Last week, I did a short series on skinny fatness and scale weight obsession. Since those articles were fairly well received and spawned quite a few email questions, I’ve decided to explain another major reason diets fail: calorie blindness.
Calorie blindness is the condition where people exclusively base their weight loss efforts on a strict accounting of the number of calories they consume compared to the number of calories they burn through exercise.
You can easily spot someone who is calorie blind by their exclamations of “I only eat ___ amount of calories and whenever I exercise I burn at least ____ calories. I should be losing weight but the scale never moves! What am I doing wrong?”
What is wrong is that these individuals are listening to the countless fitness experts, doctors and dietitians who base the bulk of their diet advice around two fundamental constructs of fat loss math:
* 1 lbs of fat = 3500 kcal
* calories in = calories out
As the theory goes, as long as you create a 3500 kcal deficit each week, you will lose 1 lbs of fat. Yet ask anyone who has tried this approach how effective it is… to put it kindly: not very.
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There’s no disputing that eating more green vegetables is beneficial for weight loss. Broccoli, spinach, peppers, kale, romaine lettuce, etc all provide tons of high quality nutrition for a minimal caloric impact.
That being said, they aren’t the only green products that contribute to a great physique. Today I’m going to spotlight another great “green” product to boost your body transformation efforts: green tea.
What is tea?
Although many beverages are marketed as tea, most are actually “herbal” teas or tisanes. Real tea must come from the Camelia Sinesis plant. This means that only white, green, oolong and black teas are actually beverages that can call themselves tea.
Since all the teas come from the same plant, what makes them have different health properties and taste?
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“To booze or not to booze, that is the question”.
I get asked quite often, “What is the best alcoholic beverage to have?” This is quickly followed up by, “I know alcohol isn’t good for you, but if I was going to drink…”
Since most people are approaching this question from the perspective of “which drink will get me buzzed but cause the least damage to my waistline”, I tend to offer the following solution, go with either:
1. Distilled spirits (i.e. vodka, rum, gin, etc) mixed with ice or water.
2. Wine, with red being preferable to white.
Simple enough, no?
Obviously there is a lot more going on behind the scenes, so if you actually want to learn about what alcohol does to your metabolism, read on.
