Our Plan:
1) Weigh yourself daily.
2) Follow a low fat, low cholesterol, low salt diet that is recommended by the scientific community, like TLC or DASH.
3) Plan your meals.
4) Track total fat, saturated fat, salt and calories by recording and measuring what you eat on a website like fitday.com.
5) Exercise 30+ minutes daily.
6) Add physical activity to your daily routine.
7) Lift weights.
8) Cook and bake for fun.
Barriers to weight loss (or what not to do):
1) Do not use over-the-counter diet products
2) Eat away from home too often.
3) Believing that healthy foods are too expensive, tasteless, and unsatisfying.
4) Find excuses not to exercise, such as being too tired, having no time or no one with whom to exercise, and finding it too hard to maintain an exercise routine are also huge barriers to weight loss.
5) Forgetting to eat breakfast.
6) Forgetting to measure.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Measuring Is An Important Scientific Tool: Weigh Yourself And Measure Your Food Everyday
After a week or two of recording what I have eaten, I was shocked by how much I was eating. It wasn't just the sheer number of calories I was consuming a day. It was the actual amounts of food that I was scarfing down. I thought I was eating healthy and appropriate portions of food. I was not. How did this happen to me?
I had forgotten a very important lesson that I learned in science class: senses alone will not always give precise information. Measurement transforms subjective gut-instinct feelings into quantitative information. Failing to measure means that you are not following scientific principles.
As I was gaining weight the past year, I kept on asking myself, "Why am I getting heavier? What am I doing wrong?" I had forgotten to measure. I failed to weigh myself everyday. I failed to measure and record the food that I was eating.
In fact, in a study in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity found that self-monitoring strategies may be important in maintaining weight loss. People who reported planning meals, tracking calories, tracking fat, and measuring food (as well as exercising 30+ minutes daily) were more successful in losing weight. Also, successful weight losers were more likely to weigh themselves daily, report lifting weights or cooking/baking for fun.
Simply trying to count calories, eat smaller portions, eat fewer fatty foods, and consuming reduced-fat/fat-free products without measuring and tracking are not behaviors that successful weight losers follow.
In light of this scientific evidence, I will present the Scientific Dieting and Exercise's Blog Dieting plan in my next post!
I had forgotten a very important lesson that I learned in science class: senses alone will not always give precise information. Measurement transforms subjective gut-instinct feelings into quantitative information. Failing to measure means that you are not following scientific principles.
As I was gaining weight the past year, I kept on asking myself, "Why am I getting heavier? What am I doing wrong?" I had forgotten to measure. I failed to weigh myself everyday. I failed to measure and record the food that I was eating.
In fact, in a study in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity found that self-monitoring strategies may be important in maintaining weight loss. People who reported planning meals, tracking calories, tracking fat, and measuring food (as well as exercising 30+ minutes daily) were more successful in losing weight. Also, successful weight losers were more likely to weigh themselves daily, report lifting weights or cooking/baking for fun.
Simply trying to count calories, eat smaller portions, eat fewer fatty foods, and consuming reduced-fat/fat-free products without measuring and tracking are not behaviors that successful weight losers follow.
In light of this scientific evidence, I will present the Scientific Dieting and Exercise's Blog Dieting plan in my next post!
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Helpful Tips To Use FitDay To Record Your Diet
As I mentioned in my previous post, one effective scientifically proven method to help yourself lose weight is to simply record what you eat. After using fitday for a week, I thought that I would share some tips:
1) Record what you eat. While it is best to record what you eat immediately on the computer, it might not be possible. Since I haven't worked up the courage to whip out a piece of paper to write down what I have eaten while I was out at lunch, I try to record what I ate in the evening or the following morning. It takes a bit of effort to remember what you ate, but I usually come reasonably close.
2) Measure your food. That means using dry and liquid measuring cups and spoons. Remember, this is the Scientific Dieting and Exercise Blog. Scientists make observations by taking measurements and weighing things. You might want to buy yourself a kitchen scale, if you don't already have one.
3) Break down each meal into its parts, such as "cooked spaghetti, crushed tomatoes, garlic, onions, olive oil, ground beef" rather than "spaghetti with meat sauce".
3) Don't worry too much about finding a specific brand. If you can't find "Whole Foods 93% Lean Ground Beef", just use 95% ground beef. Or, you can create a custom food by using the nutrition information on CalorieKing.
4) Make sure to record your weight every day. (This will be a topic for a future blog post)
5) Once you have spent a week or two recording your meals, you can easily recreate meals by using the drop down menus in custom and recent foods to add multiple foods to your diary.
6) Be honest. Try not to lie about what you have eaten. Garbage in, garbage out. If you lie about what you have eaten, you are only cheating yourself. This is easier said than done. Right now, I am refusing to add the samples I ate at Whole Foods yesterday (Guacamole, salsa, 2oz of cheese, and olives) to my log. I feel that they shouldn't count. This is my mental illness, damn it!
7) The custom nutrition tab at the bottom of the page is very useful for tracking sodium and cholesterol intake, since these aren't provided in the regular daily reports.
