Category: Nutrition

Posted on

You’re going to walk off that McRib? Really?

I think we often fool ourselves about our rate of calorie burn. There are many times I hear friends talk about eating something like a McRib with fries and finishing with “I guess I’ll have to get in a few extra steps on the treadmill to make up for this.”

WRONG!

A McRib with medium fries is 880 calories.

According to the Mayo Clinics estimates for a 200-pound person (less calories are burned for people who weigh less, more for people who weigh more), burning 880 calories would require you to

  • walk very briskly for over two hours
  • jog for about one and a quarter hours
  • run fast for about an hour

You can get the numbers here.

I really hope you aren’t saying to yourself right now, “Well, I don’t eat at McDonald’s.” The McRib was just an example. Most of us have poor eating habits that we justify. Acknowledge yours.

I am not saying here that you should not indulge yourself from time to time. In fact, I think you should do that. Do you enjoy a Sonic Bacon Cheeseburger with a Chocolate Shake? Have it!

All I’m asking is that you don’t kid yourself that you are going to burn off the 1200 calories from that meal (and that’s without fries!) with a walk around the block in your neighborhood. Not gonna happen.

 

Posted on

Do you get enough fruit?

If you’re like me, you’re not really a fruit eater. I like a good apple, but it’s hard to find a good apple. I love a good pear … but it’s hard to find a good pear. And so on. So I really don’t eat a lot of fruit.

I probably don’t need to explain to you the health benefits of fruit, from their anti-oxidants to their added soft fiber to their lower glycemic sugars. I really felt that I should eat more fruit, but, whenever I bought apples and bit into a mushy one … blech!

Then my life changed.

When I started doing Tony Horton’s P90X, I also changed my diet. The dietary suggestions in the P90X program did not necessarily include more fruit, but they did include allowances for a lot more protein than I was used to eating. To get enough protein, I turned to prepackaged protein drinks.

Then I read Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint and it made a lot of sense to me, so I stopped eating all grains. All of them. No pasta. No bread. No oatmeal. No tortillas.

(I eat grains again now, but in far smaller quantities that I used to. That is my usual approach to reducing a dietary item: Quit it for three to six months — sometimes longer — to break the habit, then add a little back in.)

I had already stopped eating almost all sugars with the exception of some honey after workouts.

Given those circumstances, how could I get the 250 grams of carbohydrate I needed for my new diet if I did not eat those things? I had to add more fruit to my diet.

I switched to a protein powder, so I could prepare my own protein shakes, and, yup, I added frozen fruit to those protein shakes.

I mostly use blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. I don’t use bananas — too much sugar in those, and I’ve also always thought that drinking bananas is kinda gross.

Recently Costco also started stocking frozen organic peaches, so I use those in my protein shakes as well.

I mention “organic” because that’s important for me, if affordable. The organic berries and fruits that I’ve been buying have far less sugar in them than the fruits I was used to, and I find that much more enjoyable. When I eat those organic peaches, I feel as if I am eating food, not just sugar.

I don’t use the USDA Dietary Guidelines or the Food Pyramid as any kind of logical guidance for eating. You can read Good Calories, Bad Calories to find out why. (HINT: What shows up on those lists is way too influenced by politics, instead of being totally driven by actual nutrition science.)

But I do think that eating more fruit is a good idea, and I’m happy that I’ve found a way to incorporate fruit into my current eating habits.

How about you? Do you get enough fruit?

Posted on

I eat a lot of fish

I have probably eaten more fish since I started Tony Horton’s P90X about a year ago than I ate my entire life before that.

Early on in life, I just didn’t really like fish. I don’t think I’d been exposed to it much, outside fish sticks and smoked salmon, so I really had no experience with fish. Probably I’d had fishy tasting fish like salmon or something and didn’t like it because of that. Who knows?

I do, however, remember going to Long John Silver’s one day when I was in college in Tennessee and ordering the fried fish, just to see what it was like. I really liked it.

Still, though, I thought I only liked the fish at LJS, so I never really ate it anywhere else. Until many years later when I visited Seattle. It’s right on the ocean. I had to try fish there, right? And I was hooked — on fish straight from the ocean.

Of course, I have never lived on the ocean, and pretty much any fish that travels more than an hour from the ocean has been frozen, so it’s just not the same. So fish remained a special treat for me, to be eaten only from time to time.

