A few years ago I had a trainer in Custom Body Fitness who taught me that many people can gain 52 pounds in a year without noticing. Her name is Sarah.
She said that many people can drink around 500 calories a day without noticing…
When you do the math, it makes sense. To gain a pound you just need to consume 500 calories extra a day. A week you have consumed 3,500 which is equal to 1 pound. A year has 52 weeks. Does it make sense now?
Here is when the theory of calories in and calories out make sense for many…
You have to keep in mind that not all calories are not equal. Think about 200 calories of broccoli which are full of nutrients against 200 calories of sugar that has no value for your body.
A regular human being needs only 1,200 calories to survive, but 1,200 calories won’t give you the energy in life to do extra stuff and to nourish your body. So trying to eat only 1,200 a day is close to impossible. Most healthy and regular meals have 500 calories. If you eat 3 meals a day, you go over the basic caloric need. In other words, 1,200 calories a day are not sustainable.
Here is where many people think that they can eat the wrong things and then burn them out…
Like I mentioned before, not all calories are equal to begin with. Many people are not aware that what they are drinking has a lot of calories. For example, a milkshake has around 880 calories. If you drink this as extra calories, then you need to run at least 2 miles and do vigorous weight lifting for an hour to only burn the milkshake.
If you only live on milkshakes, you are not getting the nutrients needed for your body and you can only drink two a day to not gain weight. And if you drink the extra milkshake, and you are not active, you are consuming more calories than you need and you start gaining pounds
Now, let’s put an example of an active person who needs around 2,000 calories a day…
This person can eat regular healthy meals without concern. However, if she starts drinking extra calories like many do, then she can start putting those extra 500 calories that will make her gain weight by the end of the year.
For example, if you drink a gatorade, protein shake, juice, flavored tea, coffee with sugar and a glass of wine during your day, you are already consuming 26 teaspoons of sugar. The daily recommendation is only 6. If you consume more than that, the rest of the sugar gets transformed into fat in your body and this amount of sugar is very close to 500 calories a day.
So to avoid comusing extra sugar and gaining pounds by the end of the year, Sarah recommends that you only drink water, black coffee and unsweetened tea...
In other words, do not drink your calories. Sarah did open my mind to see how many of us believe that we are not consuming extra calories when in reality there is a lot of sugar in many conventional drinks.