The Calorie Story

from the book
You're a Walking Miracle—Walking, Weight Loss and Wellness
© 2005 Martin Collis

The ebb and flow of calories will determine whether you're fat, very fat, very thin or in true Goldilocks fashion, 'just right'. Calorie awareness is crucial and cannot be ignored. At school, we all heard the phrase "pay attention" and that's exactly what is required of you now, not just to the information in this chapter, but to the quality and quantity of calories you allow into your body.

The calorie story is about the calories we burn when we move, the calories we take in with our food and drink and about the calories that are turned into fat and take up residence on our bodies. If you are interested in weight loss or weight control it makes life a lot easier if you understand the truth about calories. You can't manage your finances without knowing how much you earn and how much you spend and you can't manage your body weight without knowing something about the comings and goings of the calories in your life.

For example, most people have no idea how long it takes to work off or walk off the food they eat.

Roughly how many steps would you have to take to 'walk off' a Big Mac and large fries and approximately how long would it take you? Answer: A Big Mac and large fries are about 1160 calories. At an average of 20 steps per calorie it will take 22,600 steps to 'walk them off'. At 2000 steps per mile (1250 steps per kilometer) you will have to walk just over 11 miles or 18 kilometers to 'walk off' your Big Mac and large fries!! Good luck. Something you never hear at a fast food outlet is, "Let's have some fast food and then walk for 4 or 5 hours."

Once you understand the caloric content of food and drink and the sedentary nature of our society you cannot be surprised that we have been getting fatter and fatter every year. I believe we have reached the tipping point, when governments, health authorities, schools, magazines and newspapers and millions of individuals realize that enough is enough. This book will make its contribution to the common sense revolution of eating less, eating better and moving more.

The Simple Truth About Calories

• A calorie is a unit of energy.
• We get our calories, and therefore our energy, from the food and drink we consume.
• In order to stay alive, our bodies are using energy (calories) every second of the day and night.
• The more we move the more calories we burn.
• The bigger we are the more calories we burn. This means that just to stay the same, a big person needs more calories than a small person. *The stereotypical image is of skinny people who can eat anything and never put on weight because they have a 'high metabolism'. This is possible, but very unusual.
• As you lose weight (literally becoming smaller) you need a few less calories to maintain your weight. For every pound of weight you lose you need about 8 less calories per day. This fact is often overlooked and is one of the reasons that people regain weight when they 'go off their diet'.
• The word metabolism means the rate at which we burn calories. The metabolism of a slim adult man looks like this.

If our slim man does nothing for 24 hours other than sleep, rest, sit and eat he will burn around 2000 calories. Two hundred of these calories are used to digest his food.

So our slim adult male needs about 2000 calories to exist. A 120 lb female needs about 1800 calories to do the same. It takes more fuel to heat a big house than a small one so a heavy man or woman will burn more calories.

The critical calorie zone is often between 2000 and 3000 calories. If we regularly have a muffin and a latte in the morning and maybe a chocolate bar for an 'energy boost' in the afternoon we are adding over 700 calories to our intake. Throw in a couple of alcoholic drinks and we will have consumed about half our basic 2000 survival calories and got very little value in terms of nutrition.

It's the daily habits that make the difference. An extra hundred calories seems like nothing until you start to look at it on a yearly basis.

There are 365 days in a year. I pound of body fat is equal to 3500 calories. Therefore FOR EVERY EXTRA 10 calories you have on a daily basis you are consuming a pound's worth of extra calories a year.

10 calories x 365 = 3650 calories

Fortunately the body uses some energy to convert those calories to fat, but at least 1/2 of those extra calories will finish up as fat. Therefore, an extra 10 calories a day; 2 Smarties, 5 Tic Tacs or one stick of Wrigley's gum for example, will become 1/2 pound of fat a year.

