Why Eating More Food, Not Less, Is My New Weight Loss Secret
I’ve done other weightloss programs before. I am a four-time loser at Weight Watchers. I have had and wasted 5 gym memberships, and I have a whole stack of workout clothes in my closet. I have overeaten, undereaten and not eaten at all. Everything was successful, at first, but it was impossible to maintain. Up, down. Down, up.
I thought I had the answer, just not the willpower to mailtain it: Eat Less, Move More. Seems completely obvious. But I was really only into half of it. The Eat Less half, of course. Moving more was going to happen after I lost the weight. Some plan.
So you can imagine how shocked I was when, after my second workout, Coach Ryan sat me down and talked to me about food. I’d been tracking all of my meals, snacks and nibbles on mycaloriecounter.com. I thought I had done poorly. The first day I ate about 1350 calories, the next day about 1250 and the third day about 1300 again. I had always heard that the ideal calorie count for losing weight was 1200 calories a day, and I was over the mark. But this is what Coach Ryan said…
EAT MORE
You read that right. Eat more, but eat better. Ryan told me that my optimum calorie range, once my fitness improved, was 1600-1800 calories. 400 more calories a day than I thought was correct for me. And right away, as soon as I started training, I was to increase my calorie count to 1500 a day, but there were rules. Those calories had to be 50% protein, 30% fat and 20% sugar.
Translated, that equals 183 grams of protein, 50 grams of fat and max of 50 grams of sugar.
You’d think a fat girl being told to eat more food each day would be like winning the lottery – I didn’t get fat because I have an aversion to food. It didn’t work that way, though. Getting that many grams of protein was almost impossible, especially without getting the fat and sugar grams out of whack. One yogurt in the morning was 12 grams of sugar and about 6 protein.
Coach Ryan suggested protein shakes and protein bars, which ended up being the perfect solution for me. I get to have chocolate milk and chocolate-covered bars every day and still be within my diet. I’ve also found cookbooks for diabetics to be helpful – they’re high on protein and (obviously) light on carbs. Try www.diabetic-recipes.com.
Why eat more? To fuel our bodies, yes, but to make our bodies use the fuel WE want our bodies to use – body fat. More on that next time in “getting in the heart rate zone”.
Of course, increasing my calorie intake would be stupid if I also weren’t increasing my output. I’m at the gym three days a week @ 6a.m., and I don’t want to waste those workouts because I didn’t eat right.
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