Stress Management and Relaxation Techniques

A- No. People say that there are certain foods that take more calories to burn than they provide or that certain food items are going to cause more calories to be burned. It is a misconception and I can fully understand why people think the way they do. People don’t want to put the time and the energy or the money into losing weight. It is a lot of work. People want to lose weight and they know that some of the food they eat is unhealthy and they don’t want to put the time and energy into changing things. It takes planning and time. Instead of visiting the fast food restaurant on the corner on the way home you go to the produce aisle in the grocery store. It might take you a little more time and cost you a little more money but it’s worth it. You know the fast food restaurants super size everything. The artists and executives that design the ads know that our mentality is that the more food we can get for our buck then the better we are going to like it. It wasn’t so long ago that you would go in and order a pop and you would get 8 oz or 12 oz and now it’s not uncommon to get 24 or 36oz because they super size everything.

Q- Tell me are there any specific foods that burn fat?
A- I would say not. Basically, if you want to burn fat or lose or maintain your weight everything comes down to energy balance. It gets back to when you asked me to define a calorie and if you look at the macronutrients the carbohydrates, proteins and fat are assigned a certain level of energy and for example protein each gram of protein will contain four calories.

Q- Then what should we be counting? Should we be counting calories carbohydrates or fat?
A- Let me just go on a little further and we will come back to that. If you look at carbohydrates it is the same scenario. Each gram of carbohydrates contains 4 grams of fat. This is why fat is so important. It is almost twice that of protein and carbohydrates. So one gram of fat contains roughly 9 calories. So if you start talking about the Atkins diet, it depends on how you set up the study. You can get any variety of results you want. You know the Atkins diet is one of my favorites to pick on because the early studies showed that people lost more weight initially and overall the diet was more effective than other diets.
Well I believe that since then they have gone bankrupt. Some where along the line people were starting to figure out that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. What seems to be the case now when you start looking at the numbers is when you have enough people on the diets it becomes statistically significant. What it seems to boil down to is Atkins restricts your intake to mainly fat and protein and by eliminating carbohydrates from the diet it takes away so many of the food choices that are available.