While seeming to give you correct caloric information, many packaged food producers make it tricky to interpret by talking in terms of "serving size". A 56 gram box of Smarties actually holds 56 Smarties, which we found by counting them. The 56 gram "serving size" is 256 calories, which means that each individual Smartie is almost 5 calories. WHEN YOU THINK OF THIS IN TERMS OF STEPS, YOU WOULD HAVE TO WALK ABOUT THE LENGTH OF A FOOTBALL FIELD TO "WALK OFF" ONE SMARTIE. IF YOU EAT ONE "SERVING SIZE" (A 56 GRAM BOX) YOU WILL NEED TO WALK NEARLY 3 MILES OR 4 1/2 KILOMETERS. If weight control is a goal you can be your own 'smartie' by leaving the boxes of multi-colored calories on the convenience store shelf.

Now think in terms of an extra 100 calories a day; a can of pop, 1/2 a chocolate bar or a piece of bread, and after one year you will be wearing an additional five or six pounds of fat. Little things mean a lot in love, life and weight control.

I've given you the bad news, but now for the good news. The more you move, the more you lose. For simplicity you can think of taking 20 steps to burn one calorie. So that if you record 10,000 steps on your pedometer, you've burned 500 calories. That might be all that it takes to be burning more calories than you consume. That might be all that it takes to be losing weight instead of gaining weight, or, just as important, maintaining weight.

You should be aware that the bigger you are the more calories you burn with each step.

A very big man who is over six feet tall and weights more than 300 lbs will need only 10 steps to burn one calorie.

A tiny woman weighing 100lbs. or less and standing 4 ft 10 ins tall will need 40 steps per calorie.

The following table provides a useful rough guide to convert your steps into calories, based on your weight and gender.

People could look at the above table and think "I don't want to lose weight because I'll have to walk further to burn calories if my weight goes down." This is true, but it is not a good rationale for being overweight. Firstly, as we are informed daily in the popular media, being significantly overweight is unhealthy, affecting everything from A (arthritis) to Zzzzzz (quality of sleep). Secondly, muscle burns far more calories than fat and if we can lose fat and replace some of that lost weight with muscle we will become a far more efficient calorie burning machine. Thirdly, if you weigh 300 lbs it's not easy to walk much anyway and many very obese people become expert at minimizing the number of steps they take each day because of the effort and discomfort involved.

Walking the Talk

I talk about walking and I write about walking because it works for me and millions of others. When I dress in the morning I put on my pedometer. (I use an Omron HJ-105, which, in addition to counting my steps, has a seven-day memory, which is useful when it comes to recording my daily totals.) I find the business of living provides me with about 5,000 steps, so in order to get to 10,000 and beyond I have to include a purposeful 45-minute walk as part of my day. I record my steps on the iPed™ section of my web site (www.speakwell.com). You can do this too, or you can write them down in a notebook or calendar.

In 2004, I recorded a total of 3,878,004 steps, an average of 10,624 per day. At 20 steps per calorie I burned 193,900 walking calories in 2004, which works out to 55 lbs lost or not gained.

In simple terms, my walking program makes over 1 lb per week difference to my life!!!

Fidget Your Way to Fitness and Weight Loss (Little moves mean a lot).

Dr. James Levine of the Mayo Clinic conducted an experiment on 20 sedentary adults, 10 of whom were obese and 10 of whom were close to normal weight. The two groups ate an identical number of calories from specially prepared foods. All the participant wore specially created undergarments with built in sensors, which recorded every wriggle, adjustment and movement. The 20 people were given identical tasks to perform during the day, and did no extra exercise. The average difference in caloric expenditure between the thinner group and the heavy group was 350 calories per day. The thin group just didn't sit still, they adjusted positions, they stood up, walked around their desk, stretched and were rarely still for more than a few seconds. Their heavier counterparts were models of efficiency, wasting no energy or movement in the completion of a task. That 350 calories a day can easily be the difference between fat and thin. Remember the math: 350 calories a day x 365 days = 127,750 calories a year Divide that amount by 3500 to convert to pounds and you're looking at a 36 lb difference. I'm not suggesting that you try to fidget your way to thin but it is important that you never miss an opportunity to move and that little things mean a lot. The study findings so impressed Dr. Levine that he's redesigned his office so that his computer is mounted over a treadmill on which he walks at 0.7 miles per hour while he works. Dr. Levine notes, "The walking is addictive and terribly good fun." He's received 40 requests from colleagues at Mayo for 'treadmill desks'. 'Walking to work' has taken on a whole different meaning for Dr. Levine.

