Last week’s article discussed good fat vs. bad fat. As a review, bad fat is visceral fat, which is the fat surrounding the organs in the abdomen. It’s associated with premature illness development from cancer to heart disease. I suspect that most readers have a little too much bad fat and would like to lose it. But how, and how do you know what to eat?
A proper diet is unfortunately complicated and difficult to follow. So I’ll try to make it a little easier.
First, you need to know your estimated daily calorie needs to maintain, gain, or lose weight. The easiest rule of thumb is to multiply your body weight by 15. For example, if you weigh 150 pounds, that is 150 x 15 = 2,250 calories to maintain weight. A more accurate method is to use a calorie calculator found at this link, which factors in your age, sex, height, weight, and activity to calculate your ideal caloric needs. To lose fat, you need to cut back by 3,500 calories per pound of desired weight loss. The math shows that avoiding 500 calories a day for one week will result in about one pound of weight loss per week. Fortunately, early in a diet, the bad fat tends to be lost quicker.
Now that you know how to count calories, you need to balance calories and carbs with fiber, which is a carbohydrate, to make sure you have adequate bowel movements (those who suffer from constipation know how important that is). To get adequate fiber in your diet, you need to read the food label.
When reading a food label, focus on four main categories: total calories, carbohydrates, protein, and fat content. The protein requirement is straightforward, which is 1/2 to 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. Listed under the carbohydrate section are the grams of fiber present. To ensure your necessary fiber intake, you need 1 gram of fiber per 50 calories. As an example, black beans have 120 calories per half-cup serving. Of that, it has 5 g of fiber, which passes the 50 calories to 1 gram of fiber ratio and makes for a happy gut!
Dietary fat intake is a bit more complicated, and I’ll try to simplify that for you next week.
Dr. Charlie Barnett contributes to KnoxTNToday, where he writes the weekly column DocTalk, sharing his expertise in health and wellness. He is currently in private practice, focusing on longevity and precision medicine at NovaTheros.
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