Worth The Calories Quotes

Nothing was a more powerful compass of my mood or a better indication of my self-worth than the number on the scale.

Needless to say, taken literally, this is just as absurd. For an adult organism the energy content is as stationary as the material content. Since, surely, any calorie is worth as much as any other calorie, one cannot see how a mere exchange could help.

This, as Joseph had pointed out on retreat, is the lie we tell ourselves our whole lives: as soon as we get the next meal, party, vacation, sexual encounter, as soon as we get married, get a promotion, get to the airport check-in, get through security and consume a bouquet of Auntie Anne’s Cinnamon Sugar Stix, we’ll feel really good. But as soon as we find ourselves in the airport gate area, having ingested 470 calories’ worth of sugar and fat before dinner, we don’t bother to examine the lie that fuels our lives. We tell ourselves we’ll sleep it off, take a run, eat a healthy breakfast, and then, finally, everything will be complete. We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these “if only” thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.

I wasn't worth the calories.

- dismissing any thought of me the way you'd walk past boxes of mac'n'cheese or mashmallow cereal on a shelf in the grocery store. I was kids' stuff. I was nonsense. I wasn't worth the calories.

Even more than I hate commodifying myself, I hate men judging me as a commodity. For thousands of years, women have been throughout their lives reduced to their worth as sexual objects (slash domestic workers). We learn very early on to go to great lengths to increase our sexual value in the eyes of men, without even realizing that’s why we’re (for example) agonizing over whether our one snack for the day should be a pear or a seventy-calorie sugar-free yogurt. For years—much of my childhood and early twenties—I spent the largest portion of my conscious thought on food and how much I hated and was terrified of my body. It has taken a lot of work to divorce my view of my body and my feelings of romantic worthiness from outside sources. I’m afraid apps would undermine that effort.

the sugar industry has promoted the idea that a calorie is a calorie, and that eating a calorie’s worth of sweets is no more likely to make someone obese than any other food.

Making LDL the “bad cholesterol” oversimplified the science considerably, but it managed to salvage two decades’ worth of research, and to justify why physicians had bothered to measure total cholesterol in their patients.

First, when you try to restrict calories and exercise more, your body is hardwired to perceive a starvation situation. That makes you tired (so you move less and conserve energy) and hungry (so you eat more), and it slows down your metabolism (so you don’t die!). This “eat less, exercise more” formula is not too successful for most people. It can work for a short time, certainly, but less than 10 percent of people lose weight and keep it off for a year;4 you will almost always rebound and gain back the weight. Second, when you eat carbs and sugar, insulin spikes and your blood sugar drops. The insulin drives most of the available fuel in your bloodstream into fat cells, especially the fat cells around your middle, otherwise known as belly fat. So your body is starved of fuel, and this stimulates your brain5 to make you eat more.6 You could have a year’s worth of stored energy in your fat tissue and yet feel like you are starving. The only thing that can stop this vicious cycle is eating a lot of fat and cutting out the refined carbs and sugar. A high-fat, low-carb diet leads to a faster metabolism and sustained weight loss.

running an entire marathon burns only about 2,600 calories, the equivalent of a day’s worth of food. Even worse, body fat is a remarkably good way to store energy: a pound of body fat contains roughly 4,000 calories. That means losing a mere ten pounds is the caloric equivalent of running 13.5 marathons.

We all know that if we consume too much beer and cake and pizza and cheeseburgers and all the other things that make life frankly worth living, we will add pounds to our bodies because we have taken in too many calories. But what exactly are these little numerical oddments that are so keen to make us round and wobbly?

TREVOR AND I WEREN’T SPEAKING when I went into hibernation. I probably called him at some point under the black veil of Ambien early on, but I don’t know if he ever answered. I could easily imagine him diving into a complicated, fortysomething-year-old’s vagina, dismissing any thought of me the way you’d walk past boxes of mac ’n’ cheese or marshmallow cereal on a shelf in the grocery store. I was kids’ stuff. I was nonsense. I wasn’t worth the calories. He said he preferred brunettes. “They give me space to be myself,” he told me. “Blondes are distracting. Think of your beauty as an Achilles’ heel. You’re too much on the surface. I don’t say that offensively. But it’s the truth. It’s hard to look past what you look like.

Having low self-esteem and a shield of lard are not guarantees of safety. Having a warrior spirit, high self worth (most people are assaulted by someone they know, so if you think you're only worthy of hanging out with controlling low-life's, that's who you'll attract into your circle) and the ability to run, hit, kick and holler loudly are far more effective weapons against victimization.

