The plethora of diet and weight loss and eating plan strategies out there is truly mind boggling. The drive to achieve an ideal body weight, or just improve one’s overall look or perhaps feel healthier and more energetic causes people to turn to all sorts of remedies, quick fix plans and snake oils. Quite simply, doing it properly just sounds like hard work right ? Surely there’s a pill or supplement I can take ? It would seem that if people understood some basic nutritional biochemistry, listened to their bodies a little and adhered to a couple of simple principles – we’d see a lot more people jogging, a lot less in the drive-through fast food queues, fewer diabetics and certainly less obesity.

So should you be counting calories, chasing cavemen, adhering to Atkins, popping green tea extract or what? Well, firstly – it seems prudent to understand what you are trying to achieve and what levers are available to pull. Get a baseline by having a sensible medical check-up and ensure that any underlying diseases (such as hypertension or diabetes) are well managed and that obvious high risk habits (such as smoking or excessive alcohol consumption) are reduced or eliminated. Set some reasonable goals – perhaps in terms of a smaller waist size or completion of a sporting event – and appreciate that lifestyle overhauls take some time and discipline and you’re not going to see a supermodel in the mirror in a week. BMI has some limitations as a measure of health or obesity (tummy circumference is also useful) but it is a place to start. “You gotta wanna” – meaning you have to actually want to achieve something otherwise any shift from baseline sloth or excess will be unsustainable.

Your body runs like a complex machine, with the basic requirements for fuel (input) and the ability to perform physical work (exercise or output). Fuel intake in all its forms and guises is probably where most people get it wrong as they have no appreciation of either the typical calorie requirements for a day (2500 ish for a guy) or what sort of fuels the body likes to run on. You have very capable metabolic processes allowing all sorts of fuels to be used. Many diet plans advocate the partial or complete elimination of certain fuels to encourage the utilisation of stored fuels or fats via alternate metabolic pathways. For example – the Atkins diet would largely avoid carbohydrates (sugars, grains) and concentrate on fats and proteins; while a paleo diet would take a “caveman hunter gatherer view” and avoid processed carbs, sugars and dairy. There is some logic in all of them, in that reducing carbohydrates and improving energy sustaining intake is not all bad, however distorting your natural metabolic processes to burn fat fuels and push up blood cholesterol levels in the process has some negative implications too. Many long term studies have shown immediate weight loss success in the first months of many of these low carbohydrate high protein and fat diets while the same individuals years later have reverted back to their pre-diet situation. Everyone is different though at the end of the day so if it works for you, great. The most basic learning is probably to understand how much fuel you actually need and then also to burn some fuel (and give your metabolism a boost) by doing regular exercise. We’ll chat sensible exercising in another blog post – there isn’t enough internet here for that subject plus this one.

So – understand the calorie value of what you are eating. Lots of calories have to be used up somehow otherwise they will be stored. Unless you are training everyday for an Ironman ultra triathlon, you probably don’t need the calorie value of the food that your appetite is encouraging you to eat. Everything in moderation is still a handy maxim. You can have a pizza, just not every day. Complex and refined carbs are not great fuels – so go easy on the pastries. Lean proteins (meats and fish) are great fuel sources. Men and women handle fuels slightly differently too. Remember  that we don’t only eat for fuel – we also need all sorts of other vitamins and minerals, not to mention the cerebral joy from preparing and enjoying a tasty meal.