Beating Exertion Headaches
Beating Exertion Headaches
by Douglas Kalman MS, RD, FACN
In life we are often told to be more “”efficient”". If you are efficient you do not waste energy, time, effort or much of anything. Think about it, someone that is efficient at say investing, often has more money in the literal bank than they do on hand. This person knows how to save, what items to read in order to turn 10 shares into a windfall and when to sell in order to avoid major losses. If the investor were inefficient, he or she would go about making money in a haphazard way, probably spending more time reading Yahoo Finance rather than various prospectuses and thus loose opportunities to make bank.
In nutrition or weight management smart eating can easily lead to weight control. Let me explain my premise about the virtue of being inefficient as it relates to food. More to the point, if your body is efficient and metabolizing what you eat than it will quite easily be able to store the ingested calories. During times of famine and stress, our bodies became very adept at storing whatever food that was eaten. This stored food would be kept (if you will) as body fat. Fat yields more than two-times the amount of energy as either protein or carbohydrate. Thus, if the body did not know when the next meal, snack or whatever would be eaten, it would store the food preferably as fat. Unfortunately, we still do this. The stored fat could be released slowly over time for energy. More specifically, this fat was used for energy during the long times usually endured between meals. Be glad that we do not live in those times any more! Thus, an efficient “”metabolizer”" will preferentially store food as fat and this is left over from our genetic past. This, while this explanation is brief, you can clearly see that being efficient at how you metabolize food is not a good thing. Learning how to eat in an inefficient manner is one key towards weight control and obtaining whatever your weight related goals may be.
How to be Inefficient
Some nutritionists refer to inefficient eating as being another name for eating nutrient dense foods that are also low in calories. One such comparative example is a one-cup of non-fat yogurt (~100 calories full of protein, calcium, beneficial bacteria, etc.) versus one cup of apple juice (~100 calories full of very little vitamins, no protein and all fruit-sugar). So, clearly here the non-fat yogurt is the more nutrient dense food to eat. In fact, if you like these types of “”this or that”" food comparisons pick up “”Dr. Shapiro’s Picture Perfect Weight Loss Guide”" or “”Volumetrics”". We learn that one can plan a plate of food to meet the concept of eating nutrient dense, calorie poor – and the concept is an easy one. Making your plate of food a “”inefficient one”" is as simple as dividing any plate of food into thirds. Make one-third a protein-based food, the next third a whole grain carbohydrate and the remaining third a combination of vegetables, salad and fruit.
Enhanced Burning
When we eat food, it takes some energy for the body to digest, metabolize and absorb the nutrients from the food. Dietitians call this process the “”Thermic Effect of Feeding“” or “”TEF”". As you may recall, one gram of carbohydrate and protein both contain about four calories, while alcohol has a tad over seven and fat nine calories. Thus, eating a high-fat, high-alcohol diet is an easy way to gain fat weight while eating nutrient poor foods. Believe it or not, it does not take much energy for the body to metabolize fat (about three percent), whereas it takes a little more for it to digest carbohydrates (about five percent) and about double that for protein. From a percentage standpoint, protein based foods make the bodywork twice as hard to break them down and metabolize the nutrients within. This simply means that the TEF from protein is much higher than any other macronutrient. A study by Dr. Carol Johnston found that when a person ate a meal that was thirty percent protein as compared to 15%, it resulted in the person burning 100% greater amount of post-meal calories. In other words, eating a meal that was higher than the normal amount of calories from protein made the body expend more energy in the hours after the meal was eaten. Again, if the body was efficient at this process when eating a higher protein meal, it would not expend many calories in the digestion process.
Coupled Fat Loss
It is without doubt that higher protein smart carbohydrate diets lead to more expedient weight and fat loss than the traditional diets advocated by mainstream physicians and dietitians. These accelerated weight loss diets typically contain more than 20% of their calories from protein and no more than 40% or so of carbohydrate and are not high in saturated fat.
It is true that eating inefficiently can lead to sustained weight loss, however it may not be the most efficient way (no pun intended). One truly needs to have a balanced lifestyle of eating smartly and exercising to optimize how the body reacts to dieting inefficiently. To me, when a client wishes to achieve long-term weight control, he or she must include both aerobic exercise (such as jogging, stair-climbing, etc.) with weight training. Getting the body to burn calories through exercise and to carry over the extra calories burning by eating inefficiently will spell an easy way to keep one’s weight in check and to obtain a toned body.
An Inefficient Wrap
No, I am not going to provide you with a recipe or a plethora of example tasty inefficient meals (or wraps). Instead, I am going to leave you with some thoughts to ponder – if you could make a few simple changes to your eating lifestyle that will have an immediate impact on how you feel and look, would you do it? I would and the first step is to make sure that all of your meals contain balanced nutrition of which you ensure the protein portion to be in-between 20 to 30%. Next, learn to incorporate simple exercise into your daily life and lastly, do not neglect your emotional self – after all you have to be your own support system while also surrounding yourself with winners.
