Fat Maths

Fat is stored heat. The measure of that heat is a calorie. A calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one thousandth of a kilogram of water, one degree Celsius at sea level.

Hell is cold; heaven is nice and warm. Trust me on that one. Fear is a form of hell; it is cold. When we are scared or insecure we seek heat. That may come in the form of laughter, or an embrace, or the warmth of other’s personality, or it may be heat in the form of sex. But usually we treat the icy blasts of our threatened psychology with food. A Big Mac is 600 calories of heat. Two slices of pizza are 560 calories. Spaghetti with sauce is 820 calories. A pound of fat on your waist or hips is equivalent to 3500 calories of stored fear. It’s all mathematics.

Women doing light office work say, burn about 2200-2500 calories a day, depending on their height and weight. Men use about 10% more than women, up to about 3000 a day, if the man is six feet tall. If you do really hard physical work like digging ditches for a living, you can add about 500 calories a day to your needs.

Doctors say you should exercise everyday; doctors almost never get old, they usually die young. You can lose a little weight thinking about that; the electricity in the brain needs calories to operate successfully. Deepak Chopra once told me that if you exercise each day you only increase your lifespan by exactly the amount of time you have been running about. I can’t see the point of it myself. Certainly you can burn about 60-80 calories an hour rushing about at the gym, but it always seems a lot of effort; it’s not activity well suited to the gentle mind, especially when you can save a 100 calories if you drop just one piece of bacon from your breakfast. Still, if you walk to the pub rather than drive round it may help you a bit, who knows?

Crash-bang Hollywood diets usually work but if you lose weight quickly you will put it right back on again. You have to train your mind to be less fearful and cold, and you have to train your body to consume less heat. If you can get down to ingesting just 1500-1700 calories a day, you will lose weight gently over a period of time and you’ll train your body and your appetite to get used to it. It’s a mind-set first, and a personal discipline second. 1500-1700 calories a day is quite a lot of food; you won’t starve, if you consume your calories wisely. Obviously, salads and vegetables have hardly any calories at all, but the dressings can catch you out. One tablespoon of butter, oil or margarine is 100 calories.

Westerners are often emotionally cold, blob-like people that worry a lot. If you start your weight loss plan by developing a warmer, less scary lifestyle that will help with food craving because you don’t need the sudden influxes of heat to cope with the fear, and if you learn to meditate it helps you stay calm. I took to the Taoist philosophy a long time ago. It’s very detached. If the airplane goes down, you shrug and die. If it rains, you get wet. The Taoist accepts that the way things are is the way things are. It’s not Taoist to fight against circumstances, or to try to control others, or force them into actions you approve of. Acceptance is the key to the Taoist way of looking at things.

It doesn’t work for me all the time and I sometimes rant and rave and shake my fist at the gods, but I didn’t come here to be perfect and nor did you. If we were perfect we’d be flying about with little wings firing good ideas at loads of rather hopeless humans below. If I ever make it to the status of angel I want to be the angel of “Staring into the Distance, Humming.”

Humming uses calories but not many.

Calories:

Egg McMuffin, 300
Super size French fries, 610
Hardee’s chicken strips, 520
Nathan’s all-beef hot dog, 309
6” Subway, tuna, 410
One taco, 170
Arby’s turkey, ranch and bacon sandwich, 880
Vanilla shake (small), 560
Donut, Boston Kreme, 240
Donaut, glazed, 180
Bagel plain, 360
Bagel with cream cheese, 540
Baked potato, butter and sour cream, 500
12 ounces of regular beer, 150
5 ounces of wine, 100
Whistling at the clouds, 0

(Sources: Fast Food Calorie Counter. ISBN 7104951055
Nutrition for Dummies. ISBN 74470 51065)