I love to eat just about anything. I can’t eat gluten, and soy and I don’t do well either, but I assure you if I could eat them, I would.

4,000-9,000 calories per day

Turns out, my love of food suited me quite well on Kilimanjaro. I have no idea how many calories I did burn per day, but estimates range from 4,000-9,000 per day burned on the climb. All I know was that it was pretty awesome, being able to eat as much food as I wanted and not have to worry about it. That will never, ever happen again in my life!

Food intolerances

I was pretty worried about the food before I got there. Being gluten-free can be a huge pain in the butt in the States sometimes, and I knew they like to serve plenty of carbs on Kilimanjaro for energy. I had visions of these plates of pasta being served to the rest of my group, and me trying to subsist on my Perfect Foods Bars. Those bars are like crack to me, but trying to subsist on them could prove to be a different story.

Fortunately, Tusker Trails was amazing. They ensured that everything I ate was gluten-free.

I had brought all sorts of digestive aids and supplements just in case, but by the fourth day I said to myself, “OK, they aren’t going to poison me” and stopped taking them. 

If the rest of my group got pasta, the cook made up a plate of rice or potatoes just for me. They brought seasoning bottles to me to verify ingredient lists before they used it. One time our guide came running in to the tent at lunch yelling, “Jenny, don’t eat the soup.” Apparently it had noodles in it, but the cook was making up soup just for me — it just hadn’t come out yet.

Lack of food = lack of energy

Burning that many calories day in and day out, adequate food is actually a big deal. Appetite goes down as altitude goes up, and the diamox we were taking for altitude sickness can also affect appetite. My climbing companions had problems maintaining their appetites, and lost significant amounts of weight on the trip. Neither of them made the summit, and for one in particular I suspect that lack of calories played a factor.

We were told to bring lots and lots of snack bars, and I think they wanted us to be prepared to use them as meal replacements. That way, even if we didn’t necessarily want what the cook prepared for us, then we could eat something we brought, and presumably would really like. One of the gentlemen in the group resorted to his bars a few days in. Me, no, I didn’t get that lucky.

Too much food = pants that don’t fit

I, on the other hand, had to ask my guides to stop feeding me so much. They were always pushing seconds on everyone. We even had a porter responsible for serving our food each day and making sure we ate enough – and ratting us out to the guides if we did not. But, by about day five my pants were starting to feel less comfortable and I was worried I wouldn’t have anything to wear to the summit (which would have been problematic on many levels). I managed to assure them that I wasn’t sick, but just protecting my girlish figure. At that point they finally relented.

Sample meals

We ate well on the mountain, no question about it.

Breakfast: Porridge, eggs, bacon or sausage, fresh fruit, and coffee, tea, or hot chocolate to drink.

Lunch: Vegetable soup, rice/potatoes/pasta, meat and veggies in a mystery sauce, fresh fruit.

Post-trail Snack: Freshly-popped popcorn or freshly-roasted peanuts, coffee, tea, hot chocolate.

Dinner: Vegetable soup, rice/potatoes/pasta, meat and veggies in a mystery sauce, fresh fruit.

Yes, we actually had fresh fruit every meal. Mango, papaya, pineapple, watermelon (yes, watermelon), canteloupe, and avocado.

Since my return, I’ve had more than one person remark, “now I can’t use my food allergies as my excuse for not doing a trip like that.”  No, you can’t. Because much of the rest of the world eats less processed food than the US, dealing with food allergies and intolerances outside of the US is oftentimes considerably simpler than within the US.

Anyway, you’ve run the gamut, but you still aren’t the trim, svelte individual you have in your mind’s eye. Believe me, been there, done that!

There is a simple (but not easy) weight loss plan that:

• Lets you eat what you want when you want.
• Has just one rule.
• And is GUARANTEED to work.

At this point I bet you are thinking, awesome someone else that is just going to tell me, “consume less than I eat and it will all work out in the end. Fantastic, I need that advice like I need a hole on my head.”

Yep, sadly that actually is the rule, but, I have a new twist on it that will give you a FOOLPROOF way of figuring out what your caloric target should be. And, wait for it, some structure so that you really can have your cake and eat it too.

Here are the magical steps:

1) Compute your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate). BMR is the number of calories your body absolutely NEEDS to get through the day. It does not account for exercise, activity level, or bodyfat.

