Chuck’s Home World

Many people don’t realize it, but your body burns calories all the time. When you eat, your body must burn calories to get the energy and nutrients from the food you’ve eaten. Eating every three hours or so keeps your body’s furnace going. If you don’t eat and your stomach goes empty, your furnace goes into stand by mode and your burn fewer calories. Depending on your calorie budget, you should eat about 100 – 300 calories between meals… roughly every three hours or so. Make them good calories though, not a couple of doughnuts, but an apple and some nuts (or other healthy snack).

If you think you’re going to lose weight by not eating, think again. Sure you can starve yourself and sure you may lose weight, but you’ll be suffering and you may gain more weight when you start eating again.

You see your body recognizes when there is a lack of food and so it slows down your calorie burning. Plus keep in mind that your body uses calories to process the foods you eat, so if you eat more often, you’ll burn more calories. The trick here is to make sure you eat the right kind and amount. Proteins take longer to process and you’ll feel fuller longer than say a glazed doughnut (or six).

To keep your system going, you should eat every three hours or so. A good breakfast mixed with complex carbs (whole wheat bread or oatmeal) along with some fresh or dried fruit. Then in about 3 hours, eat a small snack of nuts, granola or carrots. Just try to limit the morning snack to about 100 – 300 calories. Then have a decent high protein lunch. Mid-afternoon (three hours after lunch) have another 100-300 calorie snack, followed by a well balanced meal for supper.

If you’re trying to control your calorie intake, you should not drink your calories. Avoid sodas and sweetened teas and other drinks. Water is your best best, or if you must, use an artificial sweetener such as Splenda. You can have 3 or 4 apples for the same amount of calories (or less) than having a regular 20 oz soda!

Instead of drinking a glass of orange juice, eat an orange. Instead of apple juice, eat an apple. You get so much more out of the fruit than just the juice.

Walk more. It’s easy. Here are some ideas to increase your daily steps.

• Park your car further away when you go shopping. You don’t have to park at the very end of the parking lot, but the more distance between your car and the store’s doors is better!
• Return the cart to the inside of the store instead of the outside. Don’t just drop it off at the closest cart drop.
• Don’t try to make the fewest trips from your car to the house when toting groceries in. Make more trips!
• Take the stairs when you can. If you live on the 20th floor, I understand not taking the stairs, but if you live just one flight up and can handle walking stairs, then do it!
• If you work in an office building like me, try to walk around the place at least once per hour. Drink more water so you have to go to the bathroom more often and go to the bathrooms farthest away.

Do you have any more ideas on how to get more steps in? If you take less than 5,000 steps per day, you’re considered sedentary. Ideally you should be walking at least 10,000 steps per day (though I don’t always make that either).

How Can You Adjust What You Eat and Do Unless You Know It?

You need to know what you’re currently doing so you can know what you may need to change.  Even without starting a “diet” you can record what you eat (at least calories, fat, protein and carbohydrates. Knowing how many calories per serving is great, but you need to pay attention to the amount of servings you consume too.

Recording What you Eat

The only way you’re going to know what you eat is to write it all down. I mean every bit of it. It does take some discipline but you must do it. A simple piece of paper or a journal. No need to go out and by a food log book. Just a simple spiral bound one will do.  If you cook a lot, you may need some help in figuring it out. If you eat a lot of packaged food, use the nutritional information on that. Above all, you can use the internet to figure out how much you’re eating. I use Diet Pro 2005 (Google for it).

Create a column for the food, amount of protein, fats, carbs and calories.  And if you eat a package of food that contains more than a single serving – calculate it out to what you’ve eaten!

FF: Did you know that the Nutritional information on packages can err from 2% to  25%?

Recording What you Do

Besides know what you eat, you need to know how you are burning energy. One quick way is to get a pedometer and record the daily steps it shows. There are some really good ones out there that will allow you to record things onto a computer. Of course, just record the activities, even if you don’t know how much calories they’re using up. For example, if you take a 30 minutes walk, write that down.  Use your food journal to record activities too. Later, you may discover that walking a steady pace of 3.5 MPH for 30 minutes can burn 250 calories or more.

Try to be as fit as you can be, regardless of your diet. When starting off, the first thing you need to do is get fit. If you’re 5 pounds overweight or 150. Start exercising and get those muscles working. Start small and work your way up. If you lose your breath walking 150 feet, then you should walk 300 feet extra every day. The 600 and keep going. In a few week’s time you’ll be walking miles.

Of course you may need to check with your doctor to find out what kinds of exercising you may be able to do.

I’ve learned quite a bit over the last couple of years, and I continue to learn more as my fitness journey continues. I’ll be posting a few Diet Quick Tips in the coming days. Some of them are things that I’ve read about or heard in an educational seminar or other resource (such as a book).

Many of them are really just common sense that many of use choose to ignore. Before doing any of the suggestions, make sure you know the condition of your body and if possible check with your doctor to make sure you can do what I suggest.