Men and Weight: Food Vices - The Shortcut to Weight Management

By Russ Klettke

Modern man is a creature of habit. He has predictable ways of grooming, getting dressed in the morning, commuting to work, working out and, of course, eating and drinking.

The problem for a lot of guys is many of those habits are bad. Particularly in what we eat, where certain foods contribute calories that are way out of proportion to their nutrients. Let’s call them food vices.

The food-vice culprits are well known: sugary sodas, salty snacks, fat-drenched main meals (burgers, extra-cheese pizza, deep-fried anything). Or, maybe it’s not so much the food itself – for example, peanut butter with its heart- and skin-healthy oils and protein – but the quantity at which we eat them (e.g., sitting in front of the television, eating one spoonful of peanut butter after another).

There’s an upside to having a vice: It can be the low-hanging fruit of weight management. Cut out that one bad thing, maybe replace it with something healthier, and you can actually drop a few pounds without a lot of effort.

It’s basic math
Say your vice is regular soda. Each can has about 150 calories. If you drank four per day, but then just switched over to diet soda, you would reduce your daily intake by 600 calories. Do that five days a week for three, six or 12 months and here’s what would happen:

• 3 months: 36,000 calories reduced = 10 pound weight loss
• 6 months: 72,000 calories reduced = 20 pound weight loss
• 12 months: 144,0000 calories reduced = 41 pound weight loss

It really is that simple. If instead you cut out a daily bowl of ice cream (400+ calories), two alcoholic drinks (300+ calories) or a bag of snack foods (variable by type and size; read the label), you get similar results, albeit less if it’s fewer than 600 calories (or, more if it is more).

In my book, “A Guy’s Gotta Eat, the regular guy’s guide to eating smart,” I suggest a six-step process for assessing and eliminating vices:

1. Acknowledge your sins: Keep a diary (it can be the back of an envelope) of what you eat and drink for a week.
2. Confront the enemy: Think about vending machines, local fast food joints or office donut fairies (e.g., the receptionist who wants you to be co-dependent with her on Krispy Kremes) that tempt you daily.
3. Avert: Remove a food or beverage vice from your life (i.e., have no vice foods in the house; re-route your drive away from temptation).
4. Don’t be a fanatic: If you try to never ever eat something again, that thing can turn into an obsession. Allow yourself that vice once in a while, but set limits on how often that would be.
5. Shift gears: If you can’t control your portions (e.g., a plate of cookies in a meeting), divert your taste buds to something different (eat a pickle). Sometimes it’s enough to shake a craving.
6. Dilute it: Say you figure out your worst vice is frozen hamburgers – 350 calories, 16 grams of saturated fat each – and you eat two every night. Make one only, chop it up and mix it with a pile of broccoli (frozen, steamed), lemon juice and a little parmesan cheese.

The point is to control your vice so it doesn’t control you. That’s a great habit to get into.