As people get richer, they eat more calories, and in particular they eat more meat and dairy. And producing meat and dairy will require us to grow even more food. A chicken, for example, has to eat two calories’ worth of grain to give us one calorie of poultry—that is, you have to feed a chicken twice as many calories as you’ll get from the chicken when you eat it. A pig eats three times as many calories as we get when we eat it. For cows, the ratio is highest of all: six calories of feed for every calorie of beef. In other words, the more calories we get from these meat sources, the more plants we need to grow for the meat.

Of the 200,000 wild plant species, only a few thousand are eaten by humans, and just a few hundred of these have been more or less domesticated. Even of these several hundred crops, most provide minor supplements to our diet and would not by themselves have sufficed to support the rise of civilizations. A mere dozen species account for over 80 percent of the modern world’s annual tonnage of all crops. Those dozen blockbusters are the cereals wheat, corn, rice, barley, and sorghum; the pulse soybean; the roots or tubers potato, manioc, and sweet potato; the sugar sources sugarcane and sugar beet; and the fruit banana. Cereal crops alone now account for more than half of the calories consumed by the world’s human populations. With so few major crops in the world, all of them domesticated thousands of years ago, it’s less surprising that many areas of the world had no wild native plants at all of outstanding potential. Our failure to domesticate even a single major new food plant in modern times suggests that ancient peoples really may have explored virtually all useful wild plants and domesticated all the ones worth domesticating.

Two Last Thoughts If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that …” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try. Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate. Abbreviations in the Notes In order to save forests’ worth of paper, references cite only the first one or two authors.

This, as Joseph had pointed out on retreat, is the lie we tell ourselves our whole lives: as soon as we get the next meal, party, vacation, sexual encounter, as soon as we get married, get a promotion, get to the airport check-in, get through security and consume a bouquet of Auntie Anne’s Cinnamon Sugar Stix, we’ll feel really good. But as soon as we find ourselves in the airport gate area, having ingested 470 calories’ worth of sugar and fat before dinner, we don’t bother to examine the lie that fuels our lives.

What doesn't work is when we adopt some TEMPORARY habits, lose some weight and then pick our previous habits back up. Surprise, surprise. The weight always returns. Live one way, lose weight. Live another way, gain weight. Hhhmmm...how curious. What also doesn't work is lying to yourself about what you ate and then falling into a crying heap on the scale, playing the victim. Poor you. Never mind you ate three biscuits with butter before your dinner even hit the table at Billy Bob's Feed trough last night--it was only a salad. Never mind you gobbled down five handfuls of M&Ms off the receptionist's desk between trips to the break room for a soda--it was diet! Never mind you drove through Coffee Planet on the way to work and downed a 32 oz. Italian-named mocha-choca-ya-ya worth a day's calories in some starving nations--you skipped the whipped cream and said "no thanks" to the Chihuahua-sized muffin. I'm telling you, diets work.

Comfort foods they may have been, but helpful foods they most definitely were not. By merging my identity with certain foods and thinking of them as old friends, I found myself in the food equivalent of a co-dependent, destructive relationship. I was allowing food to have the power of defining me as a person. And those foods had defined me, all right; they'd defined me as fat, miserable, out of breath, lacking in energy and self-worth, and looking terrible in sweat pants. If I was going to insist on relating to food as a friend, then clearly I needed new friends.

There are a lot of valid reasons for wanting to feel safer. But hiding from pain or perceived threats behind a wall of weight is not the way to go about it. First of all, being a fat adult will never change the circumstances of anyone's childhood. The past is past. All you'll gain is more misery and low self-worth in your life now.

meals with high-calorie beverages, appetizers, sides, and desserts that we absolutely do not need. And, of course, there’s the famous “all-you-caneat,” which can easily turn into a sort of frantic frenzy to make sure it’s worth the money – at the cost of your weight, health, and dignity Source31

This is simply a piece of paper that has a month’s worth of days across the top (1–31) and your three daily 100-calorie changes written down the side. Every evening, you check off the changes you’ve accomplished. This small act of accountability makes you more mindful

DESPITE NEARLY A CENTURY’S WORTH OF therapeutic innovations, the likelihood of a diabetic’s contracting coronary artery disease is no less today than it was in 1921, when insulin was first discovered. Type 2 diabetics can still expect to die five to ten years prematurely, with much of this difference due to atherosclerosis and what Joslin’s Diabetes Mellitus has called an “extraordinarily high incidence” of coronary disease.

