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Counting Thanksgiving Calories

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The 2011 holiday season is upon us, so it’s time to remind ourselves how those holiday feasts can really pack on the pounds if your aren’t paying attention. Sure the holiday season is a time to indulge, so go ahead and treat yourself. But if you do it with the right intention, you’ll be able to enjoy the festivities and still feel good about yourself.

First, remember that the body works on a simple formula: energy in minus energy out equals energy stored. Or put another way: food eaten – activity = fat stored. Now, fat can either be stored or lost depending on the balance of the other side of the equation. If activity exceeds food eaten, there will be a negative result in the fat stored, or a net fat loss. Let’s look at some real numbers, but first let’s better understand what the activity part of the equation really means.

By “activity”, I’m referring to the body’s Total Metabolic Rate (TMR). The TMR is the sum of the Basil Metabolic Rate (BMR), plus exercise and all physical activity, plus the energy used in digesting food, plus the energy used to adjust to external temperature. For most people the TMR for women is around 2000 calories per day and for men is about 2500 calories per day. (Calculate your personal TMR here) So basically, if you consume more food calories than your TMR in a day, you’ll start storing fat. If you consume fewer food calories than your TMR in a day, you’ll start losing fat.

Remember, that a pound of fat is about 3500 calories. That’s way more than most people’s daily TMR and part of the reason that fat loss takes time. However, just 100 extra calories a day is enough to add a pound of fat by the end of a month! Now, granted body metabolism is a bit more complicated than I’m illustrating here, but I hope you get the idea, especially when faced with the variety of holiday food choice ahead of you over the next month.

My suggestion: instead of focusing only on one meal, like Thanksgiving, look at your total caloric intake and total metabolic rate over the course of a week. This gives you much more flexibility to make adjustments on either side of the minus sign. That way you can increase your weekly physical activity to compensate for a big Thanksgiving meal.

Just for fun, here’s a neat little holiday calorie counter to help illustrate the balance between calories in and calories out. Enjoy it, and enjoy your holiday season with lots of festivities and lots of fun physical activity to balance your equation.

About Paul Kulpinski, LMT

Paul Kulpinski is a licensed massage therapist, holistic wellness educator and co-founder of Mountain Waves Healing Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona. Information contained in this blog should not be taken as medical advice. Readers are advised to validate the information presented here with other sources including your personal physician for information specific to you.

Avoiding the New Year’s Day Weight Loss Resolution

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As I write this we are only one week into the holiday season of feasts, office parties, and sugar plum treats and just 31 days away from the New Year and the popular resolution to lose some weight. Maybe this year could be different. Maybe this year, we could avoid adding the pounds during the next 31 days that we will resolve to remove 32 days from now.

First, let’s face some facts. When we use the term weight as in “I’ve gained 15 pounds just from Thanksgiving” or “I need to lose some weight from all those holiday parties,” what we’re really talking about is fat. We make the mistake of substituting our fat gain with the notion of weight gain. Granted, if you add fat to your body, you will gain some weight. But if we are only focused on weight, we are missing the mark.

Fat is by design the most efficient mechanism for our body to store energy. It is so efficient that fat can hold 2.25 times the number of calories (energy) per pound than either carbohydrate or protein. That’s why the human body evolved the ability to efficiently store energy in this very portable structure. Look at it this way, 1 pound of fat contains 3500 calories. That’s easily a two day’s supply of energy in just one pound!

In a balanced diet, we take in calories from three sources: protein (lean meat, beans, eggs, dairy, soy), fat (animal, plant, nut), carbohydrate (vegetables, fruits, grains, sugar and everything else that isn’t protein or fat). The body burns up the calories from each of these food sources in two ways:

Basic Body Function (Basil Metabolism): breathing, heart and circulatory function, glandular activity, cellular activity, digesting food, regulating body temperature and such.
Physical Activity: walking, climbing stairs, dusting, mopping, bicycling, swimming, rugby playing, climbing Mt. Everest, and so on.

You’ll notice that you don’t have much control over your basil metabolism. These functions are pretty automatic. What you do have control over however are your voluntary physical activities. These are activities that use skeletal muscle to initiate the physical movement. The only difference is the type and intensity of the physical activity you choose. You are free to make your physical activity housecleaning or climbing Mt. Everest, yet the Himalayan trek will burn up a whole lot more calories than applying the floor wax even though they both are using many of the same muscles.

