Let's talk Nutrition

Eating...everyone loves to eat. It's an essential part of our life and we have to do it to survive. But you must know that you can literally ruin this life if you are always eating bad.

Ask yourself : do you truly know what you are eating? You often hear talking about calories but do you know exactly how many calories you must eat each day? I think I'll clarify this right now. The exact number is never the same for anyone since it depends on the age, height, weight as well as the frequency and the intensity of physical activities. But usually, the average total count per day for a normal person is around 2000 calories. If you eat more calories than you need in a day, you will gain weight. If you eat less calories than what you need then you will loose weight. It's simple and logical!

If you are really active physically and have a big muscle mass or want to gain weight (muscles) then you will have to eat more, around 2500 up to 3000 calories. But if you want to loose weight then you should eat around 1200 to 1800 calories a day. One very important thing is that you should never eat less than 1200 calories a day, even if you want to loose weight. Why? Because when you eat less than those 1200 calories your body becomes in "panic mode". Your body will think that you crashed on a desert island and don't have enough food available to you. So what will it do? It will begin to store fat in your body so that you could "survive" as long as possible. And when you want to loose weight, you usually already have enough fat to loose so you really don't want to create more, especially by not eating enough.

So always check what you eat. This 1200 calories minimum "rule" is not an excuse for you to eat bad stuff just to reach your count. If you realize at the end of the day that you have eaten about only 900 calories, don't plunge into the cookie jar or grab yourself a giant chocolate bar. This would ruin all your efforts! Eat fruits and vegetables or whole grain cereals rich in fibers.

Now you probably will ask me how can you know how many calories you are eating? I will show you here an example of a random nutrition facts label (that you should always take time to check by the way) :


First, always take a look at the portion size. Here it's one bowl or 300g. Let's say you are looking at the nutrition facts for cookies and the portion size is set to 2 cookies, but you are always eating 4, then obviously you will have to double all the numbers you are seeing on the label to know how much you are truly eating. Next you see the total number of calories. That's your important number.

Another way to calculate calories is with the number of grams of fat, carbohydrates and proteins. Here are the facts :
1 gram of carbohydrate = 4 calories
1 gram of protein = 4 calories
1 gram of fat = 9 calories.

You see that each gram of fat as more than twice the amount of calories than carbs and proteins! That's why it so important to avoid foods that have a huge amount of fat. They make your total calorie count go up at lightning speed!

Let's just validate those number with our example above :
53g of carbs x 4 = 212.
19g of fats x 9 = 171.
15g of proteins x 4 = 60.

212 + 171 + 60 = 443 Bingo!

I will talk more about the different types of fats, carbs and proteins in a future post. Stay tuned!