Weight on? Food and you 

By Emilie Isles, Sports Dietitian: 0408 547 141

Admit it, you love food. Yep, well, you’re not alone – most of us do. This article is not about putting you in the naughty corner because you’re partial to the odd Tim Tam (or beer), nor is it meant to make meal and snack times excruciatingly boring where there is nothing but fruit, vegetables and lean protein on the menu –we're going to show you a long-term, sustainable solution.

What we do want to underline (and highlight) is that good nutrition goes hand-in-hand with regular exercise to achieve health and fitness outcomes that last a lifetime – forget the quick fix.

Here’s your action plan:·        

• Food and you

• Diet is not a dirty word

• Be organised

• Modify your recipes

Food and you

Whether you lurch from one diet to the next, you’re piling on weight and don’t know why, or you can’t shift those pesky few kilos – it’s your relationship with food that is probably letting you down (sigh!).

The reasons we typically eat are:
• Hunger;
• Pleasure;
• Social and cultural occasion;
• Boredom; and
• Stress and emotional eating.

By considering food as the fuel that powers our bodies, to get the most out of our bodies, from general fitness training to elite athletic performance, it’s important to fuel our bodies with the right fuel and know when to provide it.

Diet is not a dirty word

Diet, in its true meaning, simply refers to the usual food or drink we consume. Instead, the word tends to make us feel apprehensive, nervous and restricted – we’ve been trained to perceive the term diet as meaning a prescribed selection of food, mostly with an emphasis on restriction and self-deprivation, and overall negative connotations.

The “diets” that exist in the marketplace today – on supermarkets shelves, at pharmacies and health foods stores country-wide – are enough to make your head spin with confusion! Low carbohydrate versus high carbohydrate versus type of carbohydrate, low protein versus high protein, a huge range of ‘detox’ diets, diets for your blood type as well as numerous commercial weight-loss programs. 
What does it all mean? These diet tactics don’t work at achieving long-term sustainable weight loss. Here’s why:

1. Short-term weight loss can often result from dietary restriction in the most part due to the body using up its carbohydrates stores for energy. Small amounts of carbohydrate are stored (with water) in the liver and muscles for exercise/activity as well as for maintenance of blood sugar levels. When carbohydrate intake is restricted, your body is forced to use up its reserves in the liver and muscles, and so the weight of carbohydrate from these stores will be lost, as well as the weight of all the water that is stored with carbohydrate. While this may seem encouraging at first, when carbohydrate intake increases slightly and the body is again able to store small amounts of carbohydrate, the weight that was lost will be regained.

2. Energy intake and energy output. The majority of diets on the market are based on the concept of creating an energy deficit to facilitate weight loss. This is a very simplistic approach – we know there is much more to it than this. Take energy intake, for example. When we look at the food we eat, it’s not only about satisfying hunger because there are multiple reasons why we choose to eat. Hunger, social occasions/traditions, religious occasions/traditions, boredom, emotional eating and stress eating, some people even find that they eat in their sleep! By looking purely to create an energy deficit, diets ignore all of these factors as well as failing to educate on ways to deal with each of the above situations where eating may be for reasons other than hunger. 

3. Dieting can mean a loss of muscle mass. This is a downside to many dieting approaches because muscle wasting is the result of your body needing to breakdown some of its own protein for use as energy. Not only does this create a number of unwanted side effects but also acts to slow down your metabolism as a loss of muscle tissue is a loss of metabolically active tissue. This means you actually require less energy to maintain your weight and therefore makes you increasingly likely to regain weight.

4. Metabolism, which refers to the amount of energy required by the body to maintain a stable weight over a fixed period, is influenced by a number of key factors including body size, lean muscle mass, physical activity and stage of life. Body size affects how much energy we burn, with heavier individuals requiring more energy to do the same 100 metre walk as a lighter person. Rapid weight loss via an overly restrictive diet is likely to slow metabolic rate and make it highly likely that you will regain that weight.... and more!

