The Effect on How Much We Eat

The problem is that when we are presented with more food on a plate than will meet our needs, most of us will eat more without even thinking about it.

The good news is that studies showing we eat more calories when given more, also show that we still feel satisfied when given less.

Commenting on the results of a restaurant study at Penn State University, Dr Barbara Rolls, who holds the Guthrie Chair of Nutrition said, “The bigger portions that restaurants are providing make consumers vulnerable to overeating, since most individuals eat all or most of what is served.”

In the study, the size of a pasta dish portion served was varied between a standard serving and a serving 50% larger. Customers who ordered the meal were asked to rate their satisfaction and the appropriateness of the portion size.

The results showed that customers who were served the larger portion ate nearly all of it - consuming an extra 172 calories. The survey responses showed that customers rated the size of both portions as equally appropriate for meeting their needs.

Double Trouble: High Calorie Bigger Portions
A further Penn State study by doctoral candidate Tanja Kral examined the effects of portion size and calorie density.

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You Need to Burn Fat to Lose Weight
True, but you don’t need to directly target fat burning. Consider how the body processes its energy stores. Fat is not a permanent fixture in cells – it comes and goes according to your fuel requirements. When blood glucose is low, say first thing in the morning, fat will be the main fuel. After the first few pieces of toast or muesli, blood glucose will rise and insulin will start storing glucose and fat in cells and you will start burning some blood glucose. Glucose is stored in liver and muscle, and fat in fat cells as triglycerides. When your blood glucose gets low again, or when you do moderate intensity exercise, this fat can be retrieved from fat cells when hormones called lipases break down the fat molecule and send the free fatty acids to the bloodstream to be used as fuel. This is what we call ‘fat burning’. It’s a dynamic process.

The key to understanding this is the ’sliding scale’ between fat and glucose (carbohydrate). After you burn a lot of glucose, fat gets its turn because blood glucose is low. What happens if you always have glucose to burn? Doesn’t fat just stay stored away and you stay fat? No, because if your food intake and activity output is balanced you always have fat to burn – in the early hours of the morning before breakfast, while doing everyday things like housework, before meals, when you’re active – it just balances out because glucose gets sucked up to replenish muscle and liver stores — and then fat becomes an important fuel. So in a sense you don’t have to worry about fat burning, only food fuel burning and energy balance.

Weight Training Burns More Fat
Same answer as number one – only if you do enough of it. You can’t just do a few heavy lifts with a few minutes rest in between and expect to use a lot of energy and burn a lot of fat. Even a full session of very vigorous weight lifting with only minimal breaks between exercises and sets will only burn about 600 calories. An hour of vigorous walking will burn about 300 calories. An hour of strolling around in the weights room having a chat, a drink and completing 10 exercises at moderate intensity won’t burn much more than 300

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Apples with dip Diet Recipetip: By using fat-free cream cheese instead of full-fat cream cheese, you save 143 calories and 19 grams of fat — most of which is saturated fat — in each serving.

SERVES 4

Ingredients
8 ounces fat-free cream cheese
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
2 tablespoons chopped peanuts
1/2 cup orange juice
4 apples, cored and sliced

Directions

Place the cream cheese on the counter to allow it to soften, about 5 minutes.

To make the dip, combine the brown sugar, vanilla and cream cheese in a small bowl. Mix until smooth. Stir in the chopped peanuts.

Place the apples in another bowl. Drizzle orange juice over the apples to prevent browning. Serve the sliced apples with the dip.

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There are many reasons why you may gain weight and the cause may not be one factor but a combination of a number of different ones.

Dieting

Yes, one of the main causes of weight gain is dieting. Dieting makes you fat. As you reduce your food intake to lose weight, your body put itself on ‘famine alert’. It gets the impression that food is scarce and therefore it slows down your metabolism to get the best use of the small amount of food it is receiving.

When you say you want to lose weight, what you actually want to lose is fat. If you lose weight rapidly, almost 25 percent of that weight loss can be made up of water, muscle and other lean tissue.

The reason for this is that your body is actually programmed to hold on to fat. So in times of what your body considers to be a ‘famine’, it will actually go as far as breaking down muscle and losing water in order to hold on to its fat reserves. Faddy diets suggest that you can lose up to 10 pounds in a week, but remember this: it is physically impossible to lose more than 900g (2lb) of body fat in a week.

