Healthy Eating Tip:
Concentrate on caloric density, processed food, and fiber!
On Sunday, Nov. 1, I started another diet “reset.” As a reminder, I divide my dietary habits between the plant-based whole foods diet and what I refer to as a maintenance diet. The maintenance diet is a diet that I go on if my weight is good and all of the physiological markers are good. The physiological markers I am concerned about are the things anyone my age should look at; cholesterol, triglycerides, blood pressure, blood glucose, and weight. If everything is good, then I add back in some things to my diet that significantly increases satisfaction. On the maintenance diet, I reintroduce anything that I can control. This dramatically increases the satisfaction I get from eating, but it also leads to slow weight gain. If I am careful with what I eat on the maintenance diet, I can kind of tread water on this diet for maybe even as much as a year without coming close to the excessive weight that triggers a return to the plant-based whole foods diet.
I don’t want to write about this all over again because I already outlined the details of the dietary strategy I have used to maintain my weight and health for 18 years without the use of any medications. You can read about the details, and my 28-day diet reset at the healthy eating tip blog post entitled Strike Preemptively If You Have To. Recall that I started on Sept. 12 at 193.4 pounds and ended on October 9 at 187.4 pounds representing a weight loss of exactly 6 pounds. Upon returning to Smith Center, I weighed in for the first time on Tuesday, Oct. 20, at 192.8 pounds. That’s a 5.4-pound weight gain for the trip. If I had not looked ahead and planned for the uncontrolled emotional eating I knew would happen on the trip, I would have put that 5.4 pounds onto the 193.4 pounds I started at on Sept. 12 and been at 198.8 pounds. On Nov. 1, the first weight of my new two-month reset was 194.4 pounds. I wasn’t a very good boy my first week back in Smith Center. I put on another pound in a week. My “preemptive strike” tactic worked, and I avoided what could have been a catastrophic weight gain and something that might have demoralized me so much that I just gave up altogether. The next time I write about this reset will be on the Jan. 1 healthy eating tip, where I will present another graph of my weight loss trend and make comments. Make sure that you tune in on Jan. 1. One of the best ways to learn how to lose weight and gain health with diet and exercise is to watch another person do it and pick things from those observations that you can put into your own weight loss tool kit.
Today I want to write about three very simple things that I always have on my mind, whether I am eating the plant-based whole foods diet or on my maintenance diet. They are caloric density, processed food, and fiber. In reality, these three things and, in fact, much of the entire plant-based whole foods dietary approach can be boiled down to one word; fiber! At the start, it seems like an oversimplification, but fiber is the essential element of the whole plant-based whole foods dietary protocol. I concentrate on caloric density, processed food, and fiber because it helps me focus my efforts on fiber like a funnel channels flowing water in one direction. Everything leads to fiber!
Caloric Density
Caloric density refers to the number of calories that are in a given weight of food. If you look at a nutrition facts label for a candy bar, you’ll find that all bars have between 200 and 300 calories in them and weigh about 40 grams or just over 1 ounce. Carbohydrates and protein provide four calories per gram of weight and fat provides nine calories per gram of weight. Candy bars have between 8 and 15 grams of fat in them, and that is one reason they are high in calories. Food items that are high in calories and low in weight like a candy bar are considered “calorically dense.” An apple is an excellent example of a food that is low in caloric density. An average apple weighs around 100 grams and provides just 50 calories.
Furthermore, it has what is called nutritional density as opposed to caloric density. That means it provides more nutrients and fewer calories. One thing that nearly 100 percent of calorically dense foods lack is fiber. Fiber does a few things, but the most important one in regards to weight loss is that it fills your stomach up. Think of a stomach like a fishbowl that we put foods into. Put fiber-rich foods into your stomach, and the fiber soaks up water, expands, and limits the amount of food and, therefore, calories that you can fit into the fishbowl. If the food you put in the fishbowl has little fiber and is calorically dense, then you can fit a lot for food in the fishbowl. Fiber also slows digestion so that the fishbowl empties a lot slower. Most calorically dense foods transit through the stomach quickly, leaving you hungry and wanting to fill your fishbowl up again. A fishbowl full of fiber-rich whole foods might contain 500 calories. A fishbowl full of calorically dense foods nearly void of fiber might contain several thousand calories. What eating the plant-based whole foods diet does is exchange caloric density for nutrient density.
Processed Food
Processing is what we do to whole food products to make the foods that modern Americans love to eat. Processing food almost always eliminates fiber. Processing brown rice removes the germ and bran and turns it into white rice, which is a calorically dense and nutritionally deficient food. Processing wheat berries removes the germ and bran and turns whole wheat flour into white flour, which is a calorically dense and nutritionally deficient food. Many nuts and seeds are processed into oil by removing nearly everything that is the essence of a food except the oil. There is absolutely nothing dietarily evil about fat at all, but oil is a highly processed food that is almost entirely void of any nutrients except the calories. It is the quintessential calorically dense and nutritionally deficient food and something you need to limit in your diet!
Fiber
By thinking about caloric density and food processing, I am 100 percent certain never to forget that the bottom line is fiber! One of the things that makes the plant-based whole foods diet so effective is the fiber that whole plant foods contain.
I mention all the time that eating a healthy diet isn’t rocket science. Concentrate on the three very basic elements of caloric density, processed food, and therefore fiber to make your weight loss plan a no-brainer!
Have a great week, and don’t forget to check back on Jan. 1 to see how I did on the plant-based whole foods diet for two months! I am never 100 percent certain how it will go, and I always learn something, and you can learn something too!