Diets and calories
Lots of news about diets and calories lately. A person, who will remain anonymous, emailed me and told me this site was not a healthy site because it contains to much fat in the recipes or in the meat and if they ate like that it would make them fat.
For some reason I doubt that. That reason being I’ve eaten this kind of food all of my life and I’ve never been fat. Seldom ever even been overweight. For me the foods and recipes I put up here work and they taste good.
I know lots of people have been on high carb diets, high protein diets, the Adkins diet, South Beach diet and every other diet possible. What few dieters seem to understand is it’s not the diet that does it for you, it’s cutting out calories.
Consider this, 1 pound is 3500 calories. Doesn’t matter if you’re eating lettuce or butter. 3500 calories equal 1 pound. Certainly you can eat a lot more lettuce to get to the 3500 calorie mark but that doesn’t really matter. The fact is when you eat 3500 calories you are going to gain a pound if you do nothing else.
I don’t care what diet you’re on, if you take in more calories than you spend you are going to gain weight. It’s that simple. The South Beach diet, Adkins diet nor any other diet can defeat the laws of physics. I don’t care what diet it is, who uses it or how they promote it, 3500 calories is 1 pound and if you don’t spend more calories than you take in you will get fat.
The only, I repeat, THE ONLY way to lose weight is to take in fewer calories than you spend. It’s really that simple.
Say you are a woman who weighs 125 pounds. Now lets say you eat and drink 2500 calories per day. Lets also say that you work off or spend 2000 calories per day thru exercise, your job, breathing, etc. This means each and every day you are taking in 500 extra calories.
Doesn’t seem like to much extra does it. Yet if you keep eating that way for a week you will gain a pound, for a month 4-5 pounds and for a year 52 pounds. That’s 52 pounds a year for just a couple of candy bars per day or a couple of extra cans of pop.
So how do you lose weight. Very simply, take in fewer calories than you use. It’s the only way you can lose weight. That’s a proven fact. The only thing that matters, no matter what diet you’re on, is to consume fewer calories than you use.
Back to the 2000 calories per day. If that’s your total expenditure per day then you need to eat less than 2000 calories to lose weight. Say you cut out 100 calories per day. It then takes 35 days to lose one pound. Lol, see, it’s a lot easier to put it on than to take it off.
If you cut 100 calories per day out of your diet you’ll lose approx 10 pounds a year. Geez, that’s slow weight loss but not to uncomfortable. The problem is most people want to spend years consuming 300 calories per day and then loose a years worth of weight gain in a month on some miracle diet.
Sorry, that doesn’t work very well at all. Worse yet, if you are morbidly obese and cut out 100 calories per day it will take you 20 years to lose 200 pounds. It seems to take about 10 times as long to take weight off as it does to put it on.
That’s because it’s much easier to over eat than it is to under eat. No one wants to be hungry for 20 years so once again they look for a miracle diet. Sorry, no miracle diets at all. The laws of physics say the only way to lose weight is to take in less than you burn. No way around that. None, Zip, Nada.
Eat more calories than you burn and you get fat, eat less calories than you burn and you get skinny. That’s a law of nature.
I suspect what the person who emailed me was really trying to say was a lot of the recipes on here aren’t healthy because some of them have a lot of fat. Most things that taste great have a lot of fat. Not all, but most. That’s where we have to make a decision about what’s healthy for us.
Just remember, taking in more calories than you burn makes you fat, using more calories than you take in makes you skinny. That’s reall all you need to know about diets. You don’t need to spend a ton of money to get skinny, just take in fewer calories. That’s your choice.