Furthermore, if you lose weight quickly by restricting your intake and then go back to eating normally, a much higher percentage of the food you eat is laid down as fat. Why? Because your body wants to build up extra fat stores, in case this type of famine occurs again. There’s also the question of metabolism. When you crash diet, your metabolism slows down to conserve energy and make the most out of the small amounts you are eating. What happens when you go back to eating normally? Well, everything you eat is being dealt with at a much slower rate and more fat is stored.

Too much food and not enough exercise

This is the obvious reason, because if you eat more than you burn off then you are going to gain weight. The idea has been that if the number of calories going into your body is less than the calories being used up by bodily activity and exercise, then you will lose weight. Nowadays, we know that the type of calories is also an important factor in this equation. In other words, you need to consider what type of calories you are eating - whether they come in the form of fat, carbohydrates or protein.

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Weight Loss Information and Tips for Getting StartedCalories per Hour offers the following tips to help you lose weight to look better, feel better, and live a healthier life. These tips are short and sweet and are intended as a starting point or quick reference for individuals seeking to lose weight by using the resources offered on Calories per Hour. Read the related tutorial topics to learn more about the topics discussed in these weight loss tips.How Did I Get Here?Do you simply need help learning how to eat better? Probably. But if you eat poorly as a result of emotional, mental, or spiritual problems, they may have to be addressed before you can make any real progress with weight loss.

Even people who don’t feel they have an eating disorder often turn to food for comfort. To learn to eat well and exercise regularly, you may also have to learn to handle the problems life throws at you without turning away from healthy eating and exercise.

Be particularly careful about all-or-nothing thinking. A common tendency when failing to stay on a diet is to abandon it altogether. Instead, try to learn from your mistakes and do better in the future.

Related Topic: Eating Disorders
Are You Ready to Diet? Again?

Diets entice us with promises of quick weight loss. But focusing on quick weight loss can lead to unhealthy eating and only short term success.

While most diets produce quick weight loss at the outset, they often cause your metabolism to slow. The result is that you have to eat less and less to keep losing weight. You quickly become discouraged, give up, and start eating like you used to. But now, with a slower metabolism, you regain all the weight you lost, and more.

Focus instead on improving your health, and you will become slim and healthy.

Related Tutorial Topic: Selecting a Diet Plan

Take Control of What You Eat
There are few things that we have complete control over, but what we put in our mouths is one of them. We don’t have to lose control in a restaurant or a friend’s home, and we don’t have to eat everything that’s put in front of us.

Consider this: We love fat because it carries flavor, and restaurants aren’t as interested in whether we’ll be around in 30 years as whether we’ll be back next week. And what about our friends?

Eat Frequently, and Eat Slowly
It is important to understand what happens when you skip a meal or go on a crash diet. When you skip a meal your metabolism slows to conserve your energy. And when you lose weight too quickly for a few days, your body thinks it is threatened with starvation and goes into survival mode. It fights to conserve your fat stores, and any weight loss comes mostly from water and muscle.

Never skip a meal, especially breakfast, and eat healthy snacks between meals. Eating frequently prevents hunger pangs and the binges that follow, provides consistent energy, and may be the single most effective way to maintain metabolism efficiency.

Eating slowly gives our bodies time to tell us they are full before we’ve eaten more than we need.

Eat More Fruits, Vegetables and Whole Grains
People who eat healthy, mostly unprocessed foods, including fruit, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and limited amounts of lean animal protein, often find that they can eat as much as they want without gaining weight. If they are switching from a diet containing lots of processed foods, they find that they can eat more yet consume fewer calories — and they lose weight.

Native Chinese eat mostly rice and vegetables with a little lean meat for protein and flavor, nothing like American Chinese restaurant dishes of deep fried sweet and sour pork. Civilization doesn’t always bring progress. A step back to more natural foods would improve our health and waistlines.

Eat More Fiber
Fiber makes us feel full sooner and stays in our stomach longer than other substances we eat, slowing down our rate of digestion and keeping us feeling full longer. Due to its greater fiber content, a single serving of whole grain bread can be more filling than two servings of white bread. Fiber also moves fat through our digestive system faster so that less of it is absorbed.

Refined grains like white rice and those used to make white bread and sugary breakfast cereals have had most of their fiber and nutrients stripped away. They turn into blood sugar (glucose) so fast that, like sugar itself, they can cause a spike in our insulin level. This tells our body that plenty of energy is readily available and that it should stop burning fat and start storing it.

