Oh joy, it’s that time of year again. The time when bourbon balls, Christmas cookies, eggnog, hobnob, cancelled workouts, and champagne toasts go head-to-head with our New Year’s Resolution of losing weight. The fight usually falls into three divisions:
Heavyweight: You’ve wanted to lose weight for a while and the New Year is finally the time to do it.
Middleweight: The New Year means you get to work off everything you put on during the holidays.
Lightweight: You don’t really need to lose weight and didn’t gain much over the holidays but you don’t have any other New Year resolutions (a niche, minority category, heretofore ignored).
During times of temptation and indulgence the fight may seem futile. You want to enjoy yourself and part of this enjoyment means eating delicious food. You want to feel good about yourself and part of feeling good means being able to fit into your favorite pair of jeans. How can we rectify the two? How can we cut calories without really having to say goodbye?
There is a plethora of diet plans designed to help you snip those calories. But the funny thing about diet plans is that they rarely give you the simple equations explaining how we lose, maintain, and gain weight. They are:
Calories in < calories out = weight loss
Calories in = calories out = weight maintenance
Calories in > calories out = weight gain
If you take in fewer calories than you expend, you will lose weight. If you take in the same amount of calories you expend, you will keep your same weight, and if you take in more calories than you expend you gain weight. It really is that simple. The reason why there are so many books, fads, supplements, gimmicks, marketing ploys, and products trying to tell us the best way to shed pounds is because although the equations are straightforward, implementing them can be darn confusing.
So let’s make it simple again. Forget plans of eating only protein, zoning out, and heading to South Beach. Ascribing to these diets is like having a huge bon voyage party for our beloved calories. Instead, let’s work with the simple equations as we take on the challenge of cutting calories without noticing their absence.
First off, assess places in your diet that you might be able to make small changes—lifestyle changes, not diets—that will help you with our first equation. Remember, we’re trying to make the calories in less than the calories out. So, let’s look where we take in the extras:
Sugar: This substance is ubiquitous in food, especially in processed and packaged products. Unlikely candidates for sugar additions include crackers, breads, soups, meats, and cereals. The easiest way to cut a lot of calories is by removing or cutting back on sugar calories. Do you add sugar to your coffee or tea, or drink mochas and other sugary caffeinated beverages? Do you start your day with a sugary cereal? What about sodas, other than diet? Do you drink high-sugar fruit juice, or eat sweetened jams, jellies, and bread products? Start reading labels and get rid of anything that has a second or third ingredient of high fructose corn syrup. Phase out sugar and honey in your teas and coffees. Switch to diet sodas or better yet, sparkling water.
Sizes: Have you seen the size of some of those coffee drinks? Egad, a large size spans the distance from hand to elbow. Everything is super-sized these days so it’s up to us to be order and size-smart: small drinks, half orders, doggie bags, sharing with friends, not being part of the clean plate club. It’s really easy to eat more than we need just because it’s in front of us. Make it easy on yourself by not putting it there in the first place.