(I am using the Harris-Benedict Formula, as that is currently believed to be the most accurate)

Women: BMR = 655 + ( 4.35 x weight in pounds ) + ( 4.7 x height in inches ) – ( 4.7 x age in years )

Men: BMR = 66 + ( 6.23 x weight in pounds ) + ( 12.7 x height in inches ) – ( 6.8 x age in year )

2) Decide how many pounds per week you want to lose. It takes a 3500 calorie deficit to lose a pound, so choose carefully!

Weekly Deficit = pounds per week * 3500

3)     Compute your Weekly Caloric Total. It is a simple formula. (BMR * 7) – Weekly Deficit

Let’s look at a 40-year-old female that weighs 170 pounds, is 5’7” tall and wants to lose one pound a week.

BMR = 1,524

Weekly Deficit = 3,500

Weekly Caloric Total = (1524 * 7) – 3500 = 7,186 calories

4)     Divide those calories out through the week. If I divided the 7,186 by 7, I’d get 1,024 calories per day. But, daily totals, while very popular with weight loss programs DO NOT really work in real life.  I know you know that, I don’t know why diet “gurus” don’t.

Precise daily numbers look good on paper, but looking good on paper and working in the real world are two very different things. Being hungry all the time SUCKS, never feeling like you have a choice SUCKS, and having to perpetually turn down dessert, eating out, or even a BITE of your favorite chocolate SUCKS. So, this is why I’m a big fan of weekly averaging.

So, if you like your Friday lunch with your co-workers, go for it. In figuring out your week, start by deducting Friday lunch, and then spread your remaining calories out throughout the week.

The way I have made this program work for myself is that I prefer to have one large meal mid-afternoon, and then I eat very little in the morning and very little in the evening. My BMR is around 1550, so at 1 pound a week, I get to average about 1050 calories a day. That is what I shoot for, and then if I end up going out, I cut back a few hundred calories a day for the next few days.

Now, I’ve been a semi-professional dieter for probably close to 30 years, so I have a freaky knowledge of calorie counts all stored up in my head. You might not be able to get away with this. If you want a tracking tool, I highly recommend Lose It! if you have an iPhone. The Daily Plate at LiveStrong is a great online resource.

I’ve had to learn that hunger does not equal harm, and keep fresh veggies all cut up in the fridge at virtually all times. Some chicken or steak on a bed of spinach with some goat cheese is a fantastic, low-calorie meal that I’ve come to embrace.

Why Didn’t I Include Bodyfat?

Unless you are doing hydrostatic weighing, bodyfat is nothing more than an educated guess anyhow. Bodyfat scales have an error rate of +/- 8%. They are great for identifying trends in bodyfat if you are really consistent about the time of day and hydration levels in using it (most research indicates that your most accurate result is going to be mid-afternoon).

So, I’m simply eliminating that variable. The BMR is very accurate for all but the really lean (but then you probably aren’t reading this anyhow) and the very obese (BMR is still probably close enough to get you started).

What About Exercise?

Much like bodyfat, it’s all just an educated guess, and most modern research indicates that most solid 60-minute training sessions don’t burn more than 400 calories.

The way we ended up with such a discrepancy between what you find in calorie calculators and what we find in the real world is complicated:

• We get efficient the more we do any activity. Being more efficient means we burn less calories doing the same exercise at the same intensity for the same amount of time. So, what happened when researchers went and computed calories burned during exercise, they measured someone who is brand new to that exercise, but you aren’t.
• Body weight and body fat. We burn calories differently based upon our weight and bodyfat levels.
• Metabolism. Everyone burns calories at a slightly different rate.
• Marketing. The people who have those machines that tell you how much you burned on the treadmill have a stake in fudging the numbers a bit in their favor.
• Intensity. The more intense the activity, the harder it is to maintain it for any length of time. So, while kettlebells, for example, may burn 1200 calories per hour, I don’t think I know anyone who can swing a kettlebell for a full hour without setting it down.

Not counting exercise also gives you a bit of wiggle room because calorie counts aren’t as accurate as we’d like to believe, and you probably don’t weigh and measure everything you put in your mouth. A little bit of undercounting here and a bit of overcounting there, and everything works out in the end!

Isn’t My Daily Caloric Limit Too Low or Unsafe?

As long as you play by the rules outlined above, no. BMR goes down as we age and with loss of lean body mass (which is why this program isn’t great for super-lean people). 70% of our calorie expenditure typically comes from BMR, so doesn’t it make sense to use it as our baseline?

That gives us another 30% for fudge factor in both calorie counting (we tend to underestimate) and exercise (we tend to overestimate).

As I said, simple, but not easy. This is hard work, and isn’t for everyone. Or, email me, and we’ll figure out a way to work together to achieve your weight loss goal. Everyone does better with a coach!

