Your Ideal Form

Helping you on your journey to your best self!

diet

Your Body Wants Nutrients, Not Just Calories

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Your body wants nutrients not calories

 

Remember, when your body is hungry it wants nutrients, not calories. This is about being truly hungry, not about just craving something. Always try to satiate true hunger with real food, rather than snacks or “junk” food. You’ll feel fuller on fewer calories, and you are less likely to feel hungry again in a short amount of time. Protein is great at making you feel fuller for longer, relative to the same amount of starchy carbs. On the flip side, veggies are great at letting you eat a large volume of food to fill your stomach without having to take in as many calories. Fill your body with what it truly needs!

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Preventing Holiday Weight Gain

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preventing holiday weight gain

Halloween is totally a holiday, so I feel completely justified posting this in October. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas. Lots of food. And often, but not inevitably! weight gain. In fact, it is likely that you are at your lowest weight of the year right now, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Setting up expectations ahead of time and having a game plan can allow you to enjoy the holidays, not feel guilty, and avoid permanent weight gain. There are X (11 at the time of publishing) weeks left in the year. If you remove the indulgences of the holidays and stick to your eating plan, how much weight could you realistically lose between now and then? (If your answer is much higher than X, you are likely not being realistic). Now add back in the holidays. If you maintain your weight during the weeks where there is a holiday, where would that put you? What if you were to gain a pound for each holiday but lose the other weeks, where would you be then?

Set the Stage

  • Decide right now what is more important to you: sticking to your diet and hitting your goals sooner, or indulging in all the holidays have to offer without worrying about the number on the scale and pushing back your goal a bit. Neither answer is right or wrong, but you can’t have both.
  • Under no circumstances are you to step on a scale the day after any big meal. Water weight is going to seriously inflate any number you see.

The Candy Conundrum

Halloween brings with it a sudden influx of candy. Whether you bought it to hand out to neighborhood kids, or whether your own kids came back with a pillowcase of candy weighing as much as they do, here are some tips to deal with the tsunami of sugar.

  • If you are going to pass out candy, pick types you don’t particularly care for, so you are less likely to be tempted to help yourself to some of it. I’m not a huge fan of fruity candy, so I give out Skittles rather than peanut butter cups which would disappear before the trick-or-treaters made it to my door.
  • Try to give away ALL the candy. Toward the end of the night, give two or even three pieces to kids so that you aren’t left with any.
  • If there is any left over candy, find a way to get rid of it as soon as possible. Eating it does not count as getting rid of it. Take it into work and leave it in a common area as a free-for-all.
  • If your children bring home huge hauls of Hershey’s, and they cannot be trusted with their horde themselves, forcing you to be the keeper and dole it out to them: inventory the candy. Sit with your kids and take note of how many of each kind of candy they brought home. They keep the inventory list, and to make a withdrawal from their account, they bring it to you so you can cross what they take off the list. (And this doubles as a lesson in banking!) If they don’t request anything specific, start with the ones you’re most likely to steal from their stash. Hopefully the fear of the ensuing meltdown should they come to you demanding a Kit-Kat and there aren’t any left when there should be will keep you from raiding their cache.

The Turkey Trap

Thanksgiving is a HUGE meal. And while most try to minimize the effects of that one meal, the real culprit of weight gain is in the leftovers.

  • Sign up for a Turkey Trot the morning of Thanksgiving. These fun runs (which can also just be walked!) are in just about every city. Get some exercise and fresh air and focus on your end goal and your why.
  • Relax, enjoy the company, and enjoy the food. Feel free to brag to anyone who will listen about the run you did earlier in the day. Have seconds without reservations or justifications.
  • If you are hosting Thanksgiving dinner, buy a bunch of plastic containers to package up any leftovers and send it home with your guests. Having one big feast won’t set you back, but picking at the leftovers for the other three days of the extended holiday weekend can be tough to bounce back from.
  • If you are a guest and it is insisted you take some food with you when you go, try to stick to just turkey, and avoid some of the heavier offerings. Turkey is a nice lean protein and using leftovers in other meals can help cut down on cooking time.
  • Try to get right back to your normal eating plan or as close to it the day after. It’s an extra long weekend for many, so plan ahead to avoid having one cheat day turn into four.

The December Decadence

This month is tricky because instead of just one day with a huge meal, you have eight crazy nights. Or at least, there are holiday parties out the wazoo. You might have a potluck at work. Your spouse’s office might have a party for the employees and their families as well. There are get-togethers with old friends you haven’t seen in a year since the last time you went “back home”.

  • As always, the key to success is planning ahead. Decide in advance which of these functions are worth indulging in completely without worry, and which you can still enjoy yourself while also moderating your intake.
  • Similar rules to Thanksgiving apply at any big meals: try to get some exercise beforehand, get rid of leftovers quickly, get back on your game plan as soon as possible.
  • Plan ahead on how you will deal with relatives that tend to show love with food. They may feel hurt if they feel you haven’t eaten enough, so plan to take a very small portion at first so you have room to go up for seconds so as not to offend. Come up with some scripts for fending off well-meaning forced offerings of food.
    • “I’m saving room for some of your amazing [insert favorite dessert here]” (And then be sure to have a small helping!)
    • “I couldn’t possibly eat another bite, it was delicious!”
    • “Unfortunately, [dish] upsets my stomach if I have too much/any so I can only have a little bit/none of it”

As a bonus, if you can make a plan and stick with it through the holidays, you’ll have a jump start on all the New Year’s Resolutioners!

