What makes someone gain weight? Is it eating a large quantity of food, is it eating fatty food? Or is it a combination of how big our portions are, how much fat or carbs are in our meal, is it even what we drink with our food?
Dr. Barbara J. Rolls, a professor of behavioral health at Pennsylvania State, gave interesting and groundbreaking information at a conference on the worldwide obesity epidemic.
“Calories count, no matter what you read in the press,” she stated. Yes, it really is that easy. The culprit of weight gain is not the amount of food, but really how many calories are in the meal.
A calorie is a unit of energy stored in food. Dr. Rolls explains that the body will use every calorie that it is given. It will either use it to give you the energy to complete tasks such as walking or moving around, or it will store it as body fat. People lose fat then, by eating foods with fewer calories.
Fats, carbohydrates, and oils still have an impact on the calories one is taking in. But people who strictly don’t eat fatty foods or carbs aren’t necessarily decreasing their caloric intake.
People will regularly eat the same volume of food at each meal. The real difference is how many calories are packed into that specific volume of food. The trick to weight loss is keeping the same volume of food (so then your stomach is satisfied), but making sure that the calorie density, also called energy density of food, is low.
How can this be done? One ingredient adds food volume while having zero calories. If you can’t guess by now, it’s water! Foods that contain a large quantity of water help the stomach stay satisfied while keeping calorie intake low, more specifically, foods like fruits and vegetables.
“People given the message to eat more fruits and vegetables lost significantly more weight than those told to eat less fat,” comments Dr. Rolls. Meaning that eating less fat won’t help as much as eating foods with a high concentration of water.
You may ask, “So should I start stuffing myself with any fruit/vegetable thing I can find?” Well, let’s not get to ahead of ourselves. Knowing which fruits and vegetables have the least energy density is the key to losing weight.
Eating one cup of raisins is the equivalent to eating three cups of grapes. Why? While both contain the same calories, one has more water density than the other. Think about it, anything dried has no water, therefore it won’t fill you up as fast and thus you have to eat more of it.
The difference between guacamole and avocado is also a good example. Guacamole contains traces of fat, giving it 64 more calories than one whole California Avocado.
One cup of peaches is 42 calories. One cup of peaches in syrup is 194 calories. Big difference right? A fresh peach would contain more water than a preserved peach in syrup. An alternative would be a cup of peach in juice, which contains around 110 calories.
Also the difference in sweetened fruits versus unsweetened fruits could be up to 100 calories! A baked potato is 145 calories while a large order of McDonald’s French fries contain 500 calories.
The lesson to be taken away is to pay attention to the calories on labels. The fewer calories and the more volume, the healthier it will be. The secret is that water plays a huge role in the ratio of energy density and the space it takes up in your stomach. If you eat foods with high energy density, the body has to do something with it. But even when something clearly looks like the healthy meal to have, it may not be. Be sure and check the label.
