When it comes right down to it, good nutrition is not only WHAT you eat, but also HOW MUCH you eat. You can be eating healthy food but if you consume more calories than you burn every day, you still will end up having to store the excess in fat – and who wants that?
How much
How do I figure out how much is too much food? The actual numbers may be different for you than they are for me, simply because what calories your body needs every day depend on your age, sex, build, and activity level. A 25 year old male doing construction work all day needs more calories than a 65 year old female who is sedentary. Fortunately websites are available online that can help you calculate how many calories you should be consuming for your weight loss or weight maintenance goals. One such site is www.dietitian.com Once you get to their home page, click on the “Healthy Body Calculator” in the upper left corner. It will ask you some questions and then tell you the numbers for total amounts of fats, proteins and carbohydrates and calories you should be eating every day. It also gives you a range in which your healthy weight should fall. Another calculator is available on the Department of Agriculture site www.choosemyplate.gov , which also has links to useful nutritional information. This site provides a food calculator so that you can look up the calories and nutrients of a given food (see the box of links in the upper right corner of their home page: “look up a food”). The old food pyramid has been replaced by this nifty plate symbol. By the diagram, you see that half your plate should be occupied with fruits and vegetables. General guidelines say your protein (meat) portion should be about the size of a deck of cards and the grains portion should be about the size of a tennis ball.
Reading Nutrition Labels
Once you determine your ideal daily caloric intake, you can calculate how much falls into the different food groups (or let the dietitian.com website do that for you). Current recommendations say that 30% of your calories should come from fat, 20% from protein and 50% from carbohydrates. For example, someone eating 2000 calorie/day would have the following recommendations, outlined in the order of how they appear on a food label:
Total Fat 65 g
Saturated Fat 20 g
Cholesterol 300 mg
Sodium 2300 mg
Potassium 4700 mg
Total Carbohydrate 300 mg
Fiber 25 mg
Protein 50 mg
These numbers should give you a starting place for looking at food labels and making healthy choices. If you know your total fat allotment for the day is somewhere less than 65 grams, you may not want to go out and order a Hardees Monster Thickburger that has 95 grams of fat (and 3020 calories – whoa baby!)
One of the shortfalls of the current food labels is that it doesn’t tell you how much of the carbohydrate total is from added sugars versus sugars naturally occurring in the food (like lactose in milk and fructose in fruits). If you eat 300 grams of carbohydrate each day, then up to 30 grams could come from added sugars, but there is no way to tell that from the labels. Learn to look for the code words for these kinds of sugars in the ingredients list: sucrose, sugar, white sugar, brown sugar, confectioner’s sugar, corn syrup, dextrin, honey, invert sugar, maple syrup, raw sugar, beet sugar, cane sugar, corn sweeteners, evaporated cane juice, high fructose corn syrup, malt, and molasses.
As a general guide, if you subtract the “sugar” grams listed from the "total carbohydrates" grams on the label, it will tell you how many grams of the more nutritious kind of carbohydrate is in the food. Four grams of sugar equals one teaspoon, so you can visualize the quantity of sugar in it when you read grams of sugar on the label. Avoid products with “enriched flour”, “bleached flour”, or “refined flour” in the ingredients list. Instead look for 100% whole wheat, unless of course you are gluten intolerant which is a whole separate issue . . .
Also avoid buying foods that have any “trans fat” listed in the food label. Pick those with low amounts of “saturated fat”. The “calories from fat” line tells you how many of the calories in each serving are from fat. Use this and the "total Fat" line below to decide if the food gets a lot of its calories from fat. If it does, you'll want to eat it sparingly or not at all.
Be mindful of how much the label declares to be “one serving”. Oftentimes this is an unrealistic amount for a human being, but listing smaller serving sizes also allows them to list smaller amounts for the negative ingredients you may be looking at on the label. Be sure to double or triple all the quantities listed on the label if you actually are going to be eating twice or triple what is listed as “one serving”.
If this all seems rather confusing to you, just remember that food labels are a product of the federal government and, well, it's confusing. Some better and more thorough explanations can be found online by Googling "How to Read Nutrition Labels".
If this all seems rather confusing to you, just remember that food labels are a product of the federal government and, well, it's confusing. Some better and more thorough explanations can be found online by Googling "How to Read Nutrition Labels".
