Texas Lap Band Surgeons Talk With You

It sometimes occurs to me while talking to patients in the office that things that I find second nature after doing them for years may not be either easy or obvious for somebody just getting started on this journey.  I was fortunate enough to go to France one summer with an exchange program when I was 15.  Lemme tell ya, the French ain’t known for their great food for nothing.  They really take pride in making food into art and practically every block in Paris had a bread bakery or pastry shop that makes Joe Muggs here in town look like it sells sawdust.  Needless to say, I gained about 10 lbs in 6 weeks on my little bitty 5’1.5″ frame.  Uh Oh.

So what’s a girl to do? Like the good geek that I was (am), I started reading everything I could about nutrition.  At that age, that mainly meant whatever I could find in magazines of the Glamour and Cosmo variety, but I also looked in fitness magazines as well.  The advice always talked about eating some number of grams of protein or some number of grams of fat, but how was I supposed to know what foods had what?  I remember arguing with my mom about peanut butter and jelly sandwiches – I insisted that the jelly had all the calories, but she said that the peanut butter had far, far more.  She said, “just look on the label.”  So I did.

That started a lifetime of label looking.  And what’dya know? I lost those 10 lbs before Christmas that year.  All the information you need to know to eat well and stay slim is printed right there on the package of almost everything you eat.  The only exceptions are things like fruits and vegetables and they’re so good for you that they don’t need labels!

Let’s look at the label above.  While there is a LOT of good information contained in that little doodad, I’d like to KISS (keep it simple, stupid) and just focus on 3 things: portion size, calories and protein.  Why? Because I maintain that if you limit your calories to between 1200 and 1600 calories per day AND get 40-80g of protein per day, the rest will usually take care of itself.

So let’s look: at the top of every label it tells you what portion size the label is describing.  THIS CAN BE TRICKY SO ALWAYS LOOK AT THIS!!!!  Many companies in a bid to make their food look more healthy will use a tiny portion size that nobody in their right mind would call a “portion”. Like say, half a can of soup.  Most people I know eat the whole can for a meal.  So make sure when you’re (mentally/on the computer/in your journal) tallying up how many calories and grams of protein are in your meal, that the label matches the portion size you actually ate or otherwise you need to modify what you document.

The rest is simple addition and subtraction (and I KNOW you can all do that).  Just below the portion size is always the number of calories in that portion.  Food labels are standardized by the US government, so once you understand in what order the information is listed, this becomes a breeze!  At the bottom of the label, the last thing listed is always the grams of protein in that portion.  You add your grams of protein to that day’s total (’cause you’re working your way up to your goal of 40-80g/day) and you subtract the number of calories from the number you’re allowed for the day (cause when you hit 0, that’s it – you can’t eat anything else that day).

At least that’s the way I do it.  You could just as easily add up your grams of protein and add your calories (instead of subtracting) but you should still set the same parameters: 40-80g of protein, 1200-1800 calories.  If you stay within those two parameters with what you eat all day, I guarantee your diet will be decent if not actually good.  Not a lot of room for a 440 calorie pure sugar McDonald’s sweet tea if that’s gonna be about 1/3 of your total calories for the day.