A post in my Facebook news feed today ominously warned that TWELVE EXCESS CALORIES a day will pack on a pound in a year! That’s two Saltines! Comments included thanks for the “wake up call” and a joke about breath mint consumption.
In my book I call this “Magical Math.” It’s a popular fallback on a slow news day when somebody needs weight-related content. It has a mirror-image twin: in this case that a 12-calorie daily deficit could take a pound off you. In a year.
The barrage of tips n’ tricks n’ secrets we are exposed to in the media all add up to just so much noise. There’s little to no substance; the overall confusion is increased with cliches that are generally out of context. But mostly, they distract us from the focused perspective that gets real work done.
I could post a lengthy list of weight loss “tips” you’d already be well familiar with. Attempting to integrate them into your daily routine would find you wandering among the trees, unaware of the forest. The bigger perspective is the real strategy: Staying focused on maintaining a daily calorie deficit with regular exercise and a straight-forward plan for eating and taking your food-driven behaviors under control.
Tweaks and tips and tricks are unlikely to make much difference for you when you have a big job to do, especially if they don’t really fit into the big picture. If you’re not losing weight, believing it’s because you’re missing some tiny detail is fool’s gold at best and denial of what needs to be done at worst. The Eating Behavior Survey is a strategic tool that focuses your attention on what you’re doing right and where you might be undermining your efforts. Let’s put it in context. Log your food for a few days and run the numbers on your calorie count. How does it match up to your sensewear device? Don’t have a device? If your food is in good shape, then you need to increase your daily physical activity. Look for significant changes to make; don’t fall into the trap of believing a little tweak will fix everything.
If you’d like to learn more about how your metabolism manages calorie intake, this article which appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association explains the self-limiting nature of calorie consumption. These scholarly articles can be difficult to find; it’s reproduced here on the website of Andrea Sopher Ullberg, author of a workbook for tracking your nutritional status following WLS or significant weight loss. After you’ve read the article, check out Andrea’s book.
JAMA Article: Extra Calories Cause Weight Gain—But How Much?
Lab Tracker Workbook by Andrea Sopher Ullberg
