Weight loss (facts and fiction) on HWN BLOGS

There is so much to talk about and I’ll also try to weigh in on some facts and fiction too.

I have a lot of people who write in and tell me that they don’t know why they add weight because they hardly eat! Now, I have never seen anyone who stays off food and actually gains weight. That would be an interesting study! For this group, the main problem is what is actually eaten when they do eat. Sometimes, people tell me, the only thing I’ve eaten all day is biscuits and a bottle of soft drink. The thing about biscuits and soft drinks is that they contain empty calories which give you a quick feeling of fullness, quickly followed by more hunger pangs and then you find yourself reaching for more biscuits. If however, you were to eat a complex carbohydrate or even fruits, they keep you feeling fuller for longer and so you avoid the temptation to eat more.

Some people also write in to ask me about slimming pills or green tea or any of those wonder drugs that make you shed weight on ‘seconds’ and instruct you never to eat of specific classes of foods. Let us use green tea as an example. Green tea is great and studies have shown that it speeds up metabolism and so helps you break down all the food you have taken in, faster. However, weight gain is a function of what you’ve taken in and what you have taken out. If you take in 3000 calories and you’re able to burn only 500 calories, then clearly, there is some excess that will get converted to fat et al. Remember that some of our snack like some burgers pack as much as 500 to 600 calories in one serving and that’s just one meal (or maybe even snack ) with 3 more meals and perhaps another snack to account for. And so, if you are loading your system with more food than you need, then even the purest of green teas is going to have a hard time keeping up with your metabolism…there’s just too much
work to do what with all that food! .

Remember that generally, women are entitled to 2000 calories intake in a day and men are entitled to 2500.

HWN, Dr Oyeyemi Olusegun Adeniyi.