Tag Archives: Calorie

Here’s What 1000 calories Per Day Can Be. Yum!

1000 calorie diet meal plan

Have you been under the impression that it would be so little food that you’d starve? Think again. Here’s part of what I learned to lose 140 pounds permanently.

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Three great meals — total: under 1000 calories.

When you do the work to plan ahead (one of the Key Behaviors I teach) and learn the other technique I teach, you’ll find you can have plenty of scrumptious food that will fit your “caloric budget”. You’ll find that you can live well on 1000 calories per day and lose weight at a good pace. What’s more important, when you establish the habit patterns of eating the food you like in healthy caloric volumes, you’ll never have a weight problem again. I’ll lay out one day’s menu to give you an idea of how well you can live and lose weight at the same time.

eating 1,000 calories a day

Breakfast: Veggie and cheese omelette with buttered toast and coffee with real cream: 321calories.

This is an omelette I make at least once-a-week. With all the ingredients, even the buttered toast, it’s under 350 calories! That’s a lot less than a Denny’s Slam at over 1200! I’d have it more than once-a-week, but there are too many other good things I make!

I start with a small onion, sliced into rings, 1/4 of a green pepper, sliced, 1/4 of a red pepper, sliced, and a handful of quartered white mushrooms that I cook in a small covered saute pan with a tiny pat of butter, over a low-medium heat. You want the heat low enough so they don’t brown. They really steam in their own juices.

When the onions get limp and translucent, I add in 1/4 cup of egg substitute, like Eggbeaters, and let that continue to cook, covered over the low heat, while I toast the Publix low calorie bread.

I use a bit of Brummel and Brown spread on the toast, and then fold the omelette with 1/2 slice of Kraft fat-free cheddar inside. It’s terrific, and the whole thing is under 350 calories. I love my coffee in the morning, and I mix real half-and-half with fat-free to keep the rich flavor while trimming the calories, using Splenda to sweeten it, and the coffee is only about 30 calories a cup. This breakfast can’t be beat.

  • Onion = 30 c.
  • Pepper = 20 c.
  • Mushrooms = 20 c.
  • Butter = 20 c
  • Egg substitute = 70 c.
  • Cheese = 20 c.
  • Bread = 81 c.
  • Brummel and Brown spread = 20 c.
  • Coffee with cream = 30 c.

1000 calorie diet meal program

For lunch, Joey D’s Chicago Dog: 262 calories.

We are in the habit of lunch at Joey D’s once a week, and their Chicago Dog is a delight, and only 262 calories! They use a real Vienna Beef Hot Dog with a poppy seed bun and all the traditional trimmings: pickle spear, chopped onion, pickle relish, mustard, tomato slice and celery salt. I’ll usually have a Diet Coke with it. At 262 calories, it’s a fraction of what other typical sandwich-type lunches are in restaurants. In one of my other articles, I showed a burger and shake that was 2000 calories! The Chicago Dog seems like a lot, but its all the low calorie condiments that gives it the advantage over the high fat add-ons that others use.

  • Vienna Hot Dog = 120 c.
  • Poppy seed bun = 110 c.
  • Pickle spear = 3 c.
  • Tomato slice = 3 c.
  • Tbs chopped onion = 3 c.
  • Tbs sweet relish = 20 c.
  • tsp mustard = 3 c.

Is the 1000 Calorie a Day Diet Safe?

For dinner, grilled sirloin steak, fresh steamed asparagus and sour cream and chives mashed potatoes: 435 calories.

Many people think you have to give up beef to lose weight. Not true. In fact, one of the secrets of permanent weight loss is getting into the habit of eating everything you like in portions that will keep you at your desired weight for life. The meal above was just delicious, easy to fix, and came in at 435 calories. That brings the day to about 1000 calories, which will cause anyone to lose weight.

The steak is a 5 ounce sirloin. I buy a 2 pound sirloin when they go on sale and cut it into 4–5 ounce servings and freeze them in a gallon Ziplock bag. You can thaw one out when you want it, overnight in the fridge, on the counter for several hours or even in a small sealed Ziplock bag in some shallow room temperature water for 20 minutes or so. Grilling it is easy while the 5 ounces of asparagus is steaming for 9 minutes, and the 1/2 cup of Simply Potatoesmashed potatoes are in the microwave.

The buttery glaze you see on the asparagus is I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Spray, really adds to the taste and palatability, and only 5 calories for 5 squirts

  • 5 ounce sirloin steak = 270 c.
  • 5 ounces asparagus = 40 c.
  • 1/2 cup mashed potatoes = 120 c.
  • 5 sprays, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter = 5 c.

Losing weight permanently can become easy!

