Quick question – Which is healthier, Coca Cola or Orange Juice?
Obviously the answer is orange juice and if you chose that, you’re correct. Now for a slightly more complicated question. Assuming my weight is stable, if I currently drink three 12 ounce cans of Coke a day, and I were to replace them with three 12 ounce glasses of orange juice a day, would I lose any weight?
From my experience, I would wager a lot of people believe the answer to that question would be yes – it’s not.
A 12 ounce can of Coke has about 140 calories in it, while 12 ounces of orange juice has about 160 calories. By substituting equal volumes of Coke with orange juice, I’ve actually increased my calorie intake by 60 calories (20 per can x 3 cans a day). At that rate, all other things being equal, I’ll actually gain half a pound a month for as long as I keep drinking orange juice in place of Coke.
“It’s hard to imagine orange juice as fattening,” my Dad said to me skeptically as I presented this info to him, shortly after starting mywastedlife, “it doesn’t feel right.” And in a way, he was right. Orange juice isn’t in and of itself fattening, but neither is Coca Cola. Plain and simple – Excess calories cause weight gain. It doesn’t matter to your body where those calories came from, if you take in more than you burn, you’re going to start storing fat. That’s where the disconnect between being healthy and losing weight begins.
What if I told you I could eat nothing but Carl’s Jr. (Hardee’s for you East coasters) & McDonald’s and lose weight, would you believe me? You should, because I can – in fact, I did. Five years ago I lost 50 pounds following a low carb diet that consisted mainly of In-N-Out Burger and Del Taco. Was that diet healthy? No. Did I lose weight? Yes.
How about if I said I weighed 300 pounds, and in order to lose weight, I was going to run on the treadmill for an hour every day? You would expect me to lose weight, right? Unfortunately, so would I, and we’d most likely be wrong.
Odds are, if I’m 300 pounds, I got that way by living a lifestyle which already has a calorie surplus. Without addressing those excesses calories, the best I can hope for is that my treadmill time is simply going to prevent me from gaining more weight. At worst, I could mistakenly believe my workouts allowed me room to eat worse than before, and I’ll actually put on weight.
It’s knowledge like that which keeps me from being surprised when I read that new medical research “demonstrated no or modest weight loss with exercise alone,” especially when other research “…suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neurobiological underpinnings,” and describes fast food cravings as “…the hallmark of addiction.”
At some point people need to come to the realization that you exercise to be healthy, but to lose weight you have to eat properly. Those two things are obviously related goals, but if you don’t treat them as the distinct things they are, and take the appropriate actions for each, you’re setting yourself up to fail.
People always have this sense of awe about vegetariansim too (especially out here) and are always exclaiming how ‘healthy’ the lifestyle choice is and I like to remind them that you can eat nothing but Doritos and be a vegetarian. Our view of “health” is really limited in this country or society or whatever, and we like to look at little things and not how it fits into the whole big picture. Like just because something is labeled as “diet”, does not mean it s healthy. If you eat a salad and put a quarter cup of oil and sugar and preservatives a.k.a. salad dressing, this is not a wholly healthful meal… I recently discovered that in the SAME well-meaning organic brand of yogurt I like, there is less sugar in their vanilla frozen yogurt than in the regular low-fat vanilla yogurt. We have to look at ALL of these things and yes, it can be exhausting, the amount of time and energy I spend on shopping and meal planning probably seems crazy to a lot of people. But a lot of people are suffering from chronic health problems, heart problems, weight problems, sugar and fat addictions…. I mean, we are talking about the FUEL we put into our bodies. Nothing else will be accomplished and nothing else will really matter if we neglect to provide our bodies with what it needs. And I know this now more than ever. My body is on a heightened “needs” level and a heightened sensitivity to those needs and we are really fucking up if we cant take care of our body’s most basic biological need responsibly. This stuff gets me so worked up!
haha I kind of went on a rant there but I am saying I understand all the factors that go into making “healthful” choices. For you you have to balance calories and nutrition. For me I am obsessed with sugar intake and nutrition, there are so many things to consider and if we were all just eating unseaseoned steak and spinach and apples, we’d probably be ok but our food has gone so far from its origins and I am NOT complaining because I LOVE to eat and take advantage of the crazy things we humans have concocted. But it all matters. The calories, the preservatives, the anitbiotics, the nutrients, the protein (and the protein source), the sugar (and the sugar source!), all of it.
I agree. I’d almost certainly benefit from being as diligent as you are about what I eat, but the truth is I just don’t have that in me at the moment.
I still crave buckets of Coca Cola and greasy Carl’s Jr. regularly enough that I know that I’m alot more like a recovering addict than I am a fitness guru. Every day denying those cravings gets a little easier though, and as it does, I try to replace the effort I put into it with the effort it takes to make really good choices.
My end goal in this is to both lose weight AND be healthy, and I’ve still got a real long way to go, but with alot of work, and a little luck I’ll get there sooner rather than never.
Dude youve already come a really long way. I know its a long road still ahead but even the thought and effort and energy it takes just to reconsider your lifestyle is a massive step that a lot of people dont have the courage or presence of mind to take.