Balance your plate and body weight

To prevent weight gain

Reduce the amount of food you eat when you reduce physical activity.
Increase the amount of physical activity to compensate for extra food consumed or else taper down your food intake.

Kilojoule – a unit used to measure the energy content of foods, 4.2 kilojoules = 1 calorie.

If you’ve stepped onto a set of scales and noticed with disbelief that your body weight has gone up, this article may help you to prevent further weight gain. Let’s start by looking at the causes of putting on weight.

There are two main reasons why we put on body fat. We reduce the amount of physical activity – because of injury or simply by slacking off – while continuing the same eating habits. We start to eat larger helpings or more high-energy foods and don’t increase exercise.

In the first example, energy that would normally be used up in regular physical activity is channeled into body fat stores. If this continues beyond a couple of weeks you will experience the phenomenon of the tight waist band – your clothes will tell the story. In the second example and in both cases, the energy intake has increased and if it is not compensated by extra physical activity this too will bring about weight gain.

Weight gain – fat gain, occurs when a fraction of the kilojoules we eat are left behind with no purpose and are turned into body fat.

The meals we eat can vary significantly in the amounts of kilojoules they contain based on their composition. Kilojoules come from fats, alcohol, carbohydrates and proteins. These four macronutrients (macro meaning present in large amounts in our foods and nutrients essential for health) provide the body with varying amounts of kilojoules per unit of weight. Lets take a look at the difference in kilojoule content per gram between the four macronutrients:

• Fat contains 37 kilojoules
• Alcohol contains 29 kilojoules
• Carbohydrate contains 16 kilojoules
• Protein contains 17 kilojoules

Fats are the most kilojoule dense of the macronutrients, they contribute the largest amount of kilojoules per gram. If you are gaining weight it makes sense to target fats first for that reason but don’t fall into the pit of lowering fats and adding more carbohydrate-rich foods to your diet.

Remember it is the total amount of kilojoules that matters, not where they come from. Pasta may be served with no fat but if it is a copious amount, chances are you are getting the same amount of kilojoules that would come from a smaller serve of pasta served with a moderate amount of fat. Getting the balance between fats and carbohydrates as well as other nutrients is the trick to maintaining a healthy weight. Let’s look at a useful method to help you eat balanced meals and prevent weight gain or kick start weight loss.

Taking in a bird’s eye view of one’s food plate is a very useful exercise. It tells us a lot about the balance of macronutrients and the kilojoule density of our diet. Let’s assess the dinner plate as an example. Identifying macronutrients on the dinner food plate is fairly easy.

Carbohydrate-rich foods include potato, rice, pasta, breads, and grains. Protein rich foods include meats, eggs and dairy products, as well as legumes and nuts. Fat is found around and through fatty cuts of meats, the skin of the chicken, and it is added in food preparation as oil, butter and margarine.

Carbohydrate rich foods should occupy about a quarter of the plate.

Protein rich foods should occupy another quarter. The remaining half of the plate should be made up of a good mix of vegetables (except potato which classifies into the carbohydrate rich foods). Finally, scan for the presence of fats that are often hidden in something, for example fried foods, sauces, and mashed potato.

The amount or use of fat-rich foods on your plate may also need fine-tuning but getting the balance of foods right is the first step to a long-term success of balancing your body weight.

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