Intermittent Fasting vs Grazing

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 Grazing vs Intermittent Fasting
On top of all the information out there about what to eat or how much to eat, there’s also the debate of when to eat. There are basically two schools of thoughts on the matter, Intermittent Fasting, where you only eat during a certain window each day, and Grazing, where you eat every couple of hours. Let’s take a look at the two in more detail. Keep in mind that these systems are meant to be used in combination with another eating plan. If you’re counting calories, you eat the same number of calories per day whether you’re eating six times a day or just twice.

Grazing

With grazing, the idea is that you eat a little bit every couple of hours. This keeps you from ever getting hungry, and keeps your blood sugar levels at an even keel for the entire day. It is rather like a Hobbit’s eating plan; breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, lunch, tea, supper, dinner… You have your breakfast, and then a mid-morning snack, then lunch, an afternoon snack, dinner, and then a little something before bed. The snacks are usually something like a piece of fruit or a small handful of nuts.

Intermittent Fasting

During intermittent fasting, you fast for a period and only eat during a specific window each day. Some people do a 12-12 split, meaning they fast 12 hours and take their meals during the other 12. Others fast for 16 hours and only eat during an 8-hour window. Ideally, 8 hours of the fasting period is taken up by sleep, so you only have to deal with being hungry for a shorter time. The idea here is that after 12 hours or so of fasting, the body is done with digesting your last meal, and starts burning fat for energy. Commonly, those who do intermittent fasting skip breakfast or just have a couple cups of black coffee as breakfast and just have a larger lunch and dinner. Having zero-calorie caffeinated drinks is “allowed” as the caffeine has the effect of suppressing hunger.

Which should you choose?

Neither of these is inherently better than the other. In the end, how much you eat, not when, determines your body size. Changing up when you eat is simply a tool that may help you be more successful in sticking with it. To recap: With grazing, you eat every couple of hours, so you never get hungry. However, if you are on an eating plan that restricts how much you can eat, your meals get much smaller, so you never really get “full” either. With intermittent fasting, you need to learn to deal with being hungry (and possibly hangry), which can be really difficult and distracting, but dividing your food for the day between only two meals means you can have bigger, more satisfying meals. If you wish to add either of these to your current eating plan, pick the one you think will work best for you. Try it for a week, and if it doesn’t work, you can always try the other.

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How Water Affects Your Weight

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How Water Affects Your Weight

In case you’ve ever wondered how something with zero calories and some say zero taste can have an effect on your weight, this post is for you.

You retain water after eating.

Let me start by explaining just how water retention in the body works. When you eat a big meal, all that food heads to your stomach to start being digested. To absorb the nutrients in our food, the stomach breaks things down and turns it into a soup. To get things soupy, the body siphons some of the water out of our bloodstream and into our stomachs. This has the effect of making the blood thicker, so the body signals to the brain “hey, we need more water!” The brain then signals for thirst, and you drink some water. Once digestion is done, that excess water that was in your gut goes back into your system. Now there is too much water, so you eventually pee it out. This whole process can take up to 12 hours. In the meantime though, you could be carrying up to two pounds of excess water around. Water is heavy. A 20-ounce bottle of water weighs a pound and a half.

You  retain water after a workout.

A similar thing happens after an intense workout. While protein builds muscle, water aids in muscle repair and recovery after a workout, so water gets siphoned off to your muscles. This is what causes that post-workout “pump” where muscles seem to look a bit bigger than normal immediately following a weight lifting session. They’re just hoarding your water.

If you stay properly hydrated, your body can still use some water for digestion or muscle recovery without triggering the thirst centers of the brain to compensate.

You retain water at certain points in your cycle.

Bloating can make us feel fat, and then stepping on the scale can just make us feel worse. Take heart, however, because…

Water retention adds temporary weight, but NOT fat.

I’ve gone over how water can make it seem as if you’ve gained weight. You have temporarily gained “weight”, but what you have not gained is fat. This is why it is a good idea to schedule your weigh-ins for first thing in the morning, after using the toilet. You’ve had all night to digest your last meal, and so it’s right about time for you to shed some of that excess water.

Water can keep you from overeating.

Now let’s look at how water can actually help us lose weight. Many lists of healthy eating tips include drinking a glass of water before each meal. This helps your stomach hit that pleasantly full feeling sooner, so you don’t overeat. Often times, when you think you might be hungry, you’re actually just thirsty. Try drinking some water and waiting 15 minutes to see if the craving passes. Staying properly hydrated can improve your performance in the gym and help you recover quicker, which can help you burn more calories during your workout.

Stick to water, you probably don’t need Gatorade.