Completing the Calorie Story

Muscles are calorie burning machines and as you build muscle you increase your ability to burn calories and may well increase your overall metabolic rate. Sedentary North Americans typically lose 30% of their muscle mass in the 50 years between 20 and 70. About 1/2 lb of muscle disappears every year at the same time fat is accumulating at many times that rate. This is the major reason why our metabolism slows as we age.

This muscle loss can be offset by regular resistance training using free weights (bar bells and dumbbells), strength training machines or using your own body weight as resistance.

The huge success of Curves is that it provides a structured, but informal, environment for women to work all the major muscle groups of the body within a 30-minute period. As a result, muscle mass is retained or increased, and inches and weight are decreased, particularly if the exercise program is combined with some form of caloric restriction.

Walking is good calorie burning exercise, but it doesn't do much for the muscles of the upper body. A balanced fitness program must include some regular resistance training to maintain or build muscle and enhance the body's calorie burning capacity.

Movement burns calories and movement can build muscle, more muscle helps burn more calories in a wonderful positive spiral.

A major reason that is often cited against diets involving significant caloric restriction is that when you eat a lot less the body's resting metabolic rate slows down and you actually burn fewer calories at rest. This is a reality and is one of the reasons that weight loss is difficult (if it were easy we wouldn't have an obesity epidemic.) In a mechanism that goes back thousands of years, the body perceives a decreased caloric intake as a famine and slows down a little to try to conserve its integrity. This is another reason that it is important to move more during your diet, as exercise increases the metabolic rate and can help offset the lower resting metabolism. It also highlights the importance of a maintenance program when you have reached your ideal or target weight. Diets do work, but usually it's maintenance programs that fail.

One calorie burning part of exercise that is often overlooked is the increased metabolism that continues after you finish exercising. This is referred to as the post-exercise metabolism and means that the body continues to burn calories during the 'recovery' period after your workout. The more vigorous the exercise the more calories are burned after its completion.

Calorie Facts That You Might Overlook

All types of food are not created equal.

1 g of carbohydrate has 4 calories
1 g of protein has 4 calories
1 g of fat has 9 calories!

Per unit of weight, fat has more than twice the calories of carbohydrate and protein.

The news about fat gets worse. In order to convert dietary fat into body fat, the body needs to expend only 2.5 calories to store 100 fat calories. It's easy for the body to store the fat in your diet as body fat. However, in order to convert and store 100 calories of dietary protein or carbohydrate as fat the body must use 23 calories, nearly 10 times the amount it uses to store an equal amount of fat.

If it's available the body will always choose to store fat rather than carbohydrate or protein. The obvious message is to be very selective about the fat you choose to consume, especially if you are trying to lose weight

Wonderful Web Sites

Activity Calorie Calculators

To show the caloric cost of various activities based on your body weight would mean pages and pages of tables in this book. Fortunately, there are some excellent web sites, which provide accurate caloric information, taking into account the type and duration of the activity and your body weight.

One useful site is The Fitness Jumpsite at www.primusweb.com/fitnesspartner/.

Once there, click on the "activity calorie calculator" and you can have access to the caloric cost of 158 different activities based on your own body weight. A similar service is provided by A.D.A.M. at http://avera.adam.com/pages/tools/cal_burn.htm

This site provides the calorie cost of a wide range of recreational and sporting activities.

The Caloric Content of Food and Beverages

A web site, which will be very useful to you in checking the calories in familiar foods, can be found at www.calorieking.com/. This site has a database of over 40,000 foods, but the outstanding feature involves fast food and can be accessed by clicking on "Create a Meal". Using excellent graphics you can get complete caloric information from any combination of meals available at leading fast food franchises including McDonalds, Pizza Hut and Starbucks. Because this is web based it is constantly updated to keep pace with new products.

A web site, which combines both nutritional and caloric information of foods and beverages along with the caloric cost of exercise, can be found at www.fitday.com. This site enables you to set weight loss goals and then track your progress numerically and visually in the form of graphs and charts. The site is packed with information and is a good example of effective use of web-based technology. It's not for everyone, but for those who are analytical and hungry for information, it's Nirvana.