Raising Healthy Parents by Sid Garza-Hillman

Author:Sid Garza-Hillman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cameron + Company
Published: 2018-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

A REFRESHING LOOK AT CALORIC CONCENTRATION

Dang. Still doesn’t help.

Caloric concentration is one of my most important areas of teaching for anyone interested in healthy eating. The good news is that the light-box-to-heavy-box spectrum helps make sense of it ever so perfectly.

So, what is caloric concentration?

While our focus needs to be more on the gift inside the box and less on the wrapping paper, fact is, our bodies do run off the wrapping paper (cuz it’s the gas). What this means is that the health of anyone’s diet is determined by the proportion of heavy-box to light-/empty-box calories. Unfortunately, most people look at food incorrectly. They assess food by what it looks like on the plate, how much size it takes up.

Incidentally, what comes next will make portion control look as crazy as it actually is.

Confused? Here comes the clarity . . .

Your body doesn’t care about the portion size or shape of what you eat. It just needs fuel to do its job, and it likes it best when it gets just the right amount (and ideally with the healthy stuff, too)—not too much, and not too little. The Goldilocks of caloric intake.

Looking at food through the lens of caloric concentration makes its size and shape irrelevant. Here’s why: Compare 120 calories of olive oil (one tablespoon) to 120 calories of lettuce (about two and a half heads of lettuce). Same calories, but couldn’t look more different on a plate. So, if you have even 50 calories of lettuce on your plate (about a head of lettuce—substantially more than most have in a salad) and drizzle a couple of tablespoons of olive oil on it (picture a couple of tablespoons—it could fit in the palm of your hand), things aren’t what they seem. While the food looks like a big plate of lettuce and a tiny bit of olive oil, calorically, it is the opposite: a tiny bit of lettuce with a ton of olive oil on it. Again, calorically.

Get it? Only 50 calories of lettuce, and 240 calories of olive oil. Way more light-box than heavy-box.

Healthy eating ain’t about what the food looks like, but about where most of the calories you eat come from.

Kind of twists your noodle a little, no?

Fine, as long as your noodle is whole grain.

Ever heard someone say they eat a lot of fruit because they have half a banana and a handful of blueberries on their oatmeal? Calorically, they’re not eating much fruit (about 60 calories), especially in proportion to an average adult’s daily caloric intake (2,000 calories). On the other hand, the shake I drink that I make with ten bananas, two cups of frozen berries, and water? That’s about 1,100–1,200 calories of fruit. That is a lot of fruit.

If you’re still thinking, man, that’s a lot of sugar. It is. Awesome sugar. Comes with the stuff that makes my body run well.

It might surprise you that a Big Mac, a six-piece order of Chicken McNuggets, large fries, large coke (or as

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