Are you taking part in the food revolution?

I’m talking about Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution show on ABC.

In case you haven’t heard of it, here is the short version: Jamie Oliver, British celebrity chef, is taking the obesity problem in the US on head-on. After a successful run of his Food Revolution model in the UK, he came to Huntington, West Virginia, deemed the unhealthiest place in the US, to see if he can change people’s eating habits. The show is a reality show about that experience.

I’ve heard mixed reviews of the show outside the health and fitness industry, but no matter what you think of Jamie (I happen to have already been a huge fan), I give him HUGE props for taking on this initiative. His entire agenda is about getting people to eat whole foods again — it’s really that simple.

Did You Know?

• The milk kids drink in school has as much added sugar in it as a can of soda?
• There is now basically a double-wide casket because we’ve gotten so heavy. This casket can’t go in a hearse, needs to be lifted with a forklift, and requires a double plot at the cemetery. And, you can’t simply cremate the bodies because that causes it’s own set of problems.
• We are raising the first generation of kids that has a shorter lifespan than their parents!
• The US incurs $150 billion per year in health care costs directly related to our food choices?

Jamie won the 2010 TED Award for this project, and you can see his 18-minute talk on the topic here. He has some truly shocking, frightening, and disgusting visuals and statistics around the school food supply, so if you are up for being outraged and more than a little annoyed at the system, I suggest you watch it.

(In case you were thinking I was exaggerating about the statistics, he opens his talk with, “Sadly, in the 18 minutes it takes me to do this talk, four Americans will be dead from the food they eat.”)

Yes, 8 of the top 10 killers in the US, and other first-world countries, are lifestyle related. Which means that some simple — yes, simple — changes to what we eat can reverse this and lead to a longer, happier, and more productive life.

I think I’m lucky in that you, my readers, are already well-educated and doing the best they can for their families, so this month I’d like you to turn your focus outward and…

Join the Revolution

• Watch the show — at least one episode; it’s on at 8pm Fridays on ABC. Yes, I can virtually guarantee this will be the only time I ask my clients to watch TV. No TV? You can stream it from ABC.com or watch it on Hulu.com.
• Sign the petition. [link]
• If you are a parent with school-aged children — or even if you are not — go to your local school and see what they are eating. Jamie has provided sample school menus and advice for how to work with your school cafeterias.
• If you know your own eating could use some improving (and honestly, couldn’t we all), then Jamie has some stupid simple recipes up on the ABC web site. I watched him make this amazing-looking ginger beef stir fry thing all the way through last Friday’s episode — I ended up having to make it for myself the next night!

I’m grateful to Jamie raising the level of dialogue about food and obesity in this country. I believe that everyone wants to do right by their families, but not everyone has been blessed with the knowledge they need to do so.

Thank you for joining the revolution!

Weekends tend to wreak havoc on even the most dedicated dieter’s plans. If it’s not your son’s soccer tournament, then it’s the dinner party, or the fast food you grabbed while our running errands on Saturday. But, it’s just one day, right?

Well, unfortunately, no.

Yes, it’s just one day on the calendar, but you can undo a week’s worth of work with one day of indulgences.

Let’s look at a few healthy food items that you might grab on the go, and see where they could fit in:

• McDonald’s Grilled Chicken Sandwich. 420 calories. With the small fries, you are now up to 650 calories.
• McDonald’s Premium Southwest Salad with Grilled Chicken. 320 cals.  (swap out for crispy chicken and bump up to 430 cals)
• Starbucks blueberry scone. 460 cals. With your grande nonfat vanilla latte, and you are up to 660 calories for that “snack.”
• Almonds. A couple dozen is 169 calories. Almonds (and all nuts) are a great snack, but the portion sizes are the killer — it’s about what you can fit in the palm of your hand.

From that list you can make some really great and some really bad choices. The day I looked up the Starbuck’s scone calories was the last day I ate a Starbucks scone.

Now, what about the dinner party:

• Vodka cranberry. It depends upon the size of the pour, but for a cocktail drink, you are probably looking at 200-225 calories each.
• Margarita. It’s almost 400 calories for an 8oz margarita. But, I venture to guess that most margaritas are well over 8 ounces, so let’s say 600 calories per margarita.
• Red wine. 5 ounces is around 140 calories. 5 ounces is pretty close to what you’d get out at a restaurant, so if your friend’s are heavy pourers, you are drinking more than that.
• Beer. It depends upon what you drink, but a non-light beer is going to be about 200 calories per pint.