Becoming successful at permanent weight loss takes work, but done right, it can become easy. It’s well worth it, believe me. I’ve maintained my ideal weight for thirty years now, after losing over 100 pounds, and it was the single most important thing that’s happened in my life. It changed everything for me, and it could for you. Read my book or listen to my audiobook to learn how.

Quit looking for easy, magical ways to solve your weight problem. As long as you do, you’ll avoid learning what you need to do to be successful, and you’ll stay overweight and unhappy like I was.

If you develop the right habits using behavioral techniques like I teach, it will eventually become easy, your new normal behavior, as natural and easy as the habits you have now, only they will keep you fit rather than making you fat. It’s not done with “will power” or just “making up your mind”. It’s done with the science of the mind.

Are There Any Weight Loss Products That Really Work?

(The author is a psychotherapist who lost 140 lbs. when he discovered his unique method, and he’s kept it off for over 30 years. Read about his method of fast permanent weight loss by clicking on the book cover to the right.)

YES! There are some great “weight loss products” that helped me lose 140 pounds permanently, and I’ll list them below.

1) I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Spray

Veggies are low in calories and very filling, but without a topping, they can be bland and boring. Butter and fatty sauces can make them taste great, but are loaded with calories. This spray “butter” adds next to nothing! There is less than one calorie per squirt! Ten squirts are less than ten calories, and your veggies are covered with a tasty buttery glaze! It will make any vegetable better.

 2) Egg Beaters

If you’re not paying attention, breakfast can be the highest calorie meal of the day, especially if you eat out, often over 1000 calories. Eggs are a good choice for breakfast because they are high in protein and will suppress your appetite, but they have lots of cholesterol, and they’re 75 calories each. The eggs substitutes are half the calories and no cholesterol! So, you can have the equivalent of two scrambled eggs and a piece of diet toast for a little over 100 calories! Add a real egg to the mix to improve the texture, or make it a veggie omelet, and you are still very low in calories, and it will keep you fueled and satisfied all morning.

3) Walden Farms zero calorie salad dressings

Two tablespoons of their balsamic vinaigrette is less than five calories, so I can make a big salad with lettuce, spinach, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, and peppers for about fifty calories total. I can have that with a Michael Angelo lasagna, a 4oz. hamburger with bun or a lamb chop, and have a very decent low calorie meal. Walden Farms makes six different “zero calorie” dressings (they get to label a serving zero if it is less than 5 calories), though the one I like is the balsamic vinaigrette. Clients have liked the others and you might too!

4) Low calorie frozen dinners

“Fast food” has become the staple for families with both parents working. It saves time and trouble, but it’s making us obese. There is a good alternative you can stock your freezer with, ready to eat in 5 minutes – Frozen dinners. Today we have an array of very decent frozen dinners from Lean Cuisine, Healthy Choice, Smart Ones, Kashi and others that appeal to the senses as well as the caloric budget. Many of these offerings are less than 300 calories and are great to have in the freezer when your plan to prepare the perfect fresh meal goes awry. They are also good to have at work for lunch.

5) Diet Soda Pop

I know diet soda has gotten a bad reputation, but it’s been a life saver for me. Water doesn’t appeal to me to have with lunch, and sugared soda and juices are loaded with calories. I know diet soda is not good nutrition, but I have seen no real science that backs up the scary stories saying it is so bad. My main health problem was obesity, and diet soda is one of the most important products that has helped me to achieve my ideal weight, excellent health and maintain them for over 30 years. I’d have died years ago if I hadn’t gotten rid of that surplus 140 pounds. I’m not afraid of diet soda. It’s helped save my life.

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There are lots of other foods that you’ll discover that are great “weight loss products”. For instance, if you start looking up the calories in regular food, you’ll find that a good old-fashioned hot dog and bun with mustard, relish and onions is less than 300 calories! I often had one for lunch as I lost 140 lbs.! I’ve maintained my ideal weight for over 25 years now, and I still have hot dogs regularly!

Permanent weight loss is within everyone’s grasp, and my book will teach you what you need to do to succeed. There is work involved, but if you’ve gotten through high school, you’ve done a lot more and a lot harder work than you’ll need to do to solve your weight problem. If you really want to solve your weight problem and you’re willing to do some reasonable work, you are ready to succeed. Read my book or listen to my audiobook.

Yes, Your Stomach Actually Shrinks When You Diet!

Bill Anderson - Author of The Anderson Method book

Author Bill Anderson before and after his 140 pound weight loss.

(The author is a psychotherapist who lost 140 lbs. when he discovered his unique method, and he’s kept it off for over 25 years. Read about his method of fast permanent weight loss in his book, The Anderson Method.)     

