Exercise, Diet and Weight Loss
When I was a teen my mom took me and my sister to Weight Watchers. Like many kids, we started to get a tad chubby and my mom wanted to cut that at the pass. My mom was an obese child and teen. She lost weight when she got Cholera and was very sick. So perhaps we have a better proclivity to gaining weight. In other words, we may have somewhat of a genetic predisposition. However, this does not mean I am incapable of losing weight. Like my mother, I now have, and now maintain a significant weight loss.
When we attended meetings we were introduced to energy balance. It is important in the way the diet industry works. It is also eminently easy to understand, even if in my mind it’s mostly wrong.
CICO stands for Calories In, Calories Out, and essentially is all about calorie counting, so not exactly revolutionary.
The idea is that by counting your energy intake and expenditure, you can keep yourself in a calorie deficit and thus lose weight.
It makes a lot of sense. Eat less, move more, you too can lose weight. At the time the food plan did not include all the processed food that it does today. Nor did it have points. It had some interesting requirements. The first was liver, which is rich in B Complex and iron. We were supposed to eat it once a week. I learned to loathe liver day. That said, I tried it recently, and will go into my rotation.
Well-prepared chicken liver is delicious.
We were also required to have fish twice a week. It is low in calories and packed with protein. We were supposed to weigh everything and we stayed away from things like nuts. It had no free foods. We literally paid attention to every bite. And we were weighted every week. Of course, once we reached a plateau and stalled, our commitment to the program came into question.
Never mind plateaus are normal.
Mind you these days there are a lot of apps you can use to log what you eat, when, how often. Some allow you to track macros as well. If you decide to get any of these apps, make sure you can track macros. It will make sense later in the piece.
This is the first problem with CICO, and the diet industry, as well as medical providers that have embraced it. The dieter is always at fault. It’s a lack…