What might you learn from a successful loser?

The topic of weight management has been my passion since my personal struggle with weight gain in my late teens. When I was 17, after gaining 30-pounds over three or four months, I went to Physicians’ Weight Loss Centers for help getting that weight off.

Looking back, family stress due to my mother being ill, plus freedom (my drivers’ license, and my parents’ gift of a used Datsun 1200 for wheels) led me to making way too many regular stops at Seven-Eleven type places for a “snack!” These snacks were mostly brownies and different bags of various salty-crunchy things.

When I finally came up from the long binge—feeling like crap, and way past fitting in most of my clothes—I was ready to turn things around. Somehow I ended up at a Physicians’ Weight Loss Center “clinic” which may have been about the only choice in a small town (1977)!

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Is what you're drinking helping or hindering your weight loss efforts?

What you drink does impact your calorie intake. The average American currently derives 21% of their caloric intake from beverages, which adds up to a whopping 464 calories a day! The majority of those are empty-calories coming from sweetened beverages.[i]

For a little perspective, decades ago, the earliest soft drinks were sold in 6.5-oz bottles (78-calories) and were a very occasional treat. Today the average soft drink serving is 21-ounces (up from 13.6 oz. in 1977), and clocks in at a whopping 252-calories. Not only that, but over the same time frame servings per day increased from 1.96 to 2.39.

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Eating More Often Does NOT Boost Your Metabolism!

How many times have you heard the advice to eat more often (i.e. three meals, and two or three snacks per day) because you will supposedly burn more of the calories you eat because eating more often boosts your metabolism?

If you think the claim sounds a little fishy, your instincts are good—the claim that eating more often boosts your metabolism is completely false.

Here’s all you need to know. A small part of your total energy expenditure is called the thermic effect of food (TEF). TEF simply represents the amount of energy (calories) your body uses to digest your meal. On average TEF amounts to just 10% of the calories in your meal.

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Weight Loss Plateaus: How to reignite your weight loss

A common development after a few weeks of losing weight is that your weight loss stalls, or stops. The scale isn’t budging. This situation—a weight loss plateau—has all kinds of mythology attributed to it.

When you start a diet, you reduce your intake of calories and a big part of that reduction is from carbohydrates. The reduction in carbohydrates leads to the depletion of glycogen (how your body stores sugar) from both your muscles and liver. Each gram of stored glycogen normally holds 3- to 4-grams of water with it.

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Dorene Robinson RDN CDN | Post a Comment | Share Article Print Article Email Article

tagged low metabolism, weight loss, weight loss plateau in energy balance, metabolic rate, metabolism Permalink

Can you Become Obese by Eating Just an Extra Bite of Food per Day?

Jane Brody (veteran food columnist for the New York Times) recently reported, “According to researchers is easy to gain weight unwittingly from a very small imbalance in the number of calories consumed over calories used.” Brody continues, “Just 10 extra calories a day is all it takes to raise the body weight of the average person by 20-pounds in 30 years, the authors wrote.”

What do you think Ms. Brody meant in the preceding statement?

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