The diet Chronicle

If you are trying to lose weight, choose food based on their weight-to-calorie ratio. You want to eat food that weighs a lot but has few calories and avoid food that is light in weight but hefty in calories.

Fruits and vegetables are the big winners in the heavy weight-low calorie department, according to Tufts University.

They weigh a lot because of their fiber and water content and yet do not have many calories. For example, one cup of cantaloupe or 'melon' weighs 5.5 ounces but only has 56 calories. A cup of cooked spinach weighs six ounces but only has 42 calories.

Now, compare that to six cups of buttered popcorn that only weighs three ounces and contains 420 calories or, even worse, one ounce of potato crisps that has 152 calories (if you ate four ounces, you would be inviting 608 calories to feel at home in your fat cells).

That's what I call "small but terrible".

Most snack food doesn't weigh much but sure have a lot of calories.

This means you can eat a lot of them without feeling full and without realizing it take in many excess calories that you don't need.

Most cookies weigh ½ ounce and contain 50 calories. Eat six cookies and you only have three ounces of weight but you've racked up 300 calories. 1.5 ounces of a chocolate bar contain 220 calories. A small croissant only weighs two ounces but has 230 calories.

According to the New Zealand University study, food that is light in weight but high in calories is probably the worse kind of food to eat if you are trying to lose weight. It's sort of like 'double jeopardy' - you are still hungry but you have already eaten many calories.

Choose lower-fat choices of the same weight food. There can be a world of difference between the caloric consumption of two people eating the same weight and type of food. How is this possible? Easy, if you consider the way the food is cooked or prepared.

Here are some examples (all of them weigh 3.5 ounces). Boiled potatoes have 62 calories compared to french fried potatoes with 328 calories. Sardines in tomato sauce contain 127 calories while sardines in oil have 372. Tuna flakes in water have 95 calories while tuna flakes in oil have 309. You get the picture.
 
Avoid the "light weight-high calorie" way of dieting. I know many people who don't want to eat regular sized meals because they think that if their stomach feels heavy, they are eating a lot of calories. Therefore, they think that by eating something light like crackers, they will lose weight.

What they don't realize is that just because a food is light doesn't automatically mean it contains few calories.
 
One could easily eat nine crackers (420 calories) and still not feel full because nine crackers only weigh three ounces. Believe it or not but you could have a satisfying meal of ½ cup steamed rice, a cup of cooked spinach, a small piece of fish, and a cup of cantaloupe for less calories.
 
This complete meal would weigh a satisfying 18.5 ounces and only "cost" you 378 calories. By making the right food choices, you can cut down on unnecessary calories without starving yourself and feeling deprived.

You should also cut down somewhat on your carbohydrate, but don’t cut them out completely! Because effective weight loss depends on exercise and activity, without some carbohydrates in your diet, you won’t have the energy you’ll need to effectively burn off calories.

What you do need to do is begin with a “baseline diet” that dictates at least half of your calories come from vegetables, fruits, natural starches, and whole grains. The rest of your diet should consist of low-fat proteins like fish, chicken, and lean beef.

You need to balance out your carbohydrates with your protein stay away from those carbohydrates at night. Periodically, you want to take “carb-up” days to get your energy levels up..

For women, it is recommended you eat five meals a day and for men, you should eat six. Try to make these meals a minimum of 2 hours apart to insure you don’t get too hungry.

The benefits will reveal themselves. By doing this, you are accomplishing the following benefits:

• Faster metabolic rate.
• Higher energy.
• Less storage of body fat due to the smaller portions.
• Reduced hunger and cravings.
• Steadier blood sugar and insulin levels.
• More calories available for muscle growth.
• Better absorption and utilization of the nutrients in your food.

But you need to make sure you eat the right kinds of foods.

First, you need to drink a lot of water. Most individuals don’t drink nearly enough water. Colas and coffee don’t count! Yes, you really should drink eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day - maybe more, depending on your weight.

Water is a natural appetite suppressant. If you drink a full glass of water before beginning your meal, your stomach simply doesn’t hold as much food.