Good. So go and make your dal, sabzi, roti fresh and use a small utensil. That way you will save your fuel and LPG cost. Okay? Also, understand the reason why you’ve got dimples (cellulite) in the wrong places. You didn’t just get fat over the last few years because of excessive calories or limited exercise. It’s about fuel efficiency. You’ve consumed too many calories and received very little nutrients in return, forcing such a deprived state in your body that the body fat is also turning toxic, and instead of evenly spreading out under your skin, it has developed stretch marks, cellulite and khaddas. It’s like using a ten-person ka capacity wala kadai and making only one person’s sabzi in it. Waste hua na? So much time and fuel to heat the kadai aur mila kya? Sabzi (and that too overcooked) only for one person. Getting it?’ ‘Kind of.’ ‘So that’s why I’m telling you to eat a wholesome meal — roti, sabzi, dal — by 6-6.30 p.m., when all you eat is junk. Every calorie you eat will be worth the nutrients.’ ‘This variety is all junk or what? Even if I make it at home?’ ‘You really need me to answer that? Yes, Hinaben, make it more than once, max twice a week, and it’s junk. Too little nutrients too many calories. One person’s sabzi in a ten-people ka kadai.’ ‘Okay, can I eat moong dhokli? I’ll eat it with sabzi separate. It’s like dal dhokli. So the roti I will mix in moong ka dal. My mother-in-law loves it and so does my son. So

For every one calorie of food you eat, ten calories of (rapidly depleting) fossil fuels are stealthily expended in producing it.

When we consider treating a disease with a new therapy, we always have to consider potential side effects such as these. If a drug prevents heart disease but can cause cancer, the benefits may not be worth the risk.

Feeding the urban fleet of horses hay and grain supported many thousands of farmers. An idle riding horse in New York City required about 9,000 calories of oats and hay per day. A draft horse in the same city working in construction required almost 30,000 calories of the same feeds. Annually, each draft horse consumed about 3 tons of hay and 62.5 bushels (1 ton) of oats. It took roughly four acres of good farmland to supply a working city horse that year’s worth of feed.9 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when cities in America were limited largely to the East Coast, farmers seldom transported bulky loose hay more than twenty to thirty miles to city markets.10 The commercialization of the hay press in the 1850s, operated by hand or by horse-powered sweep, reduced the bulk and thus lowered the cost of shipping hay, while the opening of the Midwest’s tallgrass prairies to settlement and farming in the intervening years met the increasing demand for horse feed. By 1879, national hay production totaled 35 million tons, a figure that had nearly tripled to 97 million tons by 1909. More than half the land in New England was devoted to hay by 1909 as well, and at least twenty-two states harvested more than a million acres a year of hay and forage.11 The mechanization of American agriculture with horse-drawn or horse-powered machinery supported this vast expansion.

Interventional studies putting around three to six cups’ worth of daily green or oolong tea to the test showed an average metabolic boost of about one hundred calories a day, shaving off three butter pats’ worth of extra fat every day.

In this industry, we need 16 calories to produce a calorie’s worth of cereals, 70 calories to produce a calorie’s worth of meat. Roughly two pounds of cereal are needed to produce a pound of fish or poultry; four pounds of cereal, for a pound of pork; seven, for a pound of beef. This costs a lot in terms of agricultural surface area. Not to speak of the horrible conditions, in most cases, of production and slaughter in what must be called meat factories—factories in which one can observe behavior which would have been inconceivable in the time of our grandparents. Animals are treated with unheard-of cruelty—and done so on a massive scale: in the United States alone, more than 9 billion animals are killed every year.

