Eat ice-cream and still lose weight? — The Calorie conundrum

Find Your Fitness
Jul 30, 2017 · 7 min read
Client Holly on her Italian vacation embraces the local delicacies…

If you’ve ever embarked on a journey of weight loss, with no thanks to the support of the internet and the raft of “experts” that reside there, you’ve encountered a mind boggling amount of information as to the most effective approach.

This is certainly not helped by the industries charlatans who being aware of people’s despair, feed the problem further, creating a new fad or promoting a brand new game changing supplement promising the world but in reality delivering little (Not because they don’t work necessarily, just that they are not sustainable and typically cause a rebound effect as a result of trying to adopt a whole host of new eating habits all at once). I’m going to make the assumption that you want to lose weight and/or get fit and STAY that way. Not just be that way for at best a few months only for the pounds to pile back on and then some. Which is an extremely common occurrence.

I appreciate every one’s individual’s reasons for improving their health and fitness, but generally speaking we want everyone to:

- Look and feel fantastic

- Achieve life-long success, not 90 day crashes!

- Actually achieve their goals, not struggle, or feel like you’re constantly losing momentum and feel the need to keep starting over

- Enjoy the process and not feel like fitness and health is taking over your life at the expense of your social life, and avoiding addictive behaviour.

- Be a happy, confident person, not to freak out about food

We’re all accustomed to many a reality TV star claiming to have all the answers following a remarkable body transformation but possessing negligible authority in the field, not to mention any relevant qualifications whatsoever.

The level of misinformation out there is remarkable. And then you’ve got people with a genuine high level of interest in nutrition letting their good old personal biases get in the way and setting up rigidly into one of two camps.

There are those who believe the amount of calories you burn in relation to how much you consume is the biggest determinant of weight gain or weight loss (not factoring in muscle vs. fat, body composition, overall health, physical performance, or energy levels); so calories in vs. calories out (CICO).

The other camp vehemently adopts the stance that what you eat — and avoid — are far more important than your total calories. Here is often where you find the diet crazes emerge and an inclination to believe that carbohydrates are the root of all evil when it comes to obesity, heart disease, diabetes and more aplenty.

Abs and Ice Cream

Enter Anthony Howard-Crow, a 32-year-old photographer and serial stunt dieter from Colorado, who sits in the CICO camp. Having debunked the myth that you can’t lose weight eating fast food by losing 2 pounds a week for 30 days eating nothing but junk food, he embarked on another even more extreme experiment. For 100 days he ate nothing but 2000 calories worth of ice cream and 500 calories of protein powder (some of the 500 protein powder calorie allocation could be dedicated to…wait for it…alcohol!).

The outcome was almost 30lbs lost (192 to 160 lbs) and after checking out his blood work, even that came back normal for every significant variable and risk factor tested. The chap even stopped exercising after about day 60, performed no cardio at all and admitted to being completely sedentary as he works from home.

Pretty mind-blowing and strong evidence that an energy deficit overrides specific food sources when it comes to weight/fat loss.

Now, I’m not writing this blog to shock, make people feel bad or make the process of losing weight sound easier than it actually is. This guy equally stresses this wasn’t an exercise in bravado.

Along with Anthony, at NLP we want to emphasise the fact that it’s about lifestyle, and that you can be dedicated to fitness, nutrition and overall well-being, and still enjoy the foods you want. It’s about removing the stress, pain and guilt that comes with labelling foods as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. If we do this, we build a positive and negative association with something we have to think of regularly, seeing as we all eat. The negative feeling attached to certain foods only serves to elevate their status, placing them at the forefront of our minds and generate further feelings of guilt when we consume them.

It’s important to remember that this is just one individual and the exact same results can’t be guaranteed. I certainly don’t advocate adopting such an absurd diet. And even Anthony, the grand experimenter himself dissuades people from following this protocol. He confesses he was extremely low on energy and zero motivation over time, so it started to take its toll.

What it helps to emphasise is the importance of lowering your calories in order to lose weight, and that the process of doing so does allow ‘junk’ or foods that are highly palatable to be consumed along the way. It doesn’t mean painstakingly measuring out chicken and broccoli 3 times a day, every day.

It may mean, however, that those blatant junk foods that feature in your diet may just need to be moderated, to help create that powerful calorie deficit effect, and this is where portion control is so vital.

Counting calories can be a worthwhile exercise but I appreciate that tapping everything you eat in to your phone, is no way to live (Although, an awareness of how much calories different foods carry is something everyone should grasp, if you’re serious about losing weight and maintaining it — teach a man to fish and all that).

So, we know that eating less and moving more (creating a net negative energy balance) is quite important to weight loss (despite what some high profile fitness personalities claim, in order to attract customers)….and yet we are still more overweight than ever. Just “eat less” might not be the long-lasting solution we’re searching for, as it doesn’t factor in behavioural psychology and how illogical us humans can be!

But are all calories created equal?

Your body is a holistic, biological system that responds to different foods with varying hormonal responses. This has a direct influence on your metabolism and it’s one of the main reasons why a calorie is not a calorie.

Certain foods fill us up more than others without being full of calories (that’ll be those vegetables). Conversely, other foods are loaded with calories but don’t fill us up at all (sweets, crackers, fizzy pop).

So, it’s very easy to put away 2000 calories of processed snacks, and there’s a very high chance you’ll be on the hunt for more as you’re simply not satiated. These foods are engineered to have this effect. In my house, once that jar of Nutella is open, it’s going to be some time before I put the spoon down! Heavenly stuff. Just heavenly.

From a micro-nutrient point of view, you’ll be able to nourish your cells much more with veggies than you ever will Haribo.

Let’s look at fructose (a sugar which features prominently in many refined snacks) which is metabolised differently by the body than other sugars like glucose. Unlike other sugars, fructose is taken straight to the liver where it is metabolised into free fatty acids (FFAs), VLDL (the damaging form of cholesterol), and triglycerides, which get stored as fat. When you eat 120 calories of glucose, less than one calorie is stored as fat. 120 calories of fructose results in 40 calories being stored as fat. Yet another reason why a calorie isn’t a calorie.

Eating for success

So no, a calorie isn’t simply a calorie. It is a tad more complicated than that. But let’s not get overwhelmed as there is a way of eating that makes you look and feel great, out of hospital and loving life.

Real food.

Focus on eating whole foods, full of macro (protein, carbs and fats) and micronutrients. The type that fill you up, that don’t spike blood sugar levels and leave you feeling nothing short of abysmal.

No calorie counting, no macro-nutrient counting. Just focus on the right kinds of foods.

Granted, we all lead different lifestyles, have different jobs, enjoy different foods, hate different foods, feel better eating certain foods and have foods that we can’t stop eating; no one single diet can possibly work for all of us.

We have established you can eat junk food and lose weight, but we just need to limit it. You don’t have to exclude anything. Unless it’s a “trigger food” that causes you to mindlessly binge then it may be best to not have it around.

I recommend trying to make every meal contain a big protein source and fill half of your plate with vegetables. Make sure the carbs you add are from a healthy source, not cans of soda.

If you remain hungry, add more protein and vegetables.

Consider saving junk food for the evening, when maybe you’ve finished your working day and relaxing. It means you’ll feel better throughout the day when you’ll be typically working.

Remember, we want to find a way of eating that you can stick to.

Eating healthy “real food” and sticking to your calorie budget are not dichotomous and if we manage both that’s where the magic happens!

Find Your Fitness

Written by

Matty Currie | Health & Fitness Coach | Sharing my musings containing spades of self-flagellation | Liverpool https://www.facebook.com/MattyCurrieFitness/

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