There’s a candy machine standing in the lobby of my bank. You know the kind: red and glass and filled with tempting treats. This one dispenses Hot Tamales, a cinnamon candy made, essentially, from pure sugar. (Well, pure High Fructose Corn Syrup, actually.)
For the past year, it’s been my ritual to buy a quarter’s worth of candy every time I visit the bank. “A quarter’s worth of candy can’t hurt,” I tell myself. “And besides, I deserve a treat.” Maybe I do deserve a treat — maybe I don’t. What I mean to address is the notion that “a quarter’s worth of candy can’t hurt”.
Eat less than you burn
At my personal finance site, I write frequently about frugality. “The fundamental law of money,” I say, “is that in order to accumulate wealth, you must spend less than you earn. There are two ways to do this. First, you can actually spend less. Second, you can earn more.” It’s basic stuff, but it’s difficult for many people to actually implement.
The same principle applies to fitness. In one of his excellent comments on this site, greenman2001 recently wrote, “There’s only one way to lose weight: to consume fewer calories than you burn.” Absolutely. This is the fundamental principle of weight loss. And as with money, there are two ways to approach this equation: you can decrease the number of calories you consume, or you can increase the number of calories you burn.
In personal finance, when a person opts to reduce her spending (which is the easiest of the two choices, in most cases), we call her frugal. Frugality is a fundamental skill for money management. Yet I’m not aware of a similar term for a person who opts to reduce his calorie consumption. Is there one? I believe it’s a notion that deserves some exploration.
Finding frugality with food
One reason people struggle with debt is that they haven’t learned the value of frugality. Instead, they allow themselves to fritter away their earnings dollar by dollar, buying knitting needles, comic books, hunting equipment, or whatever. They do not understand the power of frugality.
Again, the same is true with food. People gain weight (a form of corporeal debt) because they haven’t grasped the consequences of small decisions. A soda with lunch, an extra helping of mashed potatoes, a handful of Hot Tamales from a candy machine — these small indulgences combine to produce a greater effect. When a person fails to practice “food frugality”, it doesn’t manifest itself as financial debt — it’s reflected as fat.
The key, then, is to adopt smart skills with food. Financial frugality is a learned skill. It takes time to understand the benefits of buying used books, of shopping for clothes at thrift stores, of re-using bags from the grocery store. Some of this seems cheap at first, but it’s actually a path to wealth. I need to learn some of these same skills with food.
Smaller portions are an excellent way to start. Taking a smaller portion is an example of food frugality. So is choosing a “light” yogurt, or drinking water instead of juice. And, of course, so is ignoring the Siren call of the candy machine in the lobby of the bank.
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Good reminder… and there’s one thing people have to remember: many of us are genetically predisposed to gain weight when eating food. It goes back to the early-human days when the body wanted to store energy (as fat) when food was plentiful, for times when food was scarce.
Since food is plentiful for most of the people reading this (if you have 2-3 meals a day, you have plenty of food – compared to many countries and/or eras of history), your body doesn’t need to horde fat. Don’t help it horde fat. Your stomach, as an organ, as actually very small – it doesn’t truly need a lot of food. By exercising portion-control (palm-sized portion sizes), you will be helping your body to function better — as well as banishing the guilt from any supersized decisions.
Every one is on a diet and everyone is on a budget. Some get you closer to where you want to be, others help you dig your hole deeper.
It’s not just the number of calories that you eat, however, it’s also the kinds of calories. Are you getting the best bang for each calorie? 100 calories of Hot Tamales is the same as 100 calories of apple. But 100 calories of apple has a lot of “freebies” – like vitamins and fibre etc.
I’ve been applying the “Eat Right for Your Type” plan to my calories, and it has made a difference in my life long struggle to lose weight. Good luck, I’m enjoying both your blogs!
I found a few things helpful for reducing food intake. Drinking a glass of water before a meal is good. Eating 5 small meals instead of 3 large ones (stomach size reduces as meal size does). Avoiding eating in front of the telly helps – you pay less attention to what you’re actually eating when watching TV.
