You Are What You Eat
I think Counting-Calories(-Plus-a-lil'-of-Exercise) is the least cruel way to lose weight. It's Mathematics. Calories in, calories out = the balance. No suffocating cigarette, no pills, no creepy-smelling jamu, no starvation, no knife and no personal trainer with a whip yelling at you six hours a day (unless you like whips, of course).
I read that the trick with exercise is to split it into at least two sessions in a day to cheat our body into processing calories continuously. With this information, for five seconds, I felt like I knew the way around the system already.
So let's say we need 1,500kcal/day to maintain our current weight (depending on gender, age, height, weight, activity level). We may lose one pound in a week if we reduce our intake to 1,000/day. Though I heard with 1,000/day, we may risk not getting enough nutrition. But if we still eat junk at 2,000, don't bother.
There are tons of websites that can tell us how many calories a cheeseburger or an apple has, for example, but it's hard to find one for our local food. I saw below in an old CLEO article a while ago, so I'm putting the list here since I kept losing the paper I jotted it down on.
So my craving for Tim Tam (if I calculate it correctly) will cost me 539kcal. That leaves me with perhaps only a couple pieces of banana and my one precious cup of coffee if I want to go on 1,000kcal/day -- since whatever exercise that I'll be doing, if it can be called exercise at all, may only burn about 100kcal.
(Calm down, I'm not going on 1,000kcal/day.)
We do burn most calories through our body's basic functions like digesting food and breathing, but 30 minutes of running may only burn about 185kcal.
185.
That's less than 1/4 of that nasi lemak.
Maybe we should breathe more quickly.
I read that the trick with exercise is to split it into at least two sessions in a day to cheat our body into processing calories continuously. With this information, for five seconds, I felt like I knew the way around the system already.
So let's say we need 1,500kcal/day to maintain our current weight (depending on gender, age, height, weight, activity level). We may lose one pound in a week if we reduce our intake to 1,000/day. Though I heard with 1,000/day, we may risk not getting enough nutrition. But if we still eat junk at 2,000, don't bother.
There are tons of websites that can tell us how many calories a cheeseburger or an apple has, for example, but it's hard to find one for our local food. I saw below in an old CLEO article a while ago, so I'm putting the list here since I kept losing the paper I jotted it down on.
- Curry laksa (+ shredded chicken, prawn, veggies, tofu and sambal) = 529
- Mixed rice (+ fried chicken, beef and veggies) = 954
- Mee goreng (+ chicken pieces, egg, veggies and tofu) = 660
- Nasi lemak (+ beef rendang, egg, sambal and cucumber) = 833
So my craving for Tim Tam (if I calculate it correctly) will cost me 539kcal. That leaves me with perhaps only a couple pieces of banana and my one precious cup of coffee if I want to go on 1,000kcal/day -- since whatever exercise that I'll be doing, if it can be called exercise at all, may only burn about 100kcal.
(Calm down, I'm not going on 1,000kcal/day.)
We do burn most calories through our body's basic functions like digesting food and breathing, but 30 minutes of running may only burn about 185kcal.
185.
That's less than 1/4 of that nasi lemak.
Maybe we should breathe more quickly.
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