When I started P90X, though, I went on their recommended diet plan, and the only way to really get all the protein I needed was to eat lean meats. As it happened, Costco had a sale going on some kind of frozen whitefish, so I tried it and LOVED IT! Wow, I was blown away by the texture and mild flavor of that fish.

Since then, I’ve bought fish by the frozen bag, always getting a whitefish of some kind like tilapia or cod or swai. And I eat three to six pounds of it a week.

You may realize that fish naturally has Omega 3s, which are important for general wellness. What you may not realize is that really only applies to wild-caught fish. Farm-raised fish tend to be fed a diet that increases their Omega 6s. Now, Omega 6s are not poisonous — we consume plenty of them via other sources and they are essential fatty acids — but it’s nice to balance them out with Omega 3s. (Here’s an article about it from Mark’s Daily Apple.)

As I often mention, I am not a nut about this stuff. I still eat farm-raised fish, because I just don’t like spending the extra money and it tastes great, plus it gives me the protein I need. Now, there are claims that farm-raised fish also have increased toxins and carcinogens. Okay. Still, I am not going to be an alarmist about this. Probably true, but….

I still eat a lot of fish. I buy ocean-caught when I can get it for a good price.

I guess the point of this post is to get you to try fish. I went many years thinking I didn’t like it only to discover quite the opposite. It’s easier to make than chicken breasts, and it goes great on a salad. Give it a try!

Posted on

An illogical way to manage your health

The other day my friend was sick with the flu. She asked me which medicine I’d recommend. I didn’t have a recommendation, because I have not had the flu in quite a few years, so I queried my friends and family and came up with a consensus best medication.

I passed this along to my friend. She looked the medication up on the internet, and said, “I don’t want to use that one, because I’ve heard it can cause strokes.”

Now, I have no problem with that. I try to be pretty careful with what I put into my body, and, in fact, the kinds of risks she was citing are the very ones that keep me from taking any kind of unnecessary pharmaceutical products.

However, the irony of this situation is that my friend, the one who made this statement of concern about ingesting a drug that “can cause strokes”, is quite a bit overweight and has a hard time finishing any meal without a sugary dessert.

Excess body fat is definitely a factor in heart disease, cancer, liver problems — you name it. Refined sugar is well-documented to be a major culprit in the accumulation of that excess body fat.

My friend knows all these things — we’ve had discussions about them — yet she chooses to continue to risk her life with her poor dietary habits.

Her life. What she wants to do is fine by me.

And you, too. You are free to choose to destroy yourself with your poor dietary decisions.

But don’t, then, try to sell me that you do not want to take a medication, because it might cause a stroke, or liver damage (as many painkillers do), or whatever.

That kind of reasoning, that illogical approach to life, is just too annoying.

Posted on

Losing inches off the waist

It’s been more than two weeks since I went off primal eating — where I ate very few carbs and did not count calories — and back to 50/30/20 — where I eat 50% protein, 30% carbs, and 20% fat, and stick to 1800 to 2200 calories daily.

My waist is down an inch. After about 9 months of stalemate, with my waist not budging, it is now down an inch in 16 days.

What does this mean?

It’s only been 16 days, and, as usual, I am not applying the scientific method to these experiences — my environment is not nearly as controlled as it should be for that — so I am cautious about assuming a definite cause-effect relationship between the lower caloric intake and the waistline shrinkage.

However, I am hypothesizing that I was simply consuming too many calories on primal. As I said, I didn’t count calories on primal, but looking back, I know I was eating a ton of salami for snacks (I can buy those 3-pound Columbus salami at Costco — delicious with an apple), plus a lot of protein smoothies blended with fruit, and whatever else — as long as it was not full of processed carbs or grains — whenever else I wanted.

Now that I am watching my calories again, I am losing the inches.

I believe I’ll stick with this way of calorie-restricted eating for a while, but I’m going to mix up the balance. I’ll keep the calories to 1800-2200, but my only other constraint is that I’ll want to get at least 150 grams of protein a day.

I say calorie-restricted, but, really 1800-2200 calories a day, with a focus on protein, is not bad, i.e. I’m not going to feel hungry, you know, like those 1200-calorie diets.

I’m doing this, because the only way I can know what works for me is to experiment on me. I know I don’t feel right when I eat a lot of carbs — I get run down and logy — so I want to turn the tables a bit and eat more fat than carbs, or at least the same amount as a percentage of calories consumed.

As long as I keep losing inches off my waist, I’ll be happy.