When you attempt to change, if you’re part of the 92%, this happens: 1. You decide to change. 2. You are scared of the change, but determined to do it. 3. You start. 4. You hit a wall. 5. You stop your new action and fail to achieve change. This almost always happens at the beginning. You don’t really know what to do; you lack skills and/or knowledge. You are destined to struggle at first. After the first failure, your doubts awaken anxiousness. You try again, you fail again. Your doubts get stronger, your resolve weakens. You lose your enthusiasm for the change, and your efforts from this point are half-hearted. Half-hearted attempts have even less likelihood of succeeding, so you fail again and your negative attitude is reinforced. The problem is that you expected significant results too soon. That’s the curse of instant gratification at work. It’s completely unrealistic to expect a visible change in your body shape two weeks after starting a new diet. If it’s a balanced diet, not some Tic-Tac hardcore regime (only two calories), you can reasonably expect to lose maybe four pounds. Two is more realistic. Let’s say three on average. Even if you are a skinny fellow like me, three pounds is just 2% of your body weight. That loss will be almost invisible. That result may not seem enough for the effort you are making. Well, it is actually a great result. If you keep that pace, you would lose 78 pounds in a year. That’s visible even on obese people. However, you’ve set your internal evaluating mechanism to expect much more in a shorter time. You had the picture of your skinny bikini or 6-pack self in your mind, but all you see in the mirror is your same old flabby self. What is more, you’ll usually take intensive action when you begin something. You’re keen! You want results! You use this initial enthusiasm to apply massive effort. A very restrictive diet! A lot of exercises! It’s no wonder that after two weeks of such hard work you decide (at least subconsciously) that it’s not worth it. Do you see what’s happening?

At the risk of oversimplifying a bit, the carbohydrate from our doughnut has two possible fates. First, it can be converted into glycogen, the storage form of glucose, suitable for use in the near term. About 75 percent of this glycogen ends up in skeletal muscle and the other 25 percent goes to the liver, although this ratio can vary. An adult male can typically store a total of about 1,600 calories worth of glycogen between these two sites, or about enough energy for two hours of vigorous endurance exercise. This is why if you are running a marathon or doing a long bike ride, and do not replenish your fuel stores in some way, you are likely to “bonk,” or run out of energy, which is not a pleasant experience.

It’s estimated that the average person consumes 400-800 calories worth of added sugars per day, which on a 2000 calorie diet equates to 20-40% of empty calories with no nutritional benefit[843],

Whether you walk on two or four legs, the dominant function of a leg is to be a pendulum. This is illustrated in figure 19, but if a picture is worth a thousand words, then action is worth even more, so take a few steps around the room and focus on what your right leg is doing. Notice when it isn’t on the ground, it swings forward like the pendulum on a grandfather clock with its center of rotation at the hip. This “swing phase” of a stride is primarily powered by your hip muscles. Your leg’s pendular action flips, however, at the end of the swing phase when your foot collides with the ground. At this instant, your leg becomes an upside-down pendulum whose center of rotation is the ankle. In essence, your leg becomes a stilt during this “stance phase” of the stride. The stilt-like behavior of legs during stance is key to understanding how you use energy when you walk. During the first half of the stance phase, muscles vault your body up and over that leg, elevating your center of mass about two inches (five centimeters). That upward lift expends calories but stores potential energy, just as if you were to raise this book. Then during the second half of stance, your body converts that potential energy to kinetic energy by falling downward and forward, as if you were to drop the book. Eventually, your swing leg collides with the ground, halting your body’s fall and starting a new cycle. Walking thus costs calories to raise the body’s center of mass in the first half of stance, then redirect it upward and forward from one step to the next, and to swing the arms and legs.8 While at least one foot is on the ground at all times during a normal walk, the key energetic principle that moves you forward is using your legs like pendulums to exchange potential and kinetic energy. Quadrupeds like dogs and chimpanzees use their four legs in just the same way.

Transporting a single calorie of a perishable fresh fruit from California to New York takes about 87 calories worth of fuel. That’s as efficient as driving from Philadelphia to Annapolis, and back, in order to walk three miles on a treadmill in a Maryland gym.

People being what they are, not everyone in the colony really earns their calories every day. And dogs being what they are, Ash has proven his worth many times over.

Dried fruits and nuts appear to be so satiating that people feel full and unintentionally offset the calories elsewhere throughout the day. Studies on apple rings,5 figs,6 prunes,7 and raisins8 have found similar results. In the apple study, postmenopausal women who added two apples’ worth of apple rings to their daily diet for six months not only didn’t gain weight but experienced a whopping 24 percent drop in their LDL (“bad”) cholesterol.

Even more than I hate commodifying myself, I hate men judging me as a commodity. For thousands of years, women have been throughout their lives reduced to their worth as sexual objects (slash domestic workers). We learn very early on to go to great lengths to increase our sexual value in the eyes of men, without even realizing that's why we're (for example) agonizing over whether our one snack for the day should be a pear or a seventy-calorie sugar-free yogurt. For years- much of my childhood and early twenties- I spent the largest portion of my conscious thought on food and how much I hated and was terrified of my body. It has taken a lot of work to divorce my view of my body and my feelings of romantic worthiness from outside sources. I'm afraid apps would undermine that effort.