That’s a great point, though, about a coke with lunch or a chocolate bar once a week – they add up over time to a substantial amount of calories. I wrote about this a few weeks ago ( http://www.geek-fitness.com/2007/12/11/identifying-bad-habits/ ) – it can be really hard to identify these sorts of problems (exactly as with money), because of the “it’s only one cookie” mentality, until you start to view it in a larger context.
I think this way of thinking is fundamental to changing your eating habits, and making ‘frugal eating’ part of a lifestyle rather than part of a ‘diet’.
To extend the analogy one step further (and if you ahve the discipline) it’s also nice to think of saving calories – for example I love to eat out and nice restaurants and some time I want to be able to relax and let go and not have to worry about the calories. If I know I’m going out on a Saturday night somewhere nice that will give me the motivation to turn down the soda, or cookie or whatever, in the knowledge that by saving those calories I can spend them later.
Obviously this is not something that should be done all the time as the objective is to reduce calorie consumption overall, but for special occasions it’s a nice psychological trick.
Asimilar tactic can be used with exercise (going to the gym for one extra session, because I kow Iwill eat cake at an upcoming party)
This post makes me very happy, JD. You’re finally drawing real parallels between getting rich slowly and getting fit slowly. These are powerful analogies. I suggest taking it a step further.
If I said to you, over a lunch of Sno-balls at the local 7-Eleven, “I have a plan for getting rich slowly: spend less, earn more, and invest wisely,” you’d be likely to reply, “Those are great goals, but they’re not a plan. A plan is: make a budget, track your spending in Quicken, make a list of your debts, start paying your debts smallest to largest, do a monthly review, research mutual funds, and so forth.”
Up until now, your plan for getting fit slowly has been to eat less, exercise more, and eat healthily. Greenman2001, smartass that he is, says, those are great goals, but they’re not a plan. A plan is: calculate your daily calorie expenditure, determine the caloric count of each meal you eat, eat up to a daily caloric limit 500 calories less than you burn, eat 6 meals a day, and so on.”
What’s your plan?
Many, many nutritionists recommend keeping a food journal immediately before starting a diet. Part of the reason for this is to shock you into realizing just how many calories you consume, how you undermine good eating habits (look, here I am eating a handful of candy in the bank lobby!), and just how out of balance your nutrition intake is. This is a valuable exercise for some, but I see it as just another motivational hack, like weighing yourself twice a day. (The difference between motiving yourself negatively through horror and fear versus positively through successful feedback loops is a topic for an entire post.) However you get there, you have to come back to the fundamental principle: eat fewer calories than you burn. Everything derives from this. And you operate out of that principle through a plan, like a General planning for battle.
I’d also suggest to you that, just as spending less, earning more, and investing wisely are actually three separate goals that sometimes overlap, eating less, exercising more, and eating well are also three separate goals that happen to overlap. I think it’s extremely problematic to undertake all of them at once, and I think doing so is the main reason most people fail to lose weight. It’s problematic because you’re making three enormous, difficult changes in your life — in your case four, because you’re changing jobs right now, a huge stressor. And if you decide to get up at 5am, as your readers keep urging you to do, you can add a fifth major change. You’re stacking the deck badly against yourself. If you want to know what will happen, just look back at the results of every single one of your previous attempts to lose weight.
Great post!
An earlier commentor here complained that it’s easier for men to build lean muscle than women because men have higher levels of testosterone. Take a good look at Lauren’s photos before you give up in despair:
http://physicalmind.com/
In her comment, Lauren is revealing one of the great secrets of maintaining proper caloric intake: the palm-sized portion. For people losing weight, I’m a strong advocate of counting calories: it’s the best way of training yourself to recognize how much food you need to satisfy your appetite. It turns out that a palm-sized portion of most foods consists of 200-500 calories. It’s an almost perfect rule of thumb.
