Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

(This relates to my weight gain goal, but it’s all equally applicable if you’re losing weight.)

I said to my wife over the weekend, “I’ll be glad when I reach my goal weight and I can ease back a bit on eating all the time.”

That got me thinking.

Physiology – or physics, for that matter – tells me that if I am taking in more energy than I need for my energy output, I will gain weight, and if I’m taking in less, I’ll lose weight. The body seeks a balance.

Old Scales by ukapala

The body’s energy output is mainly affected by three things: Level of activity, body composition (fat versus muscle), and body weight.

So, if I find out the amount of energy that I theoretically would need if I was my goal weight, and plan my eating so that my everyday intake is that amount, my weight should naturally and inevitably rise until the energy intake and the energy output balance, and then stop. This should (again theoretically) occur at my goal weight, give or take whatever individual variation my particular metabolism has from the average.

The advantage of this approach is that right through my weight change process I will be eating in the same way that I will need to eat to maintain the changed weight. That’ll be my new lifestyle as someone who weighs that amount. I’m not making one change to get to that weight and another to keep it.

So, how do I run the numbers and figure out what I need to do?

Well, I go to nutritiondata.com and use their Daily Needs Calculator. I put in my age (actually the age I’m going to be in a few months), my height and my gender, but I put in the weight that I plan to be – not the weight I am now. The results are:

You are a 41 year old man, 6ft 0in / 183cm tall, with a current weight of 67.0kg. You lead a somewhat active lifestyle.

Your Body Mass Index

Your current Body Mass Index (BMI) is 20.0.

BMI is a standardized ratio of weight to height, and is often used as a general indicator of health. The “normal” BMI for an adult man of your height is 18.5 to 24.9. This translates to a healthy weight range of 62 to 83 kg. However, BMI does not take body composition into account. A weight above this range could still be considered healthy if your percentage body fat is less than average. For more accurate determination of body fat levels, consider using a body fat caliper.

Your Calories Burned

Here is an estimate of your daily energy needs…

Calories Burned
Daily Energy Expenditure: 2562 kcal ( 10727 kJ)

After some disclaimers, it gives me some further useful information about my minimum nutrient needs, including the key figures of 130g of carbohydrate and 54g of protein (both of which seem low, but they’re minimum figures, remember).

My next task, then, is to compare what I eat now with these target values and see how far off I am. To do this, I create a “Pantry” (a slightly unintuitive name, but never mind) on the Nutritiondata.com site. I have to be signed in for this so that I can save it.

You can combine multiple ingredients into a recipe and save it with its own name, which is useful, or there are a large number of prepared foods in the database as well.

I quickly discover that my breakfast gives me 195 calories towards my target 2562.

I usually have the same breakfast, lunch and snacks from day to day but vary what I have for dinner. Within a very reasonable span of time and with no significant issues, I have worked out that my standard daily intake at the moment, excluding dinner, totals to over 3000 calories. I already know from working it out for my nutrition studies (the hard way, from printed reference tables typed by hand into a spreadsheet) that my usual dinners run between about 300-600 calories, so I’m about 800 calories over what I actually need to reach my goal weight. I can afford to back off a bit on the stuffing, which is a relief. For example, I can drop the time-consuming preparation of a smoothie with fruit juice, a banana, an egg and milk with my dinner in the evening; it’s giving me about 500 calories I don’t need and a glycaemic load of 28. I could probably go back to one sandwich instead of two for lunch, as well.

The analysis also gives me links where I can investigate better alternatives to the foods I eat (“better” for weight loss, weight gain or optimal health, whichever is my specific concern). It tells me that my glycaemic load is a bit high, my vitamin C is about 60% of the recommended amount (which considering how much fruit I eat is a surprise), vitamin K is about 25%, folates are at 93% (without dinner, remember, so they’re probably OK), and everything else is at or above 100% – manganese, for example, is at almost 500%. Clicking through to the food recommendations, some more spinach, which I do eat, should sort me out on the vitamin K and folates.

With the smaller daily intake, when I recalculate I find I’m a bit short of other important nutrients. Adding some milk back in helps, but sends my saturated fats and trans fats too high. I’ll need to fiddle with it some more to get an ideal diet, obviously.

All in all, this is a very impressive site – not only does it have a lot of valuable data but it’s very easy to use. I recommend, to complement it, World’s Healthiest Foods, which goes into what the various nutrients are good for according to a huge mass of studies.

The values are, of course, not totally exact; the database is US and I’m in New Zealand, and there can be quite a variance in the composition of foods locally. But at the level of hundreds of calories, which is what I’m concerned with, this was a very useful (and fairly easy) exercise.

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