Tag: weight loss

Whats a portion

11 years ago my wife wanted to go see the movie Avatar in theaters. I wasn’t completely on board with this idea as going out to the movies is not on my top 10 list of favorite things. After a bit of negotiating we landed on an agreement. She would buy me one single beer at the world of beer before we saw the movie. My wife was speaking my language with this offer and pretty soon we were in the car headed to the theater.

On the drive I hatched a devious plan to make sure I got the best end of the deal and it went a little something like this.

Bartender – What will you have?

Me – Liter of Hofbrau please.

Bartender sets down beer.

Me – Thanks

Wife – Wow, that’s a lot more then one beer.

Me – It’s 1 beer because it came in 1 glass.

Wife – I hope you pee your pants in this 3 hour movie.

In theory I was totally correct in ordering that 33 ounce beer but in spirit I was way off base. And I did have to take a restroom break half way through the movie.

Thanks for sticking with me through that little story, I hadn’t thought about it in years and it made me laugh but I feel like it can teach us a good lesson.

What we eat and burn

The average American consumes more than 3,600 calories daily – a 24% increase from 1961, when the average was just 2,880 calories. I know right. That factoid is from a 2013 study released by The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAOSTAT)

For a reference point the average american male burns between 1,900 and 2,500 calories a day, that number will vary with activity level. That leaves an excess of a 1,000+ calories a day. Which in theory sounds like a ton of extra food but in reality can easily be accomplished when your 1 beer has 440 calories.

Understanding portion size.

Our view of a portion size is completely out of wack with that we actually should be consuming. This is most evident in restaurants where studies have shown that we could be consuming up to 4 times the correct portion size based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Think about the giant bowl of pasta the last time you ate out at your favorite Italian joint. That’s probably what Nona Maria would have served to her entire family back in the old country.

Practical Advice.

Consult with a registered dietitian and see what you really need as your daily calorie intake. If you can’t do that a Basal Metabolic Rate – BMR calculator will give you a good idea of where you are supposed to be.

Buy a digital scale and read your nutritional labels. It’s a bit of a shocker in the beginning when you realize that you’ve been eating what is considered 2-3 portion sizes. https://www.amazon.com/digital-scale/s?k=digital+scale I agree it seems really silly to weigh out everything you eat but after a few weeks of retraining your self you wont have to rely on it nearly as much. ( we will dive deeper into this subject in a future blog, there’s some sneaky business going on with nutrition fact panels)

Fill your plate the correct way. A well designed plate will look like this. 50% vegetables, 25% whole grain carbohydrate and 25% protein. Vegetables are nutrient rich, relatively low in calories and are high fiber/high volume foods. When you get that digital scale try weighing out 300+- grams of vegetables its a lot more than you think it will be. P.S that’s a pretty good number to aim for at dinner and I almost guarantee you wont leave the table hungry after that portion of vegetable.

Like I’ve mentioned before in so many of my posts the key to long term success is to slowly but surely eliminate those junk food items from your daily diet. If you need some Doritos’s in your life right now i’m cool with it. But instead of taking the whole bag to the sofa for the ensuing T.V binge fest make friends with your new digital scale and weight out a correct portion and then get your chill on.

1. Stop drinking your calories

So I would like to open by saying I am not a dietitian or a doctor, I don’t have any letters after my name making me a subject mater expert in the field of nutrition either. what I can offer up for your consideration is some anecdotal evidence from my personal experiences as well as some cold hard science and perhaps plant a seed of change in your mind.

What if I told you that a year from now if you changed this one thing in your life you could lose a serious amount of weight and save a couple thousand dollars. Maybe you would think its crazy or another round of click bait marketing that isn’t even remotely based on anything factual.

Over the next few minutes I want to show you how drinking an excess amount of sugary drinks over the period of a year will hit you hard around the waist line and the wallet.

The science

Sugars are a type of carbohydrate and all forms contain 4 calories per gram.

Alcohol has 7 calories per gram.

1 pound of fat roughly contains 3,500 calories.

Beer and Alcohol

The average american spends roughly $435 dollars per year on alcoholic beverages, to be completely honest I was a little surprised at this number as I thought it was a little low. I’m sure in my hay day of $10.00 6 packs of craft beer I was spending way more then that on an annual basis.

Beer is the most popular alcoholic beverage in american and over the past decade we have averaged a consumption of 26.2 gallons per year.

