Things I Like - Food

Okay, one more post about healthy eating and diet. I promise this is the last one - I just wanted to close out the topic properly.

I've already talked about portion size and the "healthy eating" food pyramid. The final piece is proper weight and what that means from a calorie perspective. There are at least two measurements that nutrionists use to evaluate body weight - the BMI (body mass index) and what I call the HWF factor (height/weight/frame). I've calculated both for myself and they seem to match up so it probably doesn't matter which one you use.

Once you find your healthy weight, you know whether or not you need to adjust your diet. Adjusting your diet comes down to the calorie calculation, you need to know (or estimate) your current calorie intake. There are tons of on-line calorie calculators that will do this for you but the results vary pretty significantly - I looked at about 10 and then averaged the results from the two calculators on the sites linked below (one skewed toward weight loss, the other toward nutrition - guess which one allows more calories?).

If you're at your desired weight now, you must be doing something right. If you are underweight, lucky you - Paula Dean has some recipes you need to try. However, if you're looking to lose weight, you have some work to do. To lose one pound, you need to reduce your caloric intake by and/or burn 3,500 calories.

That's pretty tough to do over the course of a week through calorie reduction alone. Almost as tough is determining exactly how many calories you're ingesting every day. I kept a food diary for one week, looking up and recording the calories and fat grams of everything I ate or drank. Not only was it time consuming, it was frightening. Believe me, I stopped grabbing that handful of Pringles at lunch round about Tuesday. Now try to remove 500 calories per day from your diet. It's not easy, especially if you're fond of ice cream. Much as I hate to admit it, exercise is a key component of weight loss.

So what did I learn over the last several weeks? First, I am not the healthy eater I thought I was. I had no idea that I was so off when it came to standard portion size. Second, I don't have nearly enough fruits and vegetables in my diet - thank goodness the farmer's market season is approaching. Third, counting calories is way too much work - I need to excercise more!

Calorie Calculators:
Mayo Clinic: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/calorie-calculator/NU00598
Free Dieting.com http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm

Btw - remember to eat your fruit & veg - don't these produce
stands from Barrow Market in London make you want to eat healthy?