Speaking of workouts, don’t make the mistake of trying to quench your thirst at the gym with high calorie “performance” drinks. Unless your workout goes for longer than an hour, you don’t need the electrolytes in drinks like Gatorade or Powerade. Water is plenty sufficient, and doesn’t have extra calories.

How to get more water in your day.

If you don’t think you are getting enough water in your day, here are some things you can do to help you stay hydrated:

  • Set a timer to go off once an hour to remind you to drink some water.
  • Buy a water bottle and keep it handy; buy one for home and a separate one for work so you’re never without one. (I have a water bottle at home, one at work, one in my gym bag, and one in my work laptop bag for when I do an activity immediately after work.)
  • If water is too boring for your tastes, try infusing your water with lemon, strawberries or cucumber for a refreshing twist. They even sell water bottles with a special compartment to put the fruit so you don’t have to worry about accidentally choking on a strawberry.
  • You can also buy zero-calorie water enhancers that can give your water some flavor.
  • If you like carbonation, try seltzer water which can be found in a variety of flavors.

How much water is enough?

So now that you are all pumped to drink more water, you may be wondering just how much “more” is more. There is the often touted “eight glasses a day”. But what size glass are they using? As with most things surrounding healthy eating, there is no one-size fits all answer for everyone. That said, there is an easy way to tell how hydrated you are: check the color of your pee. This infographic from the Cleveland Clinic details how to tell if you are hydrated enough, or whether you could use some more water. Drink up!

The Color of Pee

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Eating Back Exercise Calories

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Should You Eat Back Calories Burned Off from Exercise-

A question I see get asked a lot is whether or not one should “eat back” the calories burned during exercise. You’ve calculated your TDEE, and you’re eating at a deficit to lose weight*, but that exercise raises your TDEE some, so you’re now at a greater deficit. Should you eat those calories back?

This is a bit tough for me because to be perfectly honest, I just don’t get it. After doing all that work, why would you negate it all by eating it all back? There’s also a big potential pitfall with eating back your calories: overestimating how many calories you’ve burned and thus eating back more than what you just worked off. Studies show** that people regularly overestimate how many calories we burn during exercise. And it’s not our fault; cardio machines grossly overestimate how many calories you burn, and even fitness apps can just do a best guess based on national averages. So the treadmill/app tells you that you’ve burned 300 calories when it’s really 200, and you think that means you’ve earned that 250 calorie snickers bar. But in reality, you’ve undone all your hard work, and you’re now over your budget.

Studies also show we tend to be bad at estimating how many calories we eat***. In this case, we tend to underestimate the number of calories in the food we have. With more and more places putting calorie counts on menus, this is getting harder to do, but if this isn’t commonplace where you live yet, it can be easy to convince yourself that your post-workout smoothie is healthy, and therefore much lower in calories than it really is. Combined with the elliptical machine telling you that you burned more than you actually did, and it becomes really easy to eat more than your TDEE for the day.

So, what do you do if exercise leaves you woozy and you have to have something after your workout? Here are a couple of tips:

  • Aim for eating back half the calories you burned at most.
  • If working out is always leaving you feeling ravenous, try switching to lower-intensity exercise.
  • A controversial opinion is to stop exercising all together and just focus on your diet.
  • Try to think of any calories burned during exercise as merely a bonus or a turbo boost to get you to your destination faster!

 

*If you’re trying to gain muscle, you definitely want to eat back those calories, getting as much of them from protein as possible!
** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26469988
*** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1454084

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4 Reasons to Be Patient with a Plateau

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Getting Through a Weight Loss Plateau

On your journey to reach your ideal form, there may come a time when the scale just does not seem to be moving. These are plateaus, and they feel like you’re driving across Interstate 10 in Texas. You’ve been driving for 8 hours, and you’re still not out of the state. It can be tempting to just throw in the towel when it seems like you’re spinning your wheels and going nowhere fast, but if you can hang in there, I promise it will be worth it.

We’re going to define a plateau as being at the same weight for three or more weeks. One or two weeks might just be a fluke. Three, and we’re definitely in a plateau.

Here are four reasons to be patient when dealing with a plateau:

  1. A big woosh could be right around the corner at the next weigh in. Weight loss is rarely linear, and often times when the scale seems stuck, when it does start moving again, it does so in a big way.
  2. If it’s only been a week or two, there are a number of things that could be messing with the numbers on the scale: your monthly cycle, a very intense workout session, or eating big meal up to a day before you step on the scale can all increase water retention. Water is heavy, and can easily throw your weight off, so try to weigh yourself first thing in the morning, before any workouts or meals.
  3. Keep in mind that a plateau is being at the same weight for a number of weeks. Often times, when someone starts a new program, there’s a large drop in weight due to water weight loss. But that’s not sustainable. If you’re losing a half to one pound per week, you’re doing great!
  4. It’s a slow process, don’t make it slower by giving up now. Learn to enjoy the process rather than fixating on results and you’ll actually get better results.

If you’ve been at a plateau for more than six weeks, then it’s time to re-evaluate your process. If you’ve lost a significant amount of weight, you may need to recalculate your TDEE.

If you’re stuck in a plateau, now is a good time to go back and look at pictures you took at the beginning of your journey. Inspire yourself by how far you’ve come.