What to do?

There are really two options:

1. Plan life out perfectly, so you know exactly what you are going to eat when and where. I believe that that level of planning is unrealistic and unsustainable. Not to mention not a whole lot of fun!
2. Go with the flow and adopt a caloric averaging technique. Rather than trying to shoot for a fixed number every day, shoot for a weekly and monthly caloric average so you can just let life happen. By averaging your days together, you are going to learn to better listen to your body, and make it OK to eat more or less based upon your mood, hormones, activity levels and life events. I talk more about this in my Jen’s Gem’s for the Healthy Writer column.

So, this week, stop and re-assess how you did last weekend, and make plans to get next weekend better.

Need some help with that? My clients will tell you that I’m a great accountability buddy and we can work together to figure out how to keep the weekends from derailing you progress. Drop me a note so we can figure out how to get started!

This month I’m hoping you to encourage you to step back and re-evaluate the relationship you and your loved ones have with food and mealtime.

What is Sustenance?

For many people, the word Sustenance simply means food. But, the definition of Sustenance is MUCH more broad:

1 a : means of support, maintenance, or subsistence : living b : food, provisions; also : nourishment
2 a : the act of sustaining : the state of being sustained b : a supplying or being supplied with the necessaries of life
3 : something that gives support, endurance, or strength

March is National Nutrition Month, and I frequently write about food, nutrition, and it’s overall impact on our lives and well-being, so I pulled some of my favorite posts to review. I know I was reminded of a lot of what I already knew about SUSTENANCE by going back through my posts, and I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed putting this together for you.

Children and Nutrition

• Childhood Diet Predicts Adult Health

Food Allergies & Sensitivities

• Gluten Sensitivity
• The Gluten / Thyroid Connection
• Eating a Low-Carb Diet can Eliminate Diabetes Medications

Grocery Shopping

• Do You Know What A Serving Size Is?
• The Perimeter of the Grocery Store

Diet vs Exercise

• Diet More Important Than Activity Levels

Productivity & Creativity

• 5 Healthy Eating Tips of Creativity and Productivity

Eating Habits for Weight Loss

• Caloric Averaging
• You Eat Like the Company You Keep
• Calorie-Restricted Diets Lead to Longevity

I have a lot more on this topic that I didn’t list out, and I’ll be writing a lot more about nutrition yet this month. Be sure to check my blog regularly for more!

If you are like a lot of people, you don’t like doing bodyweight exercises. When pushed as to why it’s not a part of their training, I generally hear one of two reasons from clients and friends.

Why people hate bodyweight exercises

1. It’s “just” bodyweight so it doesn’t really count as exercises
2. They are HARD (actually, they usually use a different word that starts with an “s,” but I’m keeping this family-friendly)

I admit, for years I was in the first camp, but over the past few years have moved in to the second. I’m also incorporating more bodyweight work in to my own, and my clients’, training.

Regardless of which camp you are in, I’m going to ask that you consider adding some bodyweight work to your training.

Why bodyweight exercises actually rock

1. It’s NOT WIMPY. For many of us, we weigh more than we can press, bench, or deadlift. If you are confused about how to “press” using just your body, might I suggest a handstand.
2. It’s INEXPENSIVE, something that isn’t to be overlooked in this economic climate. No equipment required — you already have everything you need.
3. It takes up VERY LITTLE ROOM. You can do everything you need to in a room not much larger than your bathroom.
4. It’s a perfect TRAVEL TRAINING solution.
5. It can be BOTH CARDIO and STRENGTH. How? Burpees. If you aren’t familiar with burpees, I like this example on YouTube. You can modify it to jump straight up to simplify and save space.
6. Get in BETTER IN TOUCH WITH YOUR BODY by focusing on your body and not a tool (kettlebell, barbell, dumbbell, machine).

If you decide to take up my challenge, remember that hard does not get you off the hook from perfect form. That means that you need to develop a training progression that you can do safely. For push-ups, start with a wall, move to a bench or steps, rest on your knees rather than toes, etc. As you get comfortable with one position, move on to a more difficult position. While you may feel it takes too long this way, you will be developing proper form the entire time — which will keep you from getting hurt. You’ve spent years not being able to do something. If it takes an extra month or two does it really matter?

Where to Start

If you need some ideas for bodyweight work, my two favorite resources are the Z-Health S-Phase video and Naked Warrior. They are two completely different training programs, and are both excellent.

