Moderation is our friend

How many calories do we really need to thrive?

When I was in high school, my health teacher (assistant football coach) tested us on how many calories the human body needed to survive. 2,000 calories per day was invariably the answer that got the question right, but I couldn’t help but think that 2,000 seemed like an arbitrary number. How could that particular number be the same amount of calories every single person in the classroom, including our 40 year old “health teacher”, needed to function at their optimal state?

As I looked around the room at the various students, some small, some large, some male, some female, some in shape and some in a pear shape I had a revelation our health teacher was misinformed. 2,000 calories was not the correct answer, but that number was, and still is, giving people a false sense of sustenance. If your goal is to stay healthy, sometimes less is actually more.

Now that I’m a health and wellness teacher, I spend my time helping people to create the best possible template for their individual lives. Much to the chagrin of my food-loving clients, exercise alone will not manifest the results they seek. True change comes from the quantity, quality and frequency of the food we eat.

Please don’t misunderstand my point, exercise is a great way to burn calories and create a hard body, but if you aren’t eating well (and by well I mean small amounts of nutritionally dense foods throughout the course of the day) no matter how much time you spend exercising you won’t ever get as lean as you’d like. Self control is your own personal team of navy seals in the war on obesity.

Since science isn’t always ahead of the bell curve, I decided to go straight to one of my favorite sources of wisdom. I asked my grandmother how she has been able to stay so healthy and fit throughout the years.

Her simple, yet profound answer was, “I don’t eat too much, and I don’t drink too much; everything in moderation. I’ll have a small plate of food and maybe one drink, but never a second drink or a second plate, because I want to fit into the clothes I’ve had for years.”

My grandmother, “Gran” as we call her, is 89 years old and hasn’t been to the hospital, except for annual checkups and to deliver her babies, more than a few times in over 70 years. The only medication she takes is for high blood pressure…and a calcium pill. Keep in mind she had 14 children (in 14 years), has 42 grandchildren and over a dozen great grand children. If anyone should be overwhelmed and overworked it would be her. Can you imagine how many contaminated immune systems she comes into contact with on a weekly basis? Yet she never gets sick, has the energy to volunteer at the hospital (taking care of the elderly, many of whom are actually quite a bit older than she), always wears a smile, and suffers from not a single physical malady.

How could eating less make someone healthier?

It’s important to realize that food digestion is one of the top priorities for your body. In fact, 70% of your overall blood supply rushes to your digestive track each time we ring the dinner bell. That’s why it isn’t wise to swim after eating. Blood is summoned from all over your body to report to your stomach, which means there’s less blood to power your arms and legs as they paddle, or try to paddle…and down you go.

The same goes for work productivity after a large lunch, you might as well just take a nap at your desk, because the majority of the blood in your brain and extremities is now in your stomach working hard to digest whatever your copious lunch was. Too much food is sometimes worse than not enough food.

In defense of food, by Michael Pollan, the author makes a great point as to why moderation is the key to staying healthy.

“The human digestive tract has roughly as many neurons as the spinal column. We don’t yet know exactly what they are up to, but their existence suggests that much more is going on in digestion than simply the breakdown of foods into chemicals.”

What if the human digestive track does more than just break down all the food we consume, what if the digestive track is actually a highly specialized factory for making neurons that are essential for the repair and rejuvenation throughout the rest of our bodies? Perhaps we’d think twice about considering our intestines exclusively as simply a “food digester”.

At first glance, it would seem that eating more (quality) food would give our bodies more nourishment, which would empower us to be healthier and less disease prone. But the more I learn, and the more healthy people I interview, the more I believe that eating less is what’s best for us all. I believe our lower intestines have a higher calling, to create antigens that will actually build us up.

In regards to my health teacher’s original question on how many calories a person needs to survive, a better and more dynamic rule of thumb answer is:

10 times your goal body weight per day. So if your ideal body weight is 150 lbs, you should endeavor to eat no more than 1,500 calories per day if you are living a moderately active lifestyle. If you sit at a desk all day long, experiment with 9 x your ideal weight and if you are on your feet running around all day long 11 or 12 times your ideal weight may work for you.