A reader has written in asking, “Does my stomach actually shrink after a few weeks of eating less, or is it all in my imagination?”

Much to my surprise, the answer is YES!, your stomach actually does shrink!

For years, the answer from all the experts has always been “no”, your stomach does not actually shrink.

My dietitians and physicians have always told me that this is an “old wives’ tale”, a myth that came about because after a while of eating less, we seem to get used to it. They said that the hunger that you got when you first “dieted” goes away after a few days, but it wasn’t from your stomach actually getting smaller. “It’s a matter of habituation”, they said. You also get a full feeling on less food than before, but “it’s not actually your stomach physically shrinking.  The new experience becomes our new normal and we get used to it”. According to them, our digestive system and appestat adjust to the new level of consumption, and now, when we’ve had the new normal amount or new normal of going without, our brain gives us the same messages it used to give us, but on less food. But the stomach physically shrinking? “No”, they scoffed, “just another silly myth lay people believe”.

It turns out they were wrong, at least about the stomach shrinking part.

Here’s the scoop: Researchers at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Department of Medicine and Psychiatry at St. Lukes-Roosevelt Hospital have actually measured the size of the stomachs of people before and after 4 weeks of eating less. They found that dieters had their stomachs shrink by 27-36%!

They inserted balloons into the empty stomachs of 25 obese volunteers and then filled them with water to measure the volume the stomach would hold. Then, a group of 14 of them went on restricted diets, reducing the amount of food they ate, and 9 did not. At the end of 4 weeks, they repeated the measuring procedure using the balloons. The non-dieters had no change in the volume their stomachs would hold, but the dieters’ stomachs would not hold what they used to. The volume their stomachs’ would hold had shrunk by 27 to 36%.

So, its true, your stomach actually does shrink after you eat less for a while.

Now that we have that settled, so what? If you want to lose weight, you still have to figure out what to do to get yourself to do that. That’s where I and my book come in. Read my book or listen to my audiobook and find out!

 

 

Great calorie-tracking app!

One of my great readers, Marylou Hagerty,  just emailed me about this great site that offers the best calorie tracking software and apps she has ever seen. I took a quick look (after 30 years, it’s all automatic in my head) and it looks real good. Take a look. https://www.nutritionix.com

How to Eat Out and Lose 50 Pounds a Year (or Gain!)

(First published in The Huffington Post)

(The author is a psychotherapist who lost 140 lbs. when he developed his methods, and he’s kept it off for over 30 years. Read about his method in his book at the right, or listen to his audiobook, free sample provided here.)

Consider these selections when dining out for a day:

Breakfast: Egg McMuffin and coffee at McDonalds.
Lunch: Cheeseburger and Diet Coke at McDonald’s.
Dinner: Filet Mignon, grilled vegetables and garlic mashed at Outback.

This would add up to about 1,200 calories. If you are a woman 5’6” with average activity habits (a metabolic rate of about 2000), you’ll lose about 50 pounds a year eating like that consistently!

However, consider what would happen if you weren’t paying attention and made some slight changes:

  1. Sausage Biscuit with egg and an OJ instead of the Egg McMuffin and coffee.
  2. Quarter Pounder with cheese and a regular Coke instead of Cheeseburger and Diet Coke.
  3. New York Strip, chopped salad and loaded mashed instead of the filet, grilled veggies and garlic mashed.

They look and feel almost the same, but with the second example, you’d be at 2,700 calories and gaining 50 pounds a year instead of losing them!

For a population facing an exploding obesity epidemic, the world of fast food, restaurants and convenience food is a minefield, with caloric nuclear bombs everywhere you turn. It’s a miracle we all aren’t over 600 pounds.

Consider this: Did you know that you could gain 100 extra pounds (!!) in four years by overeating as little as one latte per day? It’s true! If you are out of balance, over your metabolic rate consistently by 250 calories per day (an average latte), you’ll gain 25 pounds a year, or 100 pounds in four!

The science is in. Our body burns calories each moment we are alive, awake or asleep. Our organs, muscles and cells metabolize fuel each second we live and breathe. There’s no mystery in knowing why we gain or lose weight. It’s a matter of the energy or calorie balance. Eat 3,500 more calories than you burn and you store them as fat and gain a pound.

Most of my clients who are obese first got that way by being only a little out of balance, creeping up on the scale 10 pounds per year. That amounts to eating only 100 calories more per day than you need, the number of calories in an apple or banana! How can you avoid eating too many calories, and way more than 100, with the way we eat in this country?

