What's in a Calorie?

Is maintaining a good, healthy weight a calories in calories out calculation? Sounds good, but many think that the body is more complicated than that. I have to agree. The body is complicated. We try to eat fewer calories, and our metabolisms slows down. If we're successful, we reduce calories in and lose weight for a while, 6 months maybe, only to hit a plateau. Even though we're still eating a reduced amount, our bodies hang on to that fat. We're in starvation mode. A reduced calorie diet actually convinces the body that it needs to store more fat as soon as it gets a chance. The metabolism slows down and becomes super efficient, ready for any opportunity to layer on some fat. If god forbid, we give up the diet, "Boing!" Fat cells fill up and we end up fatter than we were when we started. You know, the famed yoyo dieting problem. Diet, lose weight, lose control, eat more, gain weight, end up fatter than you started. Repeat. Gradually we get bigger and bigger.

We may know in our conscious minds that we will never have to deal with a famine, but our bodies have the wisdom of generations, and without our conscious mind's permission, the body stocks up on fat, just in case. If one day we do have to face real hunger, we've got the stores to pull us through. We should be glad that our bodies are so good at survival, so efficient. It's why we thrive as a species. But we've survived so well, we now live in a world of plenty. Now we're less than thrilled with our bodies' resourcefulness. We want to eat and eat and enjoy and never feel uncomfortable or have to work at being fit.

Another problem with the calories in calories out equation is that the only way to judge how many calories you burn is to make some educated guesses. You can calculate your baseline and maybe it's even close to the amount you actually burn. Then you have to count every calorie, monitor every morsel of food that goes into your mouth to be sure it's total is under the number of calories you're supposed to burn on average every day. Skipping over the idea of how crazy making living life calculating every calorie is and how impossible it is to maintain that kind of control over a lifetime, we still come up with a problem -- the amount of energy we use every day changes according to how active we are, how well we feel, how much we do. It fluctuates. Some days, we sit around and watch movies all day, barely burning more calories than if we were fast asleep. Other days, we go for a run or help a friend move. We're going all day. We certainly burn more calories on those days. But how do we know? We don't have a gauge to tell us how many calories we can burn in a day.

Or do we?

OK, we don't have a gauge sticking out of our abdomens, saying empty, full, 3/4… but our bodies do have a very effective way of telling us we need food. It's called hunger.

Sadly, we spend most of our time avoiding the sensation. The very thing that tells you clearly "Yes, you need food now!" and we cower in fear of it. I've seen plenty of magazines advertising weight loss programs and far too many claim "Lose Weight Without Ever Feeling Hungry!" Huh? How is that possible? If you never feel hungry, you're eating more than your body needs. End of story.

So here I will make a case for feeling hungry. It takes patience. If you've eaten too much, you may have to wait a long time before you feel it. If you give in and eat before you're hungry, you may never feel it. In order to lose weight, get and stay slim, you need to know hunger, feel it, maybe even enjoy it a little bit. Every day, ideally before every meal, you should feel hungry. Not peckish. Not feeling like having a little something'. Not craving. Genuinely hungry.

How is that different from dieting? You're listening to your body. Instead of forcing yourself to scrape by with the measly calories you think you're supposed to eat, you eat what your body asks for, so your body won't go into starvation mode. The body gets hungry; it gets fed. No need to panic and prepare for a famine. The food is there when it asks.

My daughter read my "be hungry before you eat rule" and said, "But it sounds like you have to be hungry all the time!" Not so. If you eat 3 meals a day and a snack, you need only feel hungry for 4 minutes a day - 1 minute, right before you eat each time. That's a minimum, but if you've not been hungry in a while, try it. Even if you're eating your favorite foods each meal, if you wait until you're hungry before you eat, you will shave off some pounds.