I’m not counting calories. My brain’s not really wired for operating like that day in and day out. I can do stuff like that for a day, or two. After three days have gone by… forget it. (Please don’t read anything into that. If you’re counting calories, my hat is off to you. That’s an individual area of strength that I don’t possess.)
I have had to come up with another strategy to help keep the calories in/calories used scale tipped in the right direction.
As I mentioned before, I focus on (1) deliberate eating and (2) nutritional basics: a foundation of grains backed up with veggies and fruits.
Obviously, some foods are packed with more nutrients than others. After I broke my toe and was slowed down from an exercise standpoint, this started to be a minor problem. Things that are high in nutrients tend to also be high in calories. For example, take an orange. Uhm… no… let’s talk tangelos. I prefer them over oranges. Take a tangelo. Cut it in half, and get all that yummy juice out. Repeat until you have a nice glass of juice. I love a good glass of fresh juice.
Now, put that glass of juice in the refrigerator for a while. Pick up the same number of tangelos that we used to make the glass of juice. Now eat them. All of them. In one go. I don’t know about you, but If I were to do that, I’d be sick of tangelos for the day. Curiously, if given no restrictions, I could drink a number of glass of juice in a day.
Other than fiber, there’s no significant difference (nutrition-wise) between the pile of tangelos and the glass of juice… and I get fiber in spades elsewhere. The difference is that in squeezing out the juice, the nutrients are physically packed into a smaller space. The same volume of juice has more nutrients and calories as a piece of fruit.
So what? A broken bone imposed a temporary lifestyle change on me. That wrecked the calories in/calories out balance that I had figured out. In order to help re-balance my food intake, I chose to cut back on juice and eat the fruit. It’s just as tasty.
Where I had stagnated slightly, this single change was enough to tip the balance in the right direction again. Keeping the momentum moving forward takes a little experimentation and patience. Life happens. Enjoy it as it comes.
Status: 38 pounds lighter
[...] or so I can detect and correct any trends that are showing up consistently. I’ve noticed that I’ll slip into a new behavior pattern without thinking about it, and that messes things up. In that example that I wrote about, I started drinking a lot more fruit [...]
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[...] Energy Density In Food Published July 21, 2008 asides , fitness Tags: asides, energy density, fitness, health, joe average, juice, Raw food Joe Average writes about the energy density in foods and home squeezed juices. [...]