keep you lean. Sounds confusing, doesn't it? Not really, it's the way the body uses the calories coming from these given sources.

Calories from things like starchy, white, what I like to call "dead' foods such as white bread, white pastries, white pasta and white flour etc., and yes, even whole grain products, do actually cause higher blood sugar spikes and promote the storage of fat, whereas the energy coming from such as fruit eaten with the skins on and vegetables promote a far slower rise in the blood sugar and react differently within our bodies, meaning that they are not as readily stored as fat. This process is of course very technical but for the purposes of this short article I have outlined it very briefly. The answer is still the same.

I can give an example from real life: someone that I was advising recently, already a healthy eater regularly eating around 2300 calories a day of fruit, fish and vegetables, changed their diet to and began consuming a lot of grains of the type I have described; still good but nevertheless grains (that is, a different type of carbohydrate) in place of the carbohydrates they were eating in large quantities of fruit and vegetables. Interestingly, they were still consuming roughly the same amount of calories a day. Within weeks, they had put on a number of pounds.

So losing weight and indeed gaining weight are all about knowledge of foodstuffs eaten, it's about knowing, and if you are consuming a lot of the foods mentioned above such as the white bread, pastries, processed foods and products filled with "kill-you-slowly" fats like hydrogenated fats along with lots of sugary drinks such as canned drinks, then you really are not helping yourself to look the way you really want to look. Substituting some of that junk with what are real wholesome foods such as fresh vegetables, fruits, oily fish and nuts etc. will go a long way to helping you not just lose weight, but also give you a packed cocktail of healthy nutrients and phytochemicals that have been proven to fight cancer and other illnesses.

And the sum up? Really, this is the answer to all your weight loss concerns. Eat less calories that you burn, and don't forget exercise.

In the meantime, stay healthy.

- Paul Spencer Dip. (Clinical Nutrition)

Paul Spencer is available for one-to-one custom diet plans, advice and nutritional coaching for all individuals, including sports athletes, actors, etc. He can be contacted at nutritionist@optimalhealth.co.uk.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this article has been written for educational purposes only and can all be verified with appropriate research. Any form of diet regime being undertaken based on this information should be presented to a doctor or qualified nutritionist to ensure correct balance before commencement, particularly if there is an underlying medical condition.