So if you are only mopping the kitchen, but eating like your on the summit team for Everest, you’ll be eating more calories than your muscles need. Since the body never lets a good calorie go to waste, it automatically puts it around your waist for future use. After all, your body never knows when your mind might actually force it to attempt a summit of Everest. That’s how we become over-fat and during the holidays we are at the greatest risk for this pattern.

During the month of December, the average person will add about 1-2 pounds of fat. That’s equivalent to eating an extra 225 calories per day that isn’t burned off by physical activity.

The reason is all of those holiday parties, feasts and snacks provide enough calories to climb mountains, while at the same time we are slowly decreasing our physical activity (if we were active at all). Our physical activity decreases for a variety of reasons, like less daylight, colder temperatures, and less time in general because we are attending all of those holiday parties. So it’s not just about too many calories, it’s also about less activity which allows our muscles to weaken and atrophy which reduces their ability to burn calories. Do you see the vicious cycle?

So now, more than at any other time of the year, it’s critical to keep up your exercise routine to maintain the muscle mass that will burn the calories you eat. If you’ve already begun to lighten your workout, don’t fret, just get back onto the routine before you get any further into the holiday season.

Secondly, don’t obsess about all of the temptations. Go ahead and indulge a bit and don’t deny yourself. Do keep it in moderation however. Ask yourself before you eat: “am I hungry?” If you are, what do you want to spend your calories on? Choose well and you’ll feel good about what you are eating and you’ll be honoring your body without overloading it with excess energy that will have to be stored for tomorrow.

By maintaining or even increasing your physical activity now, you’ll be less likely to add the additional fat that prompts the New Year’s weight loss resolution. More on that one next month.

Happy Holidays!

Resources:

Covert Baily Fitness

Boost Your Metabolism with Weight Lifting

Why Food Turns into Body Fat

The Confusing Calorie

How Calories Work

About Paul Kulpinski, LMT

The Gift of Frankincense

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As if the social and economic stress of 2009 isn’t enough, here we are in the 11 hour of the most stressful time of the year: Christmas. Got to get the gifts in the mail on time so they make it there by the 25th. Got to send the cards out and make sure that we include everyone who sent us a card this year too. Got to make the cookies for the office. Got to attend all those holiday parties. Don’t forget the decorations and the lights! It’s enough to drive you insane – or at the very least put unnecessary stress on your body.

Stress is the reaction of the body to a perceived threat or expected outcome. I’ve placed emphasis on the words perceived and expected, because these are the operational words in stress. To the degree that we perceive something to be a threat or expect something to turn out poorly, our stress will rise proportionally. If Aunt Mathilda doesn’t receive her Christmas card on time, we will perceive ourselves as not living up to her expectations which may create tension in the family relationship which will make us feel inadequate…. and so forth.

The key is to monitor what we perceive and what we expect. We need to be careful here because perceiving something to be a threat requires us to anticipate a future possibility, just as expecting a certain outcome is a projection into what is only a possible outcome. When we find ourselves in this future, anticipatory consciousness by definition we are not present in the moment. If you are fearing the future, you can’t be in the present. The paradox is that our ability to monitor our perceptions and expectations exists only in the present moment. It’s staying in the moment, that’s the trick.

Enter the three wise men. Legend has it that one of the gifts of the magi was frankincense. Frankincense is an aromatic resin produced from the sap of the Boswellia tree and was a prized herbal remedy during the time of Jesus, so it’s no surprise it was brought as a gift, but why. Frankincense (as is Myrrh, another of the gifts) is an anti-inflammatory. It is particularly useful in reducing inflammation of the lungs and bronchial tubes thereby allowing a deeper breath and helping a person under stress to relax. The Mayo Clinic even today lists frankincense as an effective herbal remedy in treating asthma. So it might have been helpful in aiding a new-born or even the mother in breathing after delivery.

New research has also verified the psychoactive properties of frankincense, which may have been helpful in calming and anxious mother and reduce the effects of postpartum depression or calming a baby suffering from colic. In a 2008 study published in the on-line Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem found that a constituent of frankincense called incensole acetate activated channels in the brain that lowers anxiety and creates anti-depressive behavior.

So how can all of this help you with your holiday stress? Frankincense is available in modern times as resin nuggets and as essential oil which is distilled from steaming the resin. Inhaling the smoke from the burning resin or the aroma from the essential oil will deepen the breath, open the lungs and calm the nervous system. Inhaling the sweet, balsamic aroma of frankincense can produce a meditative state from which you can focus yourself in the present moment and objectively monitor your perceptions of possible threats and expectations about the outcomes of your choices. When you can do that, stress is much more manageable.