People losing weight, especially those who have failed again and again and again to do so successfully, don’t believe this. If you put a grilled chicken breast in front of this person and tell them it’s all the food they need for the next 2 hours, and that they won’t feel hungry if they eat a portion this size every 2 hours throughout their day, they simply don’t believe you. JD stood in the lobby of his bank and ate a fistful of pure sugar without a second’s thought: this is someone who needs to be armed with tangible facts that fit into a framework he completely understands and accepts if he is to change his life. (Worse, he felt GOOD about this decision because it’s supported by his belief in frugality. Michael Pollan, in his masterpiece The Omnivore’s Dilemma, talks about the fact that the cheapest calories in the grocery store are to be found in the candy aisle, the most expensive in the produce aisle.)
Please comment more often, Lauren!
I started developing what I like to think of as the “eating small” theory early in my pregnancy, when I had no appetite to speak of. At that time, eating small portions was all I could physically handle. My body refused to let me overeat. This was a first for me. I am someone who is used to eating to the point of discomfort, especially if I am enjoying the food before me. I realized I was “eating small”–eating small amounts of nutrient-packed food more frequently (well, I had to remind myself to do this), eating food at the pace of a “small” person rather than a “large” person. I took a mindfulness approach to this and observed my eating patterns and the signals my body was giving me. I knew I had to make each meal as healthy as possible since I was faced with not only undernurishing myself but the fetus. I was also without a kitchen at this time and eating a lot of restaurant food so waste was an issue. If I ordered a full plate of food it wasn’t going to get eaten. So, I began ordering food like a “small” person, and thus I began to think of myself of as a “small” person.
I’ve been able to apply this approach throughout my pregnancy, although it is getting harder now that I am in the final stretch. All of a sudden I am hungry. I feel physical hunger in a way that I haven’t ever before. Again, I am trying to take a mindfulness approach. I’m observing my body, what happens when I eat at different intervals (I need that banana at 4 am otherwise I can’t sleep through the rest of the night) and what happens when I eat different types of food. I’m also giving into my cravings–ironically my cravings are for things like avocados, peanut butter, and all of sudden mangoes, not cookies, chips, or ice cream. I’m trying my darndest to keep eating “small” now that I am faced with the challenge of hunger that obviously needs to be fed. My partner Paul is great at reminding me that I need to eat smaller portions more frequently. It has become my mantra (although I don’t always follow it and then I pay with discomfort and heartburn).
And, to the delight of my doctors and myself, I’ve managed to gain the requisite amount of baby weight without gaining too much, something most “large” people worry about during pregnancy. The baby is growing, growing, growing and although my girth has increased by 16-inches (holy crap), I will likely conclude the pregnancy weighing close to what I did before I became pregnant or even slightly less. Now the question is, can I keep “eating small” after the baby is born? I hope so–I’d love to be as healthy and fit as possible and model healthy habits for my child!
Greenman2001: I think that was my comment you were referring, to, but it was in the context of “stop whining, Boys — you can build hungry muscle and eat more and still lose weight.” Note that she’s lean and toned, but not bulky, which proves my point.
My challenge is developing better coping strategies to maintain a healthy weight and consistent fitness routine. I nailed it, then had kids, moved to a sucky climate, and started hating my job. I’m clinging to what still works, trying to fix what’s broken, and dealing with the rest in LIFO order. As they say, sometimes it’s not what you’re eating, it’s what’s eating you . . .
JD — good crossover analogy! I don’t do budgets and I don’t do diets, because they trigger my perfectionism, which tends to be the death of self-improvement for me. I have to start with where I am and give myself permission to experiment and fail to become a better health/money manager.
I use the terms “balanced eating” or “eating well” to mean roughly the same thing as “frugal eating”, but I get what you’re saying.
Thanks for clarifying, TosaJen. Part of Lauren’s accomplishment — and the reason her muscle definition is so visible — is that she’s reduced her body fat significantly, so there’s nothing “in front of” the muscle. Bodybuilders focus on this in the period before competitions by doing lots of cardio (along with dehydrating themselves).
I love the idea of dealing with life’s problems LIFO. I usually call that “putting out fires.”
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