The Energy Balance

To all our Lighten-Up participants, I am writing today from the sunny Outer Banks of North Carolina! I haven’t had access to the internet for several days, but now should be back on-line through Friday. On vacation, I’ll be expending more energy than usual – swimming, walking and biking. Which brings me to what I want to talk about today: energy.
Food represents a lot of things to us: we may think of it as a source of vitamins, life-sustenance, a reason to socialize, or a way to be comforted – there are actually genres of restaurants now called “Comfort Foods”, but when you get down to the very basic reason we need food, it is to provide energy. Our bodies break down the nutrients in food and use them to power our breathing and digestion, to make fuel for our muscles, and to strengthen our mental processes. We can’t think, work, sleep or play at our best without energy from food.
We measure the energy potential of food in terms of calories. We can also measure our activities in terms of calories burned. Our goal in maintaining our weight right now is to burn just as many calories as we take in. If our goal is to lose weight then we have two choices: burn more than we take in by bumping up our activity level, or take in fewer calories than we burn off by changing the way we eat.
You have chosen to do both by adding at least a mile of walking to your day, every day, and by choosing to change your diet through the Lighten Up activities. In order to know how to change your eating, it’s important to know where you are now. I asked everyone to keep a food diary for a couple days; now I’d like you to calculate how many calories you took in on those days. You can do that by consulting a food/calorie guide if you already have one, or you can go to www.calorieking.com. It just takes a few minutes to jot down and add up the calories per portion size. Please note that most portion sizes for most foods are from ½ - 1 cup. Something to keep in mind as you think about the size of portions you normally have on your plate.
Something else to think about is that a pound of weight gain equals about 3500 calories. That means eating about 500 too many calories in one week would cause you to gain a pound that week if you didn’t exercise enough to burn off the extra 500 calories each day. In fact if you eat just 100 more calories (about one can of pop) than you burn every day, you’ll gain about 10 pounds a year. Remember, I mentioned how our bodies break down the calories to use for fuel? Well, our bodies are ingenious machines….the calories (fuel) we don’t burn off through metabolic processes or exercises, gets stored for the future...and gets stored as extra pounds, gets stored as – you guessed it – fat.