Calorie Restriction - Blog Posts

Just ate 77 kcals for breakfast. 😔

"you don't look like you have an ed" i will slowly peel my skin off and morph into the most terrifying creature you have ever laid your eyes upon

What Works (and What Doesn’t)

I’ve lost (and gained, and lost, and gained, and lost) a lot of cumulative weight. I’ve been obsessing over my weight and going on poorly informed fad diets since before I hit puberty; in the past 3 years, I’ve weighed 98 pounds and 158 pounds. Right now I’m in the middle, where I’m supposed to be for my height and build. Saying you lost 60 pounds in fun, but it wasn’t achieved in a healthy way and it happened way too fast to be sustainable. 

Still, it helped me learn a lot about my body. After a lifetime of dieting, I know in at least the most basic terms what does and doesn’t work for me. None of this information is revolutionary, and it’s all immensely subjective. Every body is different, but through a stupid amount of trial and error, I know a lot about mine! 

Some of this information might be helpful, but take it with a grain of salt- if something doesn’t feel right to you, it probably isn’t. 

Didn’t work: counting calories 

The ‘conventional logic’ approach of calories in/calories out doesn’t hold as much scientific merit as you might think, mainly because the kind of calories you consume (ie, the kind of food) changes the way your body processes it. Fed Up is an imperfect documentary, but it does a good job of showing the way the food industry has pushed this mentality to distract consumers from the poor nutritional content of their food. 

For me, the most significant effect of counting calories was that it made me obsess about calories. I thought about food more often, so I ended up eating more. When I went over my (fairly arbitrary) limit, I felt like a failure, even if the quality of my diet was better that day. It encouraged me to eat more lower- calorie processed foods and to skimp on servings of bread or meat to make up for snacks that didn’t give me anything valuable. 

Note: I found that my problem was more about the quality/content of the foods I chose, but I have a few friends that swear they can only eat a healthy diet through calorie counting, because they take big portions and snack constantly if they don’t. Both of these techniques have a place, especially if you’re trying to lose weight at the recommendation of your doctor, but counting calories definitely wasn’t helpful for me. 

Worked better: cutting (most) calories out of my drinks 

This is probably the best small change you can make in your diet. I’m not super strict about this- I love soda and I’ll have one at a restaurant without needing to self-flagellate. I don’t usually drink more than once or twice a week, so I haven’t even cut out alcohol. Sticking to water and water only would be healthier, but I don’t find that one soda will set me on a binge, so I don’t worry too much about having it occasionally. Mainly, this was about changing my mindset to sugary drinks being an ‘occasional’ thing. 

In my first year, for example, I was obsessed with Vitamin Water, which was really cheap with my meal plan. I probably had 2 a day- that equals 240 calories and 58 grams of sugar for something that did essentially zero for me nutrition-wise. This is one of the reasons I don’t find counting calories all that effective- looking at 240 calories, I can match that to a couple of apples or a few slices of toast and see it as a fine option. Looking at 58 grams of sugar, I see something unreasonably bad for me that I really don’t want to have very often. 

Another big change I made in this area was switching from coffee to tea. Keep in mind, I used to drink a lot of coffee, and I took it with milk and a ton of sugar. At its worst, when I started to develop a cappuccino craving, my daily intake would consist of a morning cup of coffee with at least 3 teaspoons of sugar, and 2 large cappuccinos with 4 sugar packets each. I know, it was a problem. That was like, 13 teaspoons a day just to tolerate my coffee. I was still incredibly active- at the time I was working 8 hours a day as a gymnastics coach- but my body just couldn’t work off that amount of sugar. 

I didn’t want to give up caffeine altogether, so I switched to tea- first to black tea, with milk and sugar (I think it’s gross clear), then eventually to green tea, which I actually enjoy. 

Didn’t work: exercising hard once or twice a week 

Obviously working out vigorously is better than doing it half-assed, but I fell into this mental trap for a long time. If I couldn’t be at the gym for at least an hour, I felt like I was wasting my time. The problem with this mindset is that it encourages you not to work out. Even 15 minutes of exercise is better than nothing, but if you view it as less than a workout, you’re more likely to do nothing. 

If you don’t exercise very much, working out hard every day just isn’t realistic. Even if it doesn’t zap your motivation, it will make you very, very sore, which will in turn make it harder to drag yourself to the gym the next day. Lack of results results and inevitably pulled muscles eventually discouraged me from this technique, but it took me some time to accept this as a reason to change my approach. Mostly I saw soreness as a punishment for past laziness, so I didn’t try to make my routine easier for myself. Being tough and working through pain is great, in theory, but realistically, I’m not an Olympian; this mindset was unnecessary for my goals, and in the long run it made me less active. 

