Dispelling some big fat myths. Review on Weight Reduction Programme

'No artificial colours, no artificial flavours, 99% fat free', she whispers from the other side of the screen as she puts the potato chip in her mouth and closes her eyes in silent enjoyment of the taste. One part of your brain warns you that it is all a sham, that she is just an actor, and that the chips probably don't taste as good as she wants you to believe. But the other side comes up with a few pertinent points of its own. It gets persuaded by the magic number ninety-nine and wastes no time in bringing it to your attention. It points out the total lack of body fat on the girl as well as the apparent pleasure she is getting from eating that chip. That could be you, it says, if you eat one of those. The next day, which happens to be your shopping day, a packet of those chips you saw on TV manages to find its way into your trolley and half an hour later, there you are on your couch, eyes dreamy with contentment, belly protruding, hands clutching a crumpled chips packet, face absolutely devoid of guilt. Why no guilt? Obvious really, the chips were 99% fat free.

To understand why fat-free foods don't help you reduce weight, it is important to first understand how our bodies function. The human body, just like any other machine, needs energy to function. But unlike any other machine, it has this irritating habit of storing extra energy as body fat, which comes in handy if you are living through a pre-historic ice-age but when you are living in a time when you can easily get three meals a day and your daily physical exercise is composed of taking walks to the bathroom and typing words on the keyboard, it can only be called an annoyance. But annoyance or not, as long as you keep providing your body with more energy than it needs, it is only too happy to keep storing it as body fat.

One of the first steps towards a healthier lifestyle is to find out how much energy your body needs per day. That depends on a lot of things like whether you are male or female, heavy or light, active or sedentary, the “let’s go to the gym for some fun” type or “let’s watch some TV for some fun” type and a lot others. The excellent article at https://healthrecipes.com/calories.htm has different methods, varying in accuracy, to calculate your energy requirement. If the link is dead by the time you read this review, just do some research on google and you should find something worthwhile in no time.

Right, now that you know how much energy your body needs in a day, it is worthwhile spending some time getting to know our main energy sources, carbohydrates, proteins and fats. Each of these things has a specific calorific value, which is the number of calories released when one gram of food is digested. Carbohydrates and proteins give four calories per gram and fats release nine. So as a rough estimate, eating one gram of pure fat is equivalent to eating two grams of carbohydrates or proteins. So if those fat free chips had enough calories in them to push your calorie intake for the day over your calorie requirement, you will still put on weight. You see, fats are not the culprits really. It is the number of calories you consume. Of course, life would have been so much less miserable if only our bodies just excreted the excess energy. That would mean more trips to the bathroom, but who cares?

To an extent your body doesn’t really know(or care) whether you are eating carbohydrates or proteins or fats because all it does to whatever goes down your throat is to convert it to energy. So instead of keeping a tap on the amount of fat you eat, it would be a lot more useful to monitor the number of calories you consume. As long as you don’t go over your ‘daily budget’, you will be fine. If you want to grow thinner, decrease your daily energy intake below your daily requirement. If you want to grow fatter, increase it. And since your body doesn’t care about what you eat, you don’t have to care about how much of proteins, carbohydrates and fats you are eating as long as you are under your calorie requirement. Right?

Wrong. Your body is not just intelligent and irritating, it is also demanding. In addition to requiring a constant influx of energy, it also places some constraints on how much of what you should feed it. For instance, there are eight amino acids your body cannot synthesise so that has to come from the protein component of your diet. Eggs are the cheapest and the best source of protein on the planet, period. It has a biological value of 93.7% which is just incredible; so say goodbye to all those protein shakes. However, vitamin C is not present in eggs so if you want some of that, you will have to go somewhere else. Our bodies also need about 100g of carbohydrates per day so if one of your meals is totally made up of rice, you will be fine on that count. Fats - well believe it or not, the body also needs 20% of your energy to come from fats, half of which has to come from invisible fats. I don't think I need to list any sources of fat now, do I? There are so many that whatever your diet, you are probably already eating a lot more than what you are allowed. Tut tut.

Now that we have seen how we can decrease our calorie intake, let us also spend some time looking at how we can increase our calorie requirement. “Exercise” is probably the most hated word in the English dictionary, but it is really helpful in cutting those extra pounds and when you consider that you calorie requirement almost doubles with moderate exercise, you have no reason not to head to the gym. Think of all the extra food your body can now handle! But the problem with exercise is that it is boring. I am yet to come across an honest guy who thinks exercise is fun. Just remember, anyone who tells you they enjoy their workout is just lying. So it is really up to you to make it as less boring as you can. Take a CD player along(or those new things, what are they called? Ipods?), talk to yourself about something, tell yourself a story; just get it over with.

All in all, to a large degree our bodies don’t really discriminate between the three major energy sources in our diet. To single out fats for special hatred seems to be a bit unfair, in my opinion, though they are the main culprits when it comes to calorific value. So the next time you see some delicious chips dripping in oil and you feel like eating them, go ahead and let yourself go. Only, make sure you compensate for that by eating a little less for dinner that night.