8) Every week, make sure to click the reports tab, and run a few different reports. My favorite is the Nutrition Facts report, because it breaks down all of the important information for you. This allows you to see what you have been doing right and wrong. In my case, I need to eat about 200 calories less and cut out 2 grams of saturated fat or so. I should probably be drinking more milk. This is my report for the first week:
1) Record what you eat. While it is best to record what you eat immediately on the computer, it might not be possible. Since I haven't worked up the courage to whip out a piece of paper to write down what I have eaten while I was out at lunch, I try to record what I ate in the evening or the following morning. It takes a bit of effort to remember what you ate, but I usually come reasonably close.
2) Measure your food. That means using dry and liquid measuring cups and spoons. Remember, this is the Scientific Dieting and Exercise Blog. Scientists make observations by taking measurements and weighing things. You might want to buy yourself a kitchen scale, if you don't already have one.
3) Break down each meal into its parts, such as "cooked spaghetti, crushed tomatoes, garlic, onions, olive oil, ground beef" rather than "spaghetti with meat sauce".
3) Don't worry too much about finding a specific brand. If you can't find "Whole Foods 93% Lean Ground Beef", just use 95% ground beef. Or, you can create a custom food by using the nutrition information on CalorieKing.
4) Make sure to record your weight every day. (This will be a topic for a future blog post)
5) Once you have spent a week or two recording your meals, you can easily recreate meals by using the drop down menus in custom and recent foods to add multiple foods to your diary.
6) Be honest. Try not to lie about what you have eaten. Garbage in, garbage out. If you lie about what you have eaten, you are only cheating yourself. This is easier said than done. Right now, I am refusing to add the samples I ate at Whole Foods yesterday (Guacamole, salsa, 2oz of cheese, and olives) to my log. I feel that they shouldn't count. This is my mental illness, damn it!
7) The custom nutrition tab at the bottom of the page is very useful for tracking sodium and cholesterol intake, since these aren't provided in the regular daily reports.
8) Every week, make sure to click the reports tab, and run a few different reports. My favorite is the Nutrition Facts report, because it breaks down all of the important information for you. This allows you to see what you have been doing right and wrong. In my case, I need to eat about 200 calories less and cut out 2 grams of saturated fat or so. I should probably be drinking more milk. This is my report for the first week:
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Scientific Dieting
The very basis of science is observation. The scientific method requires us to gather data, hypothesize an explanation for those observations, create an experiment to see if the prediction occurs, and then see if others can corroborate our experiments.
How does this translate to dieting and exercise? We need to gather data on how and what we eat. That means writing down everything we put into our mouths. This is difficult and takes time. Fortunately, there are two great online tools that can help us: Fitday and The Daily Plate. I prefer Fitday because I can see how much saturated fat I have eaten over the course of the day. Others might prefer The Daily Plate because it has a very large database of food products, but you have to pay to see detailed nutritional breakdowns.
So, for the first week of my diet, I'm not going to try to diet. I am going to simply record everything I eat and the types of exercise that I perform. It takes some effort, but it is worth it. For example, I thought I was eating healthy, but I didn't realize that I ate 2000 calories and 20g of saturated fat yesterday. Yikes!
Interestingly, a scientific study published this past August claims that simply recording what you eat and participating in physical activity accounts for most weight-loss.
How does this translate to dieting and exercise? We need to gather data on how and what we eat. That means writing down everything we put into our mouths. This is difficult and takes time. Fortunately, there are two great online tools that can help us: Fitday and The Daily Plate. I prefer Fitday because I can see how much saturated fat I have eaten over the course of the day. Others might prefer The Daily Plate because it has a very large database of food products, but you have to pay to see detailed nutritional breakdowns.
So, for the first week of my diet, I'm not going to try to diet. I am going to simply record everything I eat and the types of exercise that I perform. It takes some effort, but it is worth it. For example, I thought I was eating healthy, but I didn't realize that I ate 2000 calories and 20g of saturated fat yesterday. Yikes!
Interestingly, a scientific study published this past August claims that simply recording what you eat and participating in physical activity accounts for most weight-loss.
Welcome!
Welcome to the Scientific Dieting and Exercise Blog. I created this blog to collate the most reliable and verifiable scientific facts about dieting and exercise. I am highly skeptical about most dieting and exercise claims.
The internet is full of bad advice about how to diet: Fad diets and Woo diets are a staple on the internet. A fad diet is usually a diet published in a book that focuses on one food or food group such as stressing the goodness of meat and protein. A Woo diet focuses on non-scientific concepts such as "balancing energy" or "cleansing".
Even more pernicious is bad advice about how to exercise. Dangerous stretches, activities, and weight lifting postures seem to rule the roost.
My goal in this blog is to teach myself (and you) how to create a diet and exercise routine that will help you live a healthy life. I'm not an expert, but I will be searching out the best modern advice I can find!
The internet is full of bad advice about how to diet: Fad diets and Woo diets are a staple on the internet. A fad diet is usually a diet published in a book that focuses on one food or food group such as stressing the goodness of meat and protein. A Woo diet focuses on non-scientific concepts such as "balancing energy" or "cleansing".
Even more pernicious is bad advice about how to exercise. Dangerous stretches, activities, and weight lifting postures seem to rule the roost.
My goal in this blog is to teach myself (and you) how to create a diet and exercise routine that will help you live a healthy life. I'm not an expert, but I will be searching out the best modern advice I can find!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)