The Math…

26.2 gallons equals out to 280 beers or twenty four 12- packs over the period of a year. based on an average cost of 10.50 a 12-pack that equals out to roughly $250 dollars. The average beer has 130 calories which leaves us with a total calorie count of 38,460 calories or 11 pounds of potential fat/stored energy.

Soda

We Americans spend several billion dollars a year supporting our sugar laden fizzy drink habit to the tune of 44.7 gallons per year according to a study released in 2010. The good news is that in the past decade soda sales have begun to decline but other sugary beverages have helped to fill those gaps.

On a daily basis we average 94 grams of added sugar a diet in our diet, that equals out to 358 calories. That’s close to a 1/6th of the daily calories based on a 2,000 calorie a day diet. One 12 oz can of Coca Cola and you have reached your daily allowance of 36 grams of added sugar.

The Math.

44.7 gallons of soda is equal to 487 twelve ounce cans of soda or 41 twelve packs. At 140 calories per can that equals out to an annual calorie consumption of 68,180 calories or 19.48 pounds of potential fat/stored energy. Based on a $5.00 price that would cost you about $200 a year.

To make things even worse we spend 1 trillion dollars a year here in the United states treating diseases closely associated with excess sugar intake. Diseases like, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and non alcohol fatty liver disease all have been linked with consuming an over abundance of sugar. Divide that 1 trillion dollars out by the 328 million Americans and you have an annual cost of $3,136 dollars per person.

Coffee

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the coffee its self its what we add to it that is the problem. I drink coffee every day and sometimes twice depending on how the kids slept the prior night and how things are going at our home office/day care center during this pandemic.

These numbers are a little shocking to me when I did the research for this blog. On average millennial’s ages 25-34 spend a whooping $2,008 a year on coffee, that equals out to $5.50 a day. HOLY CRAP!!! That’s a ton of money over the period of a year. So much in fact that the 1/3 of millennial’s spends more on coffee in the period of a year then they do on investments towards retirement. Now we know why Starbucks can afford to have a location on almost every street corner.

The Math. So we already know the financials on this habit but lets consider the calories. This is one is a bit tougher to do as a cup of black coffee has very few calories. in fact if you drank a very expensive cup of black coffee everyday you would easily come in under 500 calories for the entire you. However if you are spending $5.50 a day on coffee your more then likely moving towards the problem. Checking out the Starbucks menu online helped me narrow it down to 300 calories per drink on average.

so 300 calories times 365 days a year is equal to 109,500 annual calories or 31lbs worth of potential fat/energy.

THE REALITY

I’m not asking you to give up all three of these drinks cold turkey or suggest that if you did you would lose an upwards of 60 lbs over the next year. Both of those are completely unrealistic as a habit as hard as sugar is hard to break and the calories consumed in these drinks do help fuel our daily activity. Losing weight is not an exact science and none of us are exactly the same.

My goal with this exercise is to show that little uneventful decisions made on a daily basis can add up to some serious caloric intake and cost us a lot of money over the period of a year.

Over the period of a year all those drinks cost us $2,460 and account for 216,400 calories. Even if we fail miserably on our goal and only hit 25% reduction that’s still $600.00 and 50,000 fewer calories. That will make a huge difference in your health over a year.

CALL TO ACTION

Beer has always been my number one vice in life, I love it way more then I should. When I was younger and very active the increased calories didn’t seem to catch up with me. When I hit my late 20’s and the activity level dropped that’s when I started really putting on the weight. I had tried to limit/quit many times in the past but it was only when I took measured approach that I was able to eventually cut it out of my life.

Here’s what I did, maybe this will work for you. My goal was to only drink two beers a week one on Friday and one on Saturday. If I went to the store and bought a 12 pack thinking it would last 6 weeks in the fridge I would inevitably fail on this goal mid way through the week. So I stopped buying beer by the case and would ride my bike to gas station and purchase a single beer on the weekend. This way I had to take physical action to leave the house and go get that beer, and that’s not always easy when you have two kids.

After a couple of months of this pattern I noticed the spare tire starting to shrink and that motivated me to find other things I could do get even better results.

THE MORAL…

Start today but start small, You aren’t going to give up beer,soda or sugary coffee drinks tomorrow. If your drinking a 12 pack of soda a week lets start by trying to only drink 8 next week and then 4 the week after that. Make it a little more difficult to fall back on that vice in a moment of weakness. Put the money that you would have spent on those sugary drinks in a jar/separate bank account and watch it grow. Set a goal for something you need like a new surfboard, retirement or a vacation. Chances are by the time you’ve saved the money you’ve broken the habit and can move onto the next small step to better health and financial freedom.