This has been a bug bear of mine for years, now. I remember a time when there were just calories, YES, just calories, just that one unit of currency, so to speak, that would tell you, and let's be clear here, how much energy,(that's right, actual ENERGY), the food contained. I felt that the calculations were pretty simple and straightforward.
This is how it used to work....
Back in the day, I am going back to the 70's, 80's and 90's here, all that the calorie obsessed person required was their trusty little yellow calorie bible and that brutal slogan from the 70s', “If you can pinch more than an inch....you need to go on a diet”....
Incidentally, and just to update that for the Millennium ….If you can pinch, but an inch, chances are you are extremely underweight, so eat more.
But getting back to the calories, it was really rather easy, you looked down and could check that your 6 oz grilled steak was around 210 calories, and you could then team it with some bad choices typical of the day or whatever else you liked. Thus you, could easily tot up that your steak, hard boiled egg, lettuce and salad cream had a total of 350 calories. SIMPLE.
And there you had it, you picked a daily calorie amount such as 1000 calories maybe up to 2000 calories perhaps, and that was it, a diet that measured your energy intake. If you eat less energy than you burn, your body burns fat and you lose weight. Easy, but not to many, it would appear.
Indeed, it was claimed that the real problem with dieting was not the immense amount of willpower it takes to succeed or addressing psychological or other factors involving weight gain but no in actual fact the terrifyingly, difficult calculations involved with totting up all these numbers!
So there you have it, fat and incapable of totting up numbers to a thousand or two, that was the perception of the pre Millennium dieter, it would appear.
So Weightwatchers were the first to come to the rescue and help us all out by creating Weightwatchers points . Good of them, I know.
So for those that don't know what the WWpoint actually is and believe me, few do, I have finally found out. And here it is, no less, The original Points Plan was developed in the UK by the Weight Watchers development team who took out the first patent for a calculator based roughly on this algorithm ( the summation of calories/70 and saturated fat/4) The patent was filed on 1 November 1995 and actually looks like this.
A process for reducing body weight in a human being comprising the steps of:
(a) measuring the number of kilocalories, c, in candidate food servings;
(b) measuring the total amount of fat, f, in the candidate food servings;
(c) measuring the amount of dietary fiber, r, in the candidate food serving;
(d) calculating a whole number point value p for each candidate food serving in accordance with the equation: p = c k 1 + f k 2 - r k 3
Yes, I am slightly confused, but really it is easier...they say. Or at least it is for them, because now they get to take the food that you eat anyway that has nothing to do with Weightwatchers that they never made, designed, researched or cooked, attach this calculation to it and then charge you for it, it's definitely brilliant, by a certain standard!
The Weightwatchers system is designed to have a bias on fat so that low fat foods have lower points value/per actual energy provided to encourage you to choose them and foods such as chocolate and cheese have a higher points value per actual energy and calories.
For example:-
A small chocolate bar containing 130cals has 6 WW points.
A chicken breast containing 130cals has 3 WW points.
A large banana containing 130cals has 0 WW points.
I think I would rather have 1500calories than just 20 points, if I am honest, psychologically speaking, it sounds more....But yes, if you choose well on weight watchers points you can be eating far more calories than another person who has consumed the exact same points.
And then you have the ridiculous concept now, virtually all food you buy has precise exact nutritional information on the back, but now that is no good because you guys have decided to work in the currency of Weightwatchers, You no longer understand calories, so when your chosen meal or food item hasn't paid Weightwatchers to have their system and points value printed on the packaging, you feel you can't eat it because you have no idea how many points it has and how it fits into your diet plan.
Let's not gang up on Weightwatchers though, Slimming World were also keen to get on board this money making train of bamboozling their clients with an “easier” version of calories.
So let me introduce, Slimming world syns, because that is what eating is after all, sin in the biblical sense,.
As an atheist I struggle with the word sin, but I don't think attaching guilt and remorse to eating, is the way forward, especially when our children,sisters, wives, mothers,brothers, fathers and even grandparents are now caught up in an epidemic of eating disorders and dieting misery.
Now Slimming World will tell you that syn is for synergy, YES, synergy, synergy between healthy food, free food and syns? Do they mean sin?
Well sure, if you buy that.... The syn is what you use to have a cheeky vodka for 3 syns or a standard 50 gram bar of chocolate will set you back 15 syns. The clear context of the currency is sin, but hey.
Meanwhile on the Slimming World plan you can apparently eat as much syn free food as you like, the thing about this is the syn free food though is it is often loaded with calories. In Slimming World land before you can even calculate whether a food is a free or healthy food, regardless of syns, that is entirely dependent on what day it is....Be it red, green or extra easy. Confused?
On red days, free or syn free foods include most fruit and vegetables, fish, lean meats, poultry and eggs and healthy extras include bread, cereals cheese, milk, pasta, potatoes, rice, grains and beans. On a green day this is reversed so that free foods now include pasta, rice, potatoes, grains and eggs and the healthy extras are now lean meat, poultry and fish. To add further confusion there is now the Extra Easy day too.
People can go all week without any syns but still eat plenty of calories and food, so whilst syn free, not calorie free, often eating far more than they should of their healthy syn-free food , and just loading up their 100 syns for booze and treats at the weekend, never understanding the currency that they were supposed to be using. They have pretty much over eaten all week long yet followed the plan to the letter.
They have not addressed portion size and the plan which refers to labeling plenty of foods as SYN has now got you bingeing at the weekend.
Bear in mind , that whilst you are busy confusing and destroying your mind and body for this, Weightwatchers and Slimming World are billionaires.
I don't mind if Weightwatchers actually make a product and it's reasonable and you buy it, I will concede out of an enormous range from WW and SW there are some tasty and useful products. I do however object to people merely being sold a concept of a currency and swapping calories for a biased currency that is causing you damage and is nothing more than a con and a damaging concept.
WW points and SW syns as opposed to calories makes about as much sense to me as a native English speaker, dropping English and never uttering the language again , to take up Swahili instead. And being charged for the privilege, to boot!
So for those that have been hooked and tricked on points and syns and need a quick basic calorie run down which will allow you to choose another way, should you wish, here it is...
If you want to lose one pound in body weight you will have to burn 3500 calories. So, if I under eat by 500 calories , each day over 7 days I will lose one pound. Very simple.
If you need 2000calories a day and eat 1500calories a day over a week you will lose that pound and here is how to calculate calories quickly and easily.
So most people have very similar things for breakfast every day, so it's really a case of thinking well sometimes I like to have cereal, milk and juice, often I like toast and fruit and on Sundays I like boiled eggs. So there you go, calculate these three, breakfast A is 250cals, B is 300cals and C is 400cals. I don't have to start adding it up each time, I have it each day.
Then you decide what lunch dishes you like that are within your lunch amount , say 350-450cals for example. And you work out what is in the five, ten to twenty things you usually have for lunch, and that is ready in your calorie memory banks. Same for dinner, maybe 500-600. calories Virtually everything has calories printed on the packets for free, so it is really easy to work out.
And then you would hopefully have a few hundred calories left over for a glass of wine or two, bag of crisps or a chocolate bar etc. It's really not very hard.
It's easier than WW and co, it makes sense, it's cheaper, and it stops all the cheating and confusion and remorseful language attached to syns. A calorie is an unemotive unit of energy, it's never been patented it's yours for free, the language is universal and printed everywhere, so take advantage.
Comments