• S-Phase is for athletic excellence — I recommend it for everyone, but I consider it a MUST if you are any sort of weekend athlete. I HIGHLY recommend it.
• Naked Warrior is by Pavel Tsatsouline, the man who brought kettlebells to the US. It’s all about wiry strength using just your bodyweight (one-arm push-ups, anyone).

Knowing just how bad my diet was in my childhood, this article definitely caught my eye.

A University of Calgary study of rats found that different diets fed to the rats as youth impacted how their bodies processed food as mature mice.

“There’s a growing body of work that indicates a relationship between our health as adults and our early diet, and even our mother’s diet. This research shows for the first time that our early childhood diet may have a huge impact on our health as adults.”

This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

• I grew up in a rural middle-class household where frozen foods and carbs were our primary staples with little fresh produce. My parents did the best they could, but it was the reality of our situation.
• I guess I’ve taken the SAID principle pretty literally, and assumed that a clean diet today can hide the sins of old. Turns out that that may not be the case. I do recognize that eating clean now is better than poor eating in terms of overall longevity, so I’m not saying there is no point. Perhaps I just need to take a more holistic approach and realize that we really are a summation of EVERYTHING in the past, and while good reps will ultimately outnumber bad reps, the bad reps still count for something.

I don’t have any children of my own, but this post makes me doubly-glad to see that my brother and sister-in-law are raising my niece eating lots of fresh produce and veggies.

This study from Loyola University found there was no association between weight gain and calories burned during physical activity. It is just simply too hard to exercise enough to really make a difference.

That having been said, there are a million other reasons why regular exercise is a great idea, from better sleep to improved memory and brain function, to reducing the likelihood of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and various cancers. You aren’t as likely to develop osteoporsis and significantly more likely to age gracefully and avoid assisted living situations. But, if you are planning on treadmilling yourself thin, you might want to think again.

The results of this study actually somewhat surprised me – there seemed to be quite a bit of decent research about the benefits of a low carb diet and a logical correlation between that and diabetes. I guess I never thought to compare these two together, however.

To sum it up where it REALLY counts, diabetes medications were reduced or eliminated in 95.2% of low-carb dieters vs. 62% of Low GI dieters. WOW!

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: Dietary carbohydrate is the major determinant of postprandial glucose levels, and several clinical studies have shown that low-carbohydrate diets improve glycemic control. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that a diet lower in carbohydrate would lead to greater improvement in glycemic control over a 24-week period in patients with obesity and type 2 diabetes mellitus. Research design and methods: Eighty-four community volunteers with obesity and type 2 diabetes were randomized to either a low-carbohydrate, ketogenic diet (<20 g of carbohydrate daily; LCKD) or a low-glycemic, reduced-calorie diet (500 kcal/day deficit from weight maintenance diet; LGID). Both groups received group meetings, nutritional supplementation, and an exercise recommendation. The main outcome was glycemic control, measured by hemoglobin A1c.

RESULTS: Forty-nine (58.3%) participants completed the study. Both interventions led to improvements in hemoglobin A1c, fasting glucose, fasting insulin, and weight loss. The LCKD group had greater improvements in hemoglobin A1c (-1.5% vs. -0.5%, p=0.03), body weight (-11.1 kg vs. -6.9 kg, p=0.008), and high density lipoprotein cholesterol (+5.6 mg/dL vs. 0 mg/dL, p<0.001) compared to the LGID group. Diabetes medications were reduced or eliminated in 95.2% of LCKD vs. 62% of LGID participants (p<0.01).

CONCLUSIONS: Dietary modification led to improvements in glycemic control and medication reduction/elimination in motivated volunteers with type 2 diabetes. The diet lower in carbohydrate led to greater improvements in glycemic control, and more frequent medication reduction/elimination than the low glycemic index diet. Lifestyle modification using low carbohydrate interventions is effective for improving and reversing type 2 diabetes.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/veganfeast/ / CC BY 2.0

Which leads to today’s post. Earlier this week they posted the results of a study comparing the power of a nap to the power of caffeine. Being both a sleep and caffeine junkie, I was naturally EXTREMELY interested in the results.

They sum up the results in the first sentence, which is that while a cup of coffee may make you feel great, a nap is actually your best friend! In testing verbal skills, motor skills, and perceptual skills, the “nap” group consistently outperformed the “caffeinated” group — even though the caffeinated group reported feeling more awake.

So, score one for corporate quiet rooms, and subtract one point for the always-on pot of coffee. Having said that, I’m about to go fire up my automatic espresso machine — which I still don’t intend to ever give up!

You can find the full article here.