Our Stomach is Not a Trash Can

It is not good manners to have left overs. However, we cannot afford to say that while we are dieting. In fact, it is better to leave food left over in order to lose weight. Just a few extra bites may cause us to consume too many calories. For example, one dumpling has about 60 Kcal and one piece of sushi has about 40-50 Kcal.

Do not eat extra food just to clear them off the table. Your stomach is not a trash can. If you feel guilty throwing food away, pack them up and store them. Be careful, these foods may become easy foods to snack on when you feel like eating something. Try storing them in the freezer so that you can plan when to use them. Unless you are confident that you can endure your cravings, throw leftovers away.

For your information, here are the calories of a few possible leftovers:

one soft boiled egg	60Kcal
one dumpling	60Kcal
one piece of sushi	40Kcal
one bite fried noodle (yakisoba)	40Kcal
1/4 Japanese Salisbury steak (hambagu)	100Kcal
1/2 Japanese croquette (korokke)	100Kcal

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Basic Theory for Diet Success - Exercise

The first goal for beginners should be to gradually reach 10,000 steps on a pedometer a day. Once you reach this goal, you should include 20-30 minutes of fast walking. For the first 5 minutes, you should walk at your usual pace as a warm-up. Then, you up your pace until the last 5 minutes where you slow down again for a cool down.

If you continue walking at a speed of 80-100 meters a minute (88-109 yards) for 20 minutes, you will burn about 80kcal which is about the same as one egg. If you do the same for 40 minutes, you will consume the energy equivalent to one onigiri (rice ball).

It is import to exercise, but please note that it is difficult to reduce weight by exercise alone. Dieting should be done by:

1. Reducing intake of food
2. Exercies
3. Improving your lifestyle

It is necessary for you to find a reasonable method of walking, one where you don't push yourself too hard but is a bit of a challenge. You should form your own walking method and make it part of your lifestyle. Moreover, if you can keep to about 1500-1800 kcal a day, you can assume your diet is successful.


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The Importance of Keeping a Journal When Dieting

When we write down what we do each day, we will know:

1. How many empty foods we are eating
2. How much we are not exercising

The merits of writing down our daily activities are the following:

1. Knowing how much excess food we eat subconsciously
2. Knowing how well or poorly we balance our nutrition
3. Knowing which of our habits are leading us to weight gain
4. Knowing the relations between out eating habits and lifestyle
5. Knowing our personal balance between calorie consumption and calorie intake
6. Preventing overeating

Regardless, gaining weight is caused by excessive calorie intake. Do you know how many calories you can get from soft drinks, juices, alcohol, cakes and sweets? Do you know how many calories exceed your daily limit?
It is said that when we have the craving to eat something but are not really hungry, the feeling will subside in 5 minutes. Also, we sometimes feel hungry when we are actually thirsty. When you feel this craving, it is best to drink a small amount of water or tea then wait 5 minutes to see if this feeling subsides.

The Calories in Drinks

Many soft drinks include lots of sugar. If you buy soft drinks, try not to keep in the refrigerator, otherwise you will be tempted to drink them such as with some alcoholic drinks.

It is recommended to try and minimize the amount of soft drinks you drink and to drink water or unsweetened tea instead. You may think that sports drinks or 100% fruit juices do not contain a lot of calories but, as you see in the chart, that is not true. In addition, a lot of drinks contain a lot of sugar.

All beverages listed in the chart are based on the drinks sold in Japan.

Basics of Dieting

The basic method for dieting is to keep the balance between calorie usage and calorie intake in mind. By doing so, fat, which is accumulated in white adipose tissue, can be used up for energy.
The human body is composed of about 80% pure fat and 20% water and other materials.

Fat contains about 9kcal per gram, therefore 9kcal x 1,000g x .8 = 72,000kcal which is the amount of calories needed to lose 1kg of fat. In the case of an average Japanese man who consumes 2,000kcal a day can subtract 1,000kcal for his daily activities a day to lose about 1kg a week (1,000kcal x 7 days = 7,000kcal). If he continues to do this for a month, he will be able to reduce his weight by 4kg a month. This is just a hypothetical situation and does not always go this smoothly in real life.
The basic method of DietMaster is to burn fat effectively by controlling food intake with aerobic exercise to reduce to create a negative calorie intake. However, the fact is a real effort is needed from this point. We do not need a great deal of effort to reduce weight. Most importantly, we have to be careful of weight rebound after losing weight. The real success to dieting is to get over plateaus and prevent rebound. Let’s eat only until we feel 80% full every time we eat a meal!

Alcohol & Dieting

The reason why alcoholic drinks cause people to gain weight is because they contain a lot of calories. Pure alcohol has 7kcal per gram and 5kcal of those 7 are used as energy in the body. Protein and saccharides, complex sugars, have 4kcal per gram. Alcohol is second to lipids, or fat which has 9kcal per gram, for highest calories per gram.

Some people think that beer and sake have high calorie amounts while whiskey and shochu do not have as much. While it is true that beer and sake do have a high calorie amount, only 3 shot glasses of whiskey (about 130cc) has about 400kcal. When you try to get the same amount of alcohol through beer, you would need to drink 3 medium sized bottles (1100cc). In the case of sake, you would consume 400kcal in about two and a half bottles (500cc). Also keep in mind that the higher the alcohol content, the higher the calories will be.

As we can see, whiskey does include a high amount of calorie so we can’t say that whiskey does not contribute to weight gain. In short, any type of alcohol, if we consume too much, can easily lead to obesity.