Savvy Eating, 1/8/20: Calculate your Daily Calorie Needs and Smart BMI, Legumes and Heart Health, Plant-based vs. Vegan, Bolusing Skills

The holidays, with all the yummy foods and treats, are over. I’m not a big believer in New Year’s Resolutions. But if you are ready to reevaluate your eating habits and reign in the December eating excursions, you might want to figure out what you really need to eat.

How to Calculate your Daily Calorie Needs was written by Rachel Walsh for Medium/Lifestyle, 14 November 2019. Here’s a step-by-step formula to determine how much you should be eating to reach your fitness goals.

If you want to have a fit and healthy body, it starts with loving yourself first. Love yourself where you’re at and everything will start to fall into place. Not overnight but gradually with consistent and intentional effort. Before we can understand what we should be eating, we need to know how much we should be eating. There’s formulas for that.

Find your Basal Metabolic Rate

- - Women:BMR = 655 + (4.35 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches)-(4.7 x age in years)
  - Men:BMR = 66 + (6.23 x weight in pounds) + (12.7 x height in inches)-(6.8 x age in years)

Find your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (using the Harris Benedict equation)

1. 1. Sedentary (little or no exercise) : TDEE= BMR x 1.2
  2. Lightly active (exercise 1–3 days/week) : TDEE = BMR x 1.375
  3. Moderatetely active (exercise 3–5 days/week) : TDEE = BMR x 1.55
  4. Very active ( exercise 6–7 days a week) : TDEE = BMR x 1.725
  5. Extremely active (elite level athlete/very active+physical job) : TDEE = BMR x 1.9

How much less to eat? There are 3,500 calories in 1 lb of fat. It is considered safe by modern medical standards to lose 1–2 lbs of fat per week. To lose 10lbs in the next 2 months, one needs to lose 1.25lbs of fat per week to meet the goal.

Cracking the Code to Counting Calories: Calories aren’t everything. You have to make sure you are eating appropriate amounts of carbs, fats, and especially proteins if you want to get the best body composition results.

Be Flexible: Having fitness goals is great and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. But never forget that life is meant to be lived. Don’t let yourself be consumed by every single calorie and macronutrient.

Read more:

Peas, Beans, and Heart Health was written by Michael Hunter, MD for Medium/Food, 27 November 2019.

Publishing in Advances in Nutrition, Effie Viguiliouk and colleagues provide some insights regarding the relationship of legume consumption and health.

Dietary pulses, the edible dried seeds of legumes (that is, chickpeas, lentils, beans, and peas) that are high in fiber, plant protein, and various micronutrients and low in fat and glycemic index (GI) have been increasingly recognized for their benefits in the prevention and management of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) across various chronic disease guidelines.

The American Heart Association, Canadian Cardiovascular Society, and European Society for Cardiology all encourage dietary patterns that emphasize intake of legumes (which include dietary pulses, soybeans, peanuts, fresh peas, and fresh beans) for lowering “bad” LDL cholesterol and blood pressure, dietary pulses for lowering LDL cholesterol, and legumes for lowering LDL cholesterol and improving the overall lipoprotein profile, respectively.

According to the researchers, Americans eat less than one serving of legumes per day, on average. Simply adding more beans to our plates could be a powerful tool in fighting heart disease and bringing down blood pressure. The context? In the United States, one in four deaths relate to cardiovascular disease. Even if we only effect a small change in risk among the population, there might be a significant effect at the population level.

Read more: Peas, Beans, and Heart Health

It’s Called ‘Plant-Based,’ Look It Up was published by Ethan Varian for The New York Times, 28 December 2019. There’s a difference between disavowing all animal byproducts and simply trying to eat less meat.

The terms “vegan” and “plant-based” are often used interchangeably, but there’s a growing effort to define just what it means to follow a plant-based lifestyle. According to Brian Wendel, the founder of the “plant-based living” website Forks Over Knives, going plant-based is often “for people who are very enthusiastic about the health angle” of eating mainly whole plant foods.

Reynolde Jordan, who runs a food blog called Plant-Based Vibe in Memphis, said it’s also a way to distance oneself from the rigid ideology of veganism, which calls for abstaining from animal products of all kinds. “When you classify yourself as vegan, you’re now being watched,” said Mr. Jordan, who posts vegan recipes for dishes such as Cajun seaweed gumbo and raw beet balls along with photos of the vegetarian meals he orders on trips. “In my DMs, I’d get all these messages from activists for protests. I’m just not that guy — I did this for the purpose of eating better.”

Bolus Dosing Skills that you Didn’t Learn in the Doctor’s Office is a great resource by Nicole Rubenstein for InsulinNation.com, 26 March 2019.

Complex foods mix fats, proteins and carbs and require advanced carb counting and insulin dosing strategies

Problems with Insulin-Carb Ratio Dosing

1. – Most meals are not JUST carbohydrates; they are a mixture of fats, proteins, and carbs. These three nutrients digest at different rates and because of this, your insulin may not match the curve of the glucose rise from your meal.
2. — Free fatty acids cause insulin resistance. Because of this, insulin requirements would need to be higher to handle the glucose load from a meal that contains carbs but is also high in fat.
3. – Glycemic index (GI) is not synonymous with grams of carbohydrate for food. Therefore, some meals will produce a higher more rapid blood sugar spike (high GI) while other meals cause a more gradual rise in glucose (low GI), even though the meals may contain the same amount of carbohydrate.
4. – Individuals are all over the map with their carb counting skills.

This article offers some useful concepts to optimize your insulin dosing strategies