The Nutritional Institute

The subject of my talk this week in the 12 Steps to Wholesome Nutrition course was calories. A year or three ago, aged 24 and trying to maximise my running performance, I made very careful calculations as to my exact calorie requirements for my body and my training - I ended up guzzling down 4,000 calories every day, making sure to include a large proportion of wholegrains and starchy vegetables, while avoiding fats, as was the convention those days. As I gradually took my nutrition interest into professional practice, I sometimes did these extremely laborious calculations of calorie and macronutrient intakes for my clients, but I quickly realised that by maintaining all of my focus on numbers, I was missing the bigger picture of food quality. It was then that I started using the phrase that all of my clients know me for:

QUALITY BEFORE QUANTITY

Nowadays, I rarely do calorie calculations - I only do so when I think that the person is seriously under eating and that they won’t believe me until they see the ‘numbers’. Of course, with fancy Apps on smart phones now, I can ask them to do the laborious task of data entry themselves!

But even then, in many cases, I totally distrust the information generated from the dietary analysis. On one hand, calorie calculation is fraught with large error margins - for example, I shared a research study with the class that was suggestive of almonds having 20 per cent fewer calories than previously thought - just imagine if the same error margin also applies to a few more commonly consumed food items, such as carrots or potatoes? Then there is operator error - the quantity of a food item entered into the App is highly dependent on individual interpretation - one person might think they are consuming a medium apple, while another person sees it as a large apple.

There are also hugely complicating physiological factors - 20 grams of sugar from honey might be more readily digested and absorbed into our body than 20 grams of sugar from carrots, in which the sugar is bound up with fibre. Then, we also have to ask if the carrots are raw or cooked? Such detail makes a difference. Additionally, protein that comes from animal original contributes a much higher net energy than the same gram value of protein coming from vegetarian sources, etc etc.

And what about metabolism? In the class, I shared an example of a female triathlete that I’d worked with years ago - her theoretical need for calories on days when she only trained once was around 3,000 calories - how many did she consume - a whopping 1,200 calories…. With a theoretical 1,800 calories per day deficit, was she as skinny as a rake? No; by skinfold assessment of body fat, she could actually be termed obese, only she didn’t look obsess due to her depleted levels of muscle mass. And she was suffering from a stress fracture - I wonder why?

Nowadays, 90 per cent of my focus is on the types of foods and quality of foods going into a person’s body. I often increase food consumption in under-eaters and achieve healthy loss in body fat. Why? Because I am gently coaxing their metabolism out of hibernation. I also view each type of food as an individual nutritional entity and not just a number - hence my newest phrase below. For example; a medium sized apple and four teaspoons of table sugar both have approximately 25 grams of carbs in them. The low-carb fraternity would lump them into the same nutritional basket, whereas I see one as a fruit with high pectin levels for good digestive health and the other as a nutrient-sapping usurper of health.

FOOD, NOT NUTRIENTS

If not through calorie control and a pathetic equation that a five year old could understand (calories in vs. calories out), how then do we control our body fat? What follows is my top six list of interventions that I use in clinic:

• 1. Balancing blood sugar levels
  2. Managing stress levels
  3. Regulating female hormones
  4. Improving detoxification
  5. boosting muscle mass
  6. Sleeping

If you want to learn more, you’ll need to buy our book (Chapter 2), or book on our 12-Step course.