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Dialing in Your Diet: Where to Get Your Calories

By Eric Harr, exclusively for ORGANIC FOOD BAR

“If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise--not too little and not too much-- we would have found the safest way to health.”
--Hippocrates

Last week, here at ORGANIC FOOD BAR, I helped you lay the foundation for a healthful diet by determining how many calories you need based on your body and activity level. Armed with that information, we can move to the next step: where those calories should come from.

While I don’t want you to fixate on calories (please don’t!), I do want you to understand that calories fuel exercise and exercise forges a healthier, better, longer-lasting you. When you’re working out regularly, the last thing you want to do is deprive yourself of the calories you need to fuel that work.

Why? Several reasons. First, if you deprive yourself of too many calories, your metabolic rate slows, which is an act of self-preservation. Your body is essentially saying: “You’re not feeding me enough, and in case we’re starving here, I’m going into conservation mode.” Then, of course, when you eat as much as you actually need, your body responds by ruthlessly transforming every available spare calorie into lovehandles – just in case you decide to “semi-starve” yourself again.

Beyond that, if you restrict your calories, your performance suffers, you risk injuries and, instead of maintaining muscle mass and losing body fat, you’ll lose both, says Cynthia Sass, a registered dietitian in Tampa, Fl., spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association and co-author of Your Diet is Driving Me Crazy: When Food Conflicts Get in the Way of Your Love Life. In a nutshell: You won’t accomplish any of your fitness goals, whether it’s looking, feeling, or performing better, or improving your health, if you don’t get enough fuel.

It should also go without saying that if you consume too many calories, your body stores them as fat – so it’s important to only take in as many calories as your body needs. One pound of fat equals 3,500 calories, so if you get that many above and beyond what your body needs, you put on weight. That may sound like a lot, but if you have just 100 extra calories a day (found in about one tablespoon of butter, one egg, one slice of bread or one, big savory bite of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream!, for example), you’ll gain a pound every five weeks – or just over ten pounds in a year!

If your goal is to lose weight, experts recommend that you do so at a slow rate: Specifically, aim for no more than a pound or two a week. Since, as I just explained, a pound of fat equals 3,500 calories, you simply need to aim for 500-1000 fewer calories each day than the calorie needs you determined for yourself above. In the 25-year-old male example, if he ate between 2331 and 2881 calories a day – rather than the 3331 required to maintain his weight – he would lose 1-2 pounds a week. Clearly, this is still quite a lot of calories, and since he’s getting plenty of exercise, there’s little danger of the body going into conservation mode.

So, obviously, getting pretty close to your target number of calories each day is important – but of course there’s more to fueling your body than getting the right amount of calories. Those calories need to be an appropriate balance of macronutrients.

Sure, the Atkins-crazed, high-protein proponents who become hysterical if forced to so much as look at a loaf of bread have once again faded into the fad-diet woodwork, but there are still a lot of misconceptions about the three macronutrients, how much of each you should ideally consume each day, and why. I’ll give you the bottom line right out of the gate: You need to get 45-65 percent of your daily calories from carbohydrates, 20-35 percent from fat, and 10-35 percent from protein. This is according to the National Academies of Sciences Institute of Medicine, as well as just about any dietitian or nutritionist worth their (Himalayan rock) salt!

Why should you be shooting for these ranges? First, they collectively provide virtually all your caloric energy (specifically: one gram of carbohydrates has four calories, one gram of protein has four calories, and one gram of fat has nine calories), and you use all three, in varying degrees, to fuel your basic physiological functions, as well as your exercise. Your metabolism is cranking along – and you’re burning calories – even when you’re at rest. During those times, your body gets slightly more than half of its energy from fats and most of the rest from carbohydrates, along with a small percentage from proteins. When you’re exercising, the mixture of fuels is modified – and the amounts of each one used depend on how long and how hard you’re working out, as well as the sort of shape you’re in (how well you’re conditioned to be doing the activity you’re doing).

But there’s more to it than energy supply. While carbohydrates primarily function in this manner and are your most efficient source of energy, protein is not only used for energy, but is broken down into amino acids and reassembled into whatever proteins your body needs to make muscles, bones, skin, hair and all the connective tissues that literally keep you from falling apart. Certain amino acids found in protein are considered essential, meaning your body can’t make them; you can only get them from foods you eat. And then there’s fat, which isn’t all bad – no matter how awful the word may sound to you. In fact, in addition to providing you with energy, fats help your body to make cell membranes and certain hormones and to absorb the fat-soluble vitamins A, E, D and K. And like amino acids, some fats are also considered essential and can only be obtained from specific food sources.

So, clearly all three macronutrients are important components of a healthy diet. But, now that you know you need a good balance of carbs, proteins and fats each and every day, what are the best sources of each? We’ll tackle that next week here on the ORGANIC FOOD BAR website.

Meantime, enjoy food. Don’t let this detailed data, or any nutrition advice you hear, draw the passion out of eating. Food is one of life’s great pleasures. It binds us together, in all cultures. All I’m trying to do here is to give you the advice you need to achieve the body and energy levels you want -- while indulging in the foods you love, like ORGANIC FOOD BARS!

Remember: It’s what’s inside that counts!

Lifestyle

ORGANIC FOOD BAR is more than a bar, it’s a lifestyle.

Eating ORGANIC FOOD BARS will enhance your health and help redefine your relationship with food. Understanding how food affects our health and making smarter, more instinctual food choices for yourself and your family each day are two essential steps to living your best life.

We founded ORGANIC FOOD BAR to help you look, feel and live healthier. It’s that simple. It’s why we’ve created the world’s healthiest food bar. It’s why we form partnerships with worthy health organizations here and aboard. It’s why we provide “official energy support” at events each year. It’s why we present the RAISE THE BAR podcast to you each week. And, it’s why we’ve created this “Live the lifestyle” section of the website.

Each week, we will post a new column here with one goal: to help you live your best life. If you have a topic you’d like us to cover, just let us know!