It was hard to make the switch, but eventually I found that I had more success with consistency than intensity. Plus, I found I was more likely to increase my intensity automatically- when I exercised every day my workouts got gradually more difficult, but when the workout started off hard, I was more likely to give up. Even if I didn’t, my self perception was much more negative after my intense workouts, because I was holding myself to an unrealistic standard. Setting ambitious goals is great, but if you don’t break them down into small steps, you’re more likely to abandon them. 

Worked better: exercising moderately every day 

If there are two things I hate, it’s consistency and moderation- so you can imagine how much I used to hate working out gently every day. I’m embarrassed to admit how many times I have tried to put doable, everyday workout plans into action only to abandon them two weeks later. Still, I have only ever achieved results by working out consistently. Even two hours of sweating buckets at the gym wasn’t enough when I was only doing it once or twice a week, and that was so frustrating!

By contrast, working out for as little as 15 minutes daily made a visible difference, and I found my fitness level growing rapidly. Plus, it was easy to track my progress, so even small increases felt like victories. The American Council on Exercise agrees that moderate, regular exercise is best, and only “more fit individuals” should try to save time by opting for less frequent but more vigorous workouts. 

The technique I’ve currently adopted (mostly based on an amalgamation of different pinterest challenges, tbh) is simple and easy enough that I can do it with a torn calf muscle: 

1 minute plank, 30 second side plank (each side), 1 minute superman hold and 30 second hollow body hold, gradually increasing the times of each balance

This is insanely easy! It barely looks like a workout! But it’s helped me build back strength in my shoulders and triceps, and it engages my core, quads and glutes enough to get my blood pumping and my muscles loose. 

Didn’t work: juicing 

I have always been a juice fiend. My parents (like many) banned soda but not juice, since, in theory, it’s healthy. It took me a really long time to believe that it wasn’t. Even if you don’t believe that juice is bad for you, you should probably hop off the juicing bandwagon. The logic that I bought into for a long time was that by juicing, I would consume way more fruits and vegetables than normal. The problem is that I wasn’t actually consuming them, at least not the way they were meant to be eaten. Produce has a ton of fibre, which you completely eliminate when you scoop all that gross pulp out of your juicer. 

Some nutritionists will try to convince you that since juicers only filter out the insoluble fibre, you’re not missing out on anything essential. First all of, some fibre does remain- but it’s a very small amount. A raw orange, for example, normally contains 3 grams of fibre; the fresh juice of one only has 0.2. Second, just because it has a negative prefix attached to it, it doesn’t mean that insoluble fibre is bad or unnecessary- it just means that it doesn’t dissolve in water. In fact, of the 20-35 grams of fibre adults should consume a day, roughly 3:1 should be insoluble fibre. It helps our bodies move the bulk of our food through our digestive system, controls our intestinal pH level and prevents constipation. 

Finally, without the fibre of fruit to slow digestion, the glucose in fruit juice is quickly absorbed, giving you a sugar rush comparable to a can of soda. Juicers tout “fast absorption” as a benefit, but mostly what you absorb is a huge hit of sugar. The amount of sugar in a piece of fruit is rarely a concern to nutritionists, both because it’s usually mitigated by the fibre, and because it’s hard to consume that much fruit. Enter the juicer, which needs roughly 32 stalks of celery to fill a 16oz glass. Celery is a low-sugar vegetable, but stripped of all that insoluble cellulose, a 16oz glass of pure celery juice contains a whopping 32 grams of sugar. For reference, the American Heart Association recommends limiting your intake to 28 grams a day (24 for women, 36 for men). 

Worked better: making my own desserts 

And like...a lot of desserts. Like I said before, I have a huge sweet tooth. I (mostly) believe the paleo people when they tell me that if I cut out all sugar my craving would fade, but is it really worth it? To me, right now, it totally isn’t. I did want to cut down on my intake of packaged foods, though, so for a few years in university I baked all the time. This was actually awesome and I should do it again. It made my housemates love me, and once I accumulated the ingredients, I also found it way less expensive than buying pre-made snacks or desserts. 

I should mention that this wasn’t low-fat baking: I didn’t do anything to control the amount of butter, white flour or sugar I used. This isn’t ideal for weight loss, but it surprised me how much I was able to consume without the negative effects that usually accompany eating processed baked goods and ice cream. Michael Pollan said it best: “the best indicator of a healthy diet is whether it was cooked by a human being or a big corporation”. Even if you’re loading up on fatty ingredients, your triple chocolate brownies will probably contain less sugar (and far fewer unhealthy chemicals) than a calorie-wise dessert made in a factory. 

When I’m not on a weird diet, I will snack. It’s a thing. I don’t think it’s awful, and I would encourage you to try making snacks/desserts that suit you and your diet before trying to cut them out all together. Unless your doctor has advised you to cut out all sweets, then fighting against these natural cravings (rather than finding a healthier way to satisfy them in moderation) is more trouble than it’s worth.