The Basics

     Weight control and health are all about eating and exercise.  People have to eat enough of the right things and get a moderate amount of physical activity to stay healthy.  This is just a fact of life we can't change.  If we eat too little or too much, get too much exercise or not enough, we become ill.  Our food contains the building blocks we are made of and if some building blocks are missing we are going to start missing some necessary pieces - like anti-bodies to fight disease, antioxidants to fight inflammation, hormones that regulate our bodies daily functions, neurotransmitters that allow us to think and remember, and much, much more.  And we will get fat like I did.

     The problem with not getting enough of the nutrients your body needs each day is that your body will demand that you keep eating until you do.  If you give in to the demand, you get fat and if you don't give in, you get sick.  Neither choice is a good one.   Exercise triggers those processes that heal our bodies and allow us to handle stress.  Without exercise, we become fragile, more susceptible to disease, heart failure, broken bones and a host of other things I would personally prefer to avoid.

     The question, of course, is how much should we eat and how much exercise should we get?  And the answer is - it depends on the individual.  A book or a website can't answer that question, so my wife bought me a computer program that goes a long way toward answering them, Diet Power.  By keeping track of what you eat, what you weigh and any exercise you may do each day, Diet Power is able to determine how many calories you burn each day and how much of many important nutrients you need.  I hate calorie counting as much as the next person, but this is information you need to get started.

     Books on dieting often contain charts that take into account your weight, how much you exercise (none, light, moderate, heavy) and then try to tell you how many calories you should eat each day to reach your desired weight.  I can't begin to tell you how much is wrong with that approach.  But the two major problems are that your metabolic rate (how many calories you burn each day) is NOT a simple function of how much you weigh and shorting yourself on calories just shorts you on the nutrients you need to stay healthy.  Those were the first two lessons I learned from the Diet Power computer program.  Diet Power starts by using those formulas to "guess" your metabolic rate, but over a 30 day period is able to calculate your actual metabolic rate.  In my case my actual metabolic rate was 30% lower than the calculated value.  That is very important to know.

     The second lesson using Diet Power taught me is that reducing my calories also reduces the amount of nutrients I consume.  Unless you are getting more nutrients than you need (highly unlikely), reducing your calories through diet is just going to make you sick.  It will also cause a drop in your metabolic rate meaning your body is going to fight you over this weight loss idea.  So, the trick is to eat enough to get the nutrition you need, to raise your metabolic rate through exercise, and if your metabolic rate is already suppressed through unwise dieting, to eat more as your metabolic rate increases!

     Unfortunately, Diet Power takes the reduced calorie approach to losing weight in its recommendations.  However, it does track the information you need to take a better approach.  What I did was take its recommended number of calories per day and subtracted it from Diet Powers calculation of my metabolic rate learned from the last 30 days.  Then I chose exercises that burned off enough calories to equal the difference between my metabolic rate and the program's recommended calorie consumption.  That way, I achieved the lower calorie goal without reducing the calories or nutrients I was consuming.

     Men are born with 23% more muscle fibers than women, so men need to burn more calories exercising to receive the same benefit as women from exercise.  So, 400 calories per day for men and 300 calories per day for women of exercise qualifies as moderate and, therefore, good for health and weightloss.

     Another lesson I learned from Diet Power was that I could only lose weight with the method above if the program rated my diet as A or A+.  Diet Power does analyze the foods you eat and will show you in graphs or tables (your choice) those nutrients your diet is deficient in.  Some can be made up by adding foods high in those nutrients to your diet and Diet Power will help you by displaying a list of foods high in each nutrient if you ask it.  You will also want to take vitamins and minerals to bring everything up to par as modern food does a poor job of providing the nutrients we need (more on that later).

     In another chapter I explain why over consumption of carbohydrates can prevent weight loss and cause weight gain (see sections on insulin and serotonin).  For my own diet, I increased protein to improve recovery from exercise, increased fat (see section on the heart) and reduced carbohydrates.

      Lastly, I would like to say something about modern food.  One of my wife's degrees is in horticulture, specializing in plant breeding.  The goal of commercial plant breeding is to made vegetables and fruits produce larger yields, transport better, and have longer storage lives.  Unfortunately, all of these goals are achieved by reducing the nutritive value of the vegetable or fruit in question.

     Increasing yields involves producing more and bigger vegetables and fruit.  When a vegetable or fruit is made larger, the vitamins and minerals in the vegetable or fruit do not increase proportionally with its increased size.  The end result is a decrease in nutritional value per serving.  Nutritional tables were updated by the USDA a couple years ago to reflect this decrease in nutritional value of modern day vegetables and fruit.

     Increasing storage life involves intentionally decreasing nutrients.  The bacteria that cause food spoilage need nutrients to live on.  By increasing sugar or carbohydrate content and reducing nutritional value, bacterial growth can be reduced and the storage life of the vegetables and fruits can be increased.

    Because of the above, it is highly unlikely that a diet with enough nutritional value to meet your needs can be had with just the foods you eat each day without over eating and getting fat like the rest of America.  For that reason, you will need to supplement your diet with vitamins and minerals.  Diet Power will help you determine which ones you need and how much of each.  You can create a "food" in Diet Power and enter the amount of each vitamin and mineral you supplement with and add it to your daily list of foods so Diet Power will calculate it in with the rest in your daily tally.

     In summary, learn how many calories you need each day by learning what your metabolic rate is, reduce calories by exercise rather than eating less than required by your metabolic rate, and supplement with vitamins and minerals to make up any deficiencies in your diet.  The program, Diet Power, is a good one for accomplishing these goals.  Don't try to lose 10 pounds in 10 day or partake in quick-loss diets because they don't produce permanent weight loss; they can damage your health and lead to even greater weight gains.  Improving your health is the key to keeping weight off permanently.  In the following chapters I look at issues of health, especially those that effect weight.