Eating foods with plenty of fiber will help keep our blood sugar at a more consistent level.

Cut Down on Sugar
Be careful about sugar in coffee and soda pop. It can add up quickly, and these drinks aren’t filling.

Watch for “hidden” sugar in processed foods like bread, ketchup, salad dressing, canned fruit, applesauce, peanut butter, and soups. And be careful with “fat-free” products. Sugar is often used to replace the flavor that is lost when the fat is removed. Fat-free does not mean calorie-free.

The greater concern with the insulin spike (above) is not that it tells our body to start storing fat. Whatever we eat and don’t burn up eventually gets turned into fat anyway.

The greater concern is that the insulin spike is followed by a drop in insulin level that leaves us feeling tired and hungry and wanting to eat more. The unfortunate result of this scenario is that it makes us want to eat something else with a high sugar content. When we do, we start the cycle all over again.

Regulating your blood sugar level is the most effective way to maintain your fat-burning capacity.

Too Much of a Bad Thing
Foods like cheese stand out as among the most fat-laden, with a great number of calories coming from fat. But as important as it is to select the healthiest foods, it is also important to consider how they are prepared.

Fried foods, especially deep-fried, contain a great amount of fat. While chicken and fish are usually leaner than beef or pork, they can contain more fat when they are fried. Look at how the number of grams of fat in a chicken breast changes depending on how it is cooked:

Fried food? All I eat is salad and I still can’t lose weight!”

Be careful with salad dressings, mayonnaise, and other condiments that are high in fat content. They greatly increase the calorie count and can negate the healthy aspects of a meal. Replace mayonnaise-based condiments with fat-free alternatives like fat-free yogurt, mustard, ketchup and barbecue sauce.

And remember, a gram of fat contains more than twice as many calories as a gram of protein or carbohydrate.

Too Little of a Good Thing
But don’t try to eliminate fat altogether, as dietary fat is necessary to maintain a healthy body. It is a vital component for building body tissue and cells, and it aids in the absorption of some vitamins and other nutrients. Many people eat too much of the bad fats, but also eat too little of the good fats required for optimal health.

Exercise Regularly
People who exercise regularly not only lose weight faster, they are more successful at keeping it off. Exercise makes it possible to create a calorie deficit and lose weight without starving your body and slowing your metabolism.

At home, at the gym, or playing sports, participate in both aerobic and strength building activities on a regular basis. Not only does the exercise itself burn calories, but your body will continue to burn calories at a higher rate even after you’re done exercising.

If walking is all you can do, then walk because it’s great for you. But muscle burns more calories than fat, so put on a little muscle if you can and you will burn more calories just sitting there… looking good.

But don’t sit too long. The human body is good at adapting. If you dig ditches without gloves, you will develop calluses to protect your hands. If you sit too long, you will develop extra padding to keep you comfortable!

Take It Easy
Unless you are excited to be following a very specific diet and exercise plan, do not try and change too much too fast. If you have been eating poorly and not exercising, both your body and your mind will have a lot of adjusting to do.

All the sugar and fat were actually quite enjoyable, and sitting on the couch didn’t feel too bad, either. If you try and change everything too quickly the odds are greater that you will feel bad, get discouraged, and give up. So be patient.

A time will come when a healthy snack will taste as good as the junk food you felt bad about eating, and you will look forward to your regular exercise.

Begin Now
You can achieve your goals, but it won’t likely happen as a result of the next fad diet. Or the one after that.

Learning to eat well and exercise is the only solution to long term weight loss.

Begin Here: Diet and Weight Loss

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Your ideal body weight is where you are healthiest

This isn’t meant to sound controversial or trite, but rather - most Ideal Body Weight calculators are based on simple measurements of height. This is NOT a good way to estimate your ideal weight. This kind of measurement does not take into account bone density, muscle mass, or fat proportion. In addition to this, due to modern body image obsession, and psychological disorders (EDs), many people are unable to determine an accurate body weight.

You should be aiming for a body fat percentage goal.

An ideal body fat percentage for men would be 10-14%, or 16-20% for women. If you know your current body fat percentage you would be able to calculate your ideal weight. But not many of us know this.

How To To determine your frame size:

Grip your wrist using your thumb and index finger.
- If your finger and thumb don’t touch you are a LARGE frame
- If your finger and thumb just touch you are a MEDIUM frame
- If your finger and thumb overlap you are a SMALL frame

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