When you think about it, with the way food is pushed at us, it’s a miracle that we aren’t all morbidly obese (70 percent of us are now clinically obese). A Big Mac is 563 calories. A Cinnabon Classic Roll is 879. How hard do you think it is to go over a 2,000-calorie budget when breakfast at Denny’s can be 1,000 calories and lunch at McDonald’s can easily be 1400 or more? One of the shrimp dishes at Ruby Tuesdays is 1,475 calories! They have a salad that’s over 1,100!

So how is that 30 percent of us are not overweight, and some don’t even have to try to stay slim?

This is a more startling observation than the obesity epidemic: Many people maintain the same weight, year-in and year-out, without even trying. I find that miraculous. Think about it. A person who burns 2,000 calories per day burns 730,000 in normal activities through the year and consumes 730,000 to fuel that activity. To gain or lose a pound it would be because they were off by no more than 3,500 calories in an entire year! That averages about 10 calories per day! How could a person match their consumption to their utilization that closely by accident, without even trying?

The answer, of course, is that there must be some sort of inner process going on, like unconscious programming, that tells them how much to eat and when to stop so that they end up eating only enough to meet their needs. Dietitians have always told me this and that I should listen to my body. I tried that, but all I ever heard was, “I need something to eat” and “more, more!” If such a self-limiting thing ever existed in me, that programming was deleted long ago, probably by a combination of conditioning, all the food nuttiness in my environment, and 25 years of yo-yo dieting, gaining it all back and more after each attempt.

How to attain and maintain a proper weight automatically even when eating out.

The secret to permanent weight loss is in creating new programming — habits you can live with and enjoy that will produce the weight control you want — habits that will become automatic. It’s like getting addicted to gratifying undereating instead of overeating. For this to happen, these conditions must be met:

The plan must allow the foods you want to eat for the rest of your life. You need to learn how to eat, not diet. It does no good to lose weight by denying yourself what you know you’ll eat in the future. All you’ll do is gain it back and then some, when you go back to what you like.

The plan must be a pattern of eating that achieves the caloric values needed for the desired weight. Believe me, there is a way to create a behavior pattern that includes the food you like and hits the right caloric targets at the same time.

There must be a method of behavioral training employed to install these habits so that they become the new preferred and unconscious behavior. One of the keys to behavior therapy is simply repetitions of meals that are sensually satisfying and hit the caloric target. Other keys, besides positive reinforcement, are mental imaging and cognitive restructuring. It’s a matter of using behavioral science instead of simple will power.

Suck it up

For years while I was overweight and obese, I kept looking for ways to lose weight that were easy. I avoided anything that sounded hard, and paying attention to the calories sounded hard. Or, I’d look for ways to get someone else to do the work and make me successful. I had lost faith in myself. Avoiding doing the work myself just made me gain more weight as the years and failed attempts dragged on.

I get clients who think learning to control their weight should not be as much work as learning to pass tests for professional jobs or getting good at a sport or music. That’s a big mistake. You’ll never be successful with weight control until you decide controlling your weight is your first priority and you’re willing to work harder to develop that ability than the effort you make to grow professionally or highly skilled in sports or the arts.

Quit being mad that it’s not easy for you like it’s easy for those people I talked about who maintain the right weight without even trying. If you are like me, you are one of the people who seem to gain weight naturally and have failed to succeed many times. You need to accept that you’ll never be like them.

However, I think it’s better to be like us. All living things have the ability to learn and change. You have within you the power to get better. There is within you an incredible mechanism that helped you learn to speak and use a vocabulary of thousands of words. That was in you even before you knew who you were. You have within you the power to heal wounds and broken bones and get better when you are sick. That’s not your will power, but another kind of power at your disposal when you don’t lose the faith that it’s there (like I did for a while). I think it’s better to be like us than those people who never had the problem. We can solve this problem and when we do, we have a strength, knowledge and wisdom that they may never know.

Get started

All restaurant chains with 20 or more units must now post the caloric values in what they serve. Most have that info on their website too. Restaurants who want our business will provide that info even if they don’t have 20 units.

We need to be like the formerly obese people, now successful in weight control, who are studied by the National Weight Control Registry. They do not put anything in their mouths without knowing the caloric value. Eating without knowing the caloric cost is like charging up stuff you like at the mall without looking at the price tags. With either practice, disaster is the result.

So, start by getting to know the amount of calories that you are putting in your body. When you recover from the initial shock, you’ll be ready for the next step, which is to plan ahead. All formerly obese people who have become successful, plan ahead. They don’t eat spontaneously or wait until they are at the table with the menu of all those tempting things. They know ahead of time what they are going to order, and with the menus on the websites these days, it’s much easier than it was years ago.

That will get you started in the right direction. You can switch from my example of eating out to gain 50 pounds a year to losing 50 pounds this year. Believe me, it’s worth it!