Calories – One of Many Tools In Your Toolbox

Mar 18, 2010

I recently had a client say to me, “I don’t think counting calories is the whole answer for me”.  I agreed. There are lots of other tools that she will need to use, to be sure.  I also told her that I don’t think that calorie counting is ever intended to be the answer.  Your solutions are probably going to need to be as varied and multi-faceted as you are!   Weight management is ultimately about empowering yourself to create new behavior patterns.

As long as I have been in the field of weight management though, the calorie debate has been raging – calories count/calories don’t count, you should count them/you shouldn’t count them.  Why this is even a debate?   They are not right or wrong, the answer or not the answer. They are just facts, and but one tool in a whole toolbox of strategies. 

Calorie knowledge is not intended to be permission to eat badly and just make the calories work, tempting though it is.  This will likely work for scale weight loss, but does not insure fat loss.  Fat loss and muscle maintenance are the the goals in weight loss and health.  And anyway, in all likelihood an overweight person will not be able to continue to eat badly and manage their appetite well enough to manage their calories.  You are sort of forced into eating better if you want to keep a grip.

The content of your diet has been proven to have a huge effect the hormones that regulate these processes.  What you eat as well as the specific way you exercise promote either fat loss or fat storage.  Through diet and exercise, your body becomes what you ask it to do – either a fat burner or a fat storer.   Albeit inadvertently, you are teaching it which every day.

There are a lot of ways in which calorie knowledge can be helpful to you for long-term weight management, not the least of which is that it gives you an invaluable tool for the one of your primary weight management responsibilities –  accountability.

In the same way that knowing the amount of your mortgage and the cost of all the things you buy can help you to manage your household budget, calorie knowledge can give you the necessary mathematical information to simultaneously manage life’s hurdles and your body’s budget.  If it works for you, why not make use of this important tool?

Here are some ways calorie knowledge can be employed:

You can quantify your goal.  Your goal weight calories can be estimated (pretty accurately if you employ a device like the Body Gem to actually measure them).  There are also average estimates that incorporate about 85% of the population.  So, it is no longer a mystery to figure out the calories it takes to get where you are going.  You can get an idea in advance of the budget for the weight you want to be.

You Can Get A Benchmark.  Since you can quantify the calorie range for your goal weight, you can also check out how you are doing along the way, see how close you are coming to the mark.  You can clearly see if your goal weight is a realistic based on what you are able to get yourself to do now.  For many of my clients, this is how they saw clearly, on paper, that they would need to exercise to have a chance at staying in the caloric range of their target weight.  Good to know.

You Can Help Yourself “Hang In There”.  It also helps those who choose very low calorie diets not to bail when the going gets tough, because they can clearly see that this radical dieting was never what they really needed to be doing for the weight they want to be.  It is just a tool they chose to use to assuage their impatience and get to their goal faster.  It does not have to be sustained for them to be successful.  In fact, it probably really undermines them in the long run for a whole host of reasons.  But, anywhere along the way, they can modify it, temporarily, or permanently and, as long as they do stay around their future goal weight calories, they will eventually reach it, albeit more slowly than they may feel they have the patience for.

You Can Help Yourself Not Take The Scale So Seriously.  If you know what you are spending, then you can know somewhat accurately what the scale is going to do over time.  And if you track it, you will see that it eventually reflects what you programmed it to do, taking into consideration your metabolism, your exercise, and the calories you took in.  I’ve watched many the uninformed dieter give up in frustration, either because 1) the loss they are expecting didn’t show up in the window of time they expected it to (and if they had just held out a little longer, it would have), or 2) because, based upon their weight and the calories they are taking in, they have totally unrealistic expectations of how much weight they are entitled to lose, or 3) because they dropped an extra few pounds of water the first week and do not realize that they owe that back to the scale.

Calories are forgiving.  Perfectionism is one of most surefire setups ever employed by the chronic dieter.   It’s not only impossible to achieve perfect eating and we keep changing our ideas of what this is anyway, but more importantly, it is not necessary.  Mind you, calorie knowledge is also not intended to be permission to eat crap and just make the numbers work (frankly if you were able to do that successfully, you would not be overweight).  But calorie knowledge can be how you tolerate your intended or unintended blips without wearing them.  It buys you time to work out the kinks, or plan to indulge and consider it part of your plan – not a failure.

You Can Find The Easy Wins.  Weight management is a skill that can take years to really get “right” for you.  Knowing calories can encourage you to capitalize on things that might be easier for you (like eating lots of vegetables or exercising) while you practice some of the harder things for you – like donut management.

You Can Afford To Treat Yourself. You can do that in a couple of ways.  You can plan ahead and bank for your indulgence in advance.  That has the added benefit of making it guilt-free – priceless, by the way, in the world of chronic dieters.   Or, you can pay after the fact – a bit less reliable however.  Ya gotta ask yourself, if you won’t save in advance, when the having of the treat will feel like a reward for a job well done, what makes you think you will pay it back later when it definitely (although unjustifiably) has that “punitive” feel to it.

You Can Get Leverage on Yourself.  Hard to believe that anything is more painful than staying overweight, right?  But “paying back” calorie over expenditures must be, or more people would choose to do it.  Have you ever noticed that people who have the kind of job that doesn’t get done if they don’t go to work, rarely call in sick?  Since they get it that they are only making their own life more difficult by missing work, they have to be on their deathbed to take time off.  That’s the idea here.  If you actually insisted on taking responsibility for the calorie surplus instead of wearing it, if you didn’t let yourself off the hook, the discomfort of having to give up something else in order to pay the caloric bill might just push you to work harder at finding ways to help yourself avoid it in the first place.  Especially when it is something that in hindsight may not seem worth the cutting back you will have to do to pay it off.

You Can Quantify A Consequence.  One of my clients recently told me a story of how she spontaneously wolfed down leftover spaghetti and meatballs in a moment of stress.  I can relate, can you?!  Since every 100 calories per day manifests itself as approximately 10 lbs. in a year, it had a different meaning to her when I pointed out to her that an approximately 450 calorie choice like that daily makes a difference of about 45 lbs. a year.  Said another way, a 45 lb. heavier person makes that kind of a choice daily.  She had started out the conversation jokingly asking me if she could use as an excuse the fact that she had a great reason to be stressed.  I jokingly (but not) suggested she try telling that to her belly.  I haven’t found mine to be all that empathetic.

You Get to Decide if it is “Worth It”.  Clients often tell me that their friends ask them what I tell them they are allowed to eat.  I always answer, “I hope you told them that I told you that you can eat anything you want as long as you think it is OK calorically, health-wise and behaviorally for you.”  I’ll help them look at the pertinent facts in all these areas, but what actually goes into their mouths is entirely their decision.  Let’s face it, for how long have you really been willing to follow someone else’s rules?  They have to become your rules for your reasons.  Clients usually find that it’s a very different (and empowering) conversation to decide for themselves that something is simply not worth it to them to fit into their budget, or risk derailment or ill-health over than to think of it as “not allowed” by someone else, no matter how credible or powerful that authority is.

You Can Embrace The New You – Now.  As well as it being totally logical to take this approach, it also helps psychologically.  You can embrace the lifestyle for your goal weight now so that you know how to sustain it when you get there. It makes a whole lot more sense to learn to eat for the weight you want to be (which is permanent) rather than diet (which implies temporary).  Rather than being daunted by the shear amount of weight you want to lose, you can rest assured that you are living your life “as your target weight” right now and just wait for your body to catch up.

Most importantly, you can start being excited about the new you and all that implies and just start being him or her now!

Begin your final weight loss journey now…