No, you will not gain weight from drinking a lot of water. It’s when you don’t drink enough water throughout the day, your body gets dehydrated. When it does finally get water, it holds onto it and stores it for a future need. That’s when we feel swollen, and bloated with water weight. 

However, if you give your body enough water on a regular basis, it releases it naturally. Drinking enough water gives you the benefit of hydration and fullness.

You should always eat a balanced meal. This might be the one thing we learned in elementary school that we really can use in our adult life – the basic food groups.

Proteins and carbohydrates are essential to a healthy meal. Carbohydrates are the main source of energy in our diet, and proteins burn fat. At a bare minimum, each meal should consist of a protein and a carbohydrate.

DO NOT skip meals. One of the worst things we can do, in our attempt to lose weight, is to skip a meal. I’ve seen it countless times: Motivated to lose weight, an individual decides to eat just twice a day. But your metabolism needs the consistency of regular meals. With erratic eating schedules, the body thinks it’s starving.

So, everything it takes in – it stores as fat to be used for energy.

Finally, exercise. You just can’t lose weight when you maintain a sedentary lifestyle.  People who exercise live longer and feel better. And, they lose weight quicker. But, keep it simple.
 
Thomas Jefferson said, “The sovereign invigorating of the body is exercise, and of all the exercises walking is the best.”

It’s never too late to get in shape. We’ll give you a whole separate section on exercise, but you don’t have to join a gym and become the next famous body builder. 

There’s plenty of ways you can get enough exercise to aid in your weight loss efforts.

Of course, there is a simple formula to help calculate weight loss: consume fewer calories than what you burn every day. For example, if you consume 2000 calories per day and you burn 2500 calories per day, you will lose weight.

You might just say "Why don't I just cut down on my calories intake considerably, hence I don't really have to burn many calories to lose weight?" Well that would be starving yourself and is not a good idea at all. This will make you weaker, hungrier and you will eat quite a lot after.

Your body needs food and calories to get energy. You need to eat enough so as not to starve yourself and be able to burn these calories and more after. On the other hand, if you burn out the exact same amount of calories that you take, you will stay the same.

The secret to losing weight without going hungry is to make the right food choices. You need to choose foods that are low in calories but can satisfy your stomach so you don't become hungry.

We found a very interesting study that illustrates how the way we eat affects our weight. It was performed by New Zealand’s University of Auckland in 1999. 
 
The researchers divided male participants into three groups. Each group was put on a diet with different fat percentages (their total daily calories were composed of 60, 40 or 20-percent fat) but no calorie limits. The men were told to eat as much they wanted from the food choices they were allowed.

As expected, the men eating the 20-percent fat diets lost weight because they were consuming fewer calories. Fat contains nine calories per gram compared to four calories per gram for carbohydrates or protein. Therefore, the more fat a food contains the more calories it will have. However, in spite of the lower calorie diet, the men in this group were not at all hungry.

What the researchers discovered was that the men in the low-fat group unconsciously compensated by choosing foods that weighed the same as the men in the higher-fat groups and, therefore, were not hungry.

What this suggests is that the weight of the food you eat may play a more important role than fat or calories in satisfying your hunger. In other words, you may not need to eat high-calorie or high-fat foods to feel full but your stomach has to feel the weight of a certain amount of food.
 
There are several other studies suggesting that people tend to eat the same weight of food daily, regardless of the fat or calories that the meals contain. It's almost as if your stomach has an internal scale with a pre-determined weight that has to be reached for you to be satisfied and not hungry.

This may explain the rationale behind drinking a glass of water or having a bowl of soup before eating to cut down on your appetite. It may also explain why people can go on a low fat diet and yet gain weight if the majority of their food choices come from starchy food that is highly processed and low in fiber.

You can eat many slices of fluffy white bread before you feel full while eating two slices of whole wheat multi-grain bread already makes you feel like you swallowed the whole loaf. Eating high fiber foods like oatmeal helps you eat fewer calories (seven ounces of oatmeal only has 120 calories) without going hungry.

So how do you choose the right foods?