5. Following on from this, it is important to distinguish between fat mass and muscle mass within the body, with muscle mass having the higher metabolic rate. This means that two individuals who weigh the same can actually end up having significant differences in their metabolic rate depending on their body composition, and the proportion of muscle mass compared to fat mass. This effect of muscle mass can help to explain why men generally have a higher metabolic rate than women. With this in mind, the importance of including a strength component in any exercise/activity regime cannot be highlighted enough in terms of its ability to raise metabolic rate and assist with achieving long-term sustainable weight loss.

6. Age and weight gain. It is also quite common for people to notice that as they get older their weight can tend to creep up over the years, with people often commenting that weight gain occurs even despite the fact that their energy intake from food has not changed. This may be the result of a reduction in muscle mass with less physical activity or weight-bearing activities. To minimise this, it is important to maintain participation in weight-bearing activities and some strength activities. Maintaining lean muscle mass will help to keep your metabolism high and prevent weight gain.

7. Weight needs to be viewed as a symptom. As diets are mostly aimed at achieving a body weight that is not at all related to a particular individual in terms of their history, genetics, present weight and current lifestyle, this creates often unrealistic expectations and can lead to unnecessary feelings of failure or limited success. The same can be said for tools such as BMI and healthy weight ranges, which originate from population-based data and again fail to account for individual variability. These methods also don’t distinguish between fat and muscle mass, and will typically classify most athletes, who have some component of strength activities in their sport, as obese – which we know is simply not the case. 

8. Taking an individual approach is the way to go. This means focusing more on identifying causes of excess weight and developing strategies to reduce such  behaviours and allow weight to naturally correct itself – it’s not about simply patching  up the symptom with short-term remedies such as fad diets.

9. Choosing to focus on weight instead of problem-solving can also lead to a near obsessive addiction to weighing in – where so-called success or failure hinges on a number on the scales. In most cases it may actually be better to use other indicators such as waist measurements, not compared to national guidelines, but compared to your previous measurements, to highlight progress, or by monitoring exercise tolerance and food selections.

Be organised

Have you come home late from work with the best intentions to cook a healthy balanced meal, yet when opening the fridge to discover none of the required ingredients you turn to quick alternatives such as takeaway? It happens to the best of us.
The key here is to minimise the frequency with which such situations occur. This can be done by looking at the following:

• Bulk cook suitable meals on weekends and freeze them in appropriate portions for quick meals during the week.

• Love your leftovers – make the most of your ability to freeze leftovers for later use, or even to pack for lunch the next day.

• Always have the freezer stocked with a supply of frozen vegetables.

• Plan your weekly menu – this way you’ll be less likely to default back to unhealthy (and expensive) takeaway options. You can try inputting menu cycles on an excel spreadsheet with shopping lists for each.

• Pack suitable meal and snack options (this may even mean taking in a bulk supply of healthy snacks to work if the idea of taking them daily does not appeal to you).

• Identify healthy takeaway/cafe/restaurant choices that are available in close proximity to your home and workplace.

Modify your recipes

With the number of cooking shows featured on television at the moment, it’s no wonder we are all heading back into the kitchen with gusto. If this is you, then you may have noticed how liberal chefs and recipe books can be in the amount of oil, butter, cheese and cream that are used. While this does not mean we have to throw away the fancy recipes and return to steamed vegetables, it is important to be able to confidently modify recipes to not just reduce excess fat, sugar and salt, but also ways to add extra nutritional value to meals by incorporating more fruit and vegetables, and so on.

So what are some easy to identify ingredient exchanges:

• Use low-fat dairy (milk, cream, yoghurt, cheese and ice-cream).

• Coconut milk can be replaced with low-fat carnation milk, which now comes in a variety with coconut essence added.

• Bake meat/vegetables/croutons instead of frying them.

• Experiment with herbs and spices for flavour and minimise sauces, gravies and other high-energy additions.

• Choose a tomato-based pasta sauce instead of creamy versions.

• Experiment by using less oil/butter than the recipe advises, adding things like extra yoghurt/fruit puree can be useful in cakes/muffins, while additional stock, or even water, can be used in savoury dishes.

• Replace high-fat meats with lower fat alternatives. For example, use fresh chicken breasts instead of barbecue chickens, use lean ham instead of bacon, and choose leaner, less marbled cuts of meat.