Lose weight with the food You’re already eating

   Lose weight with the food You’re already eating

i watched interviw Jennifer Ludington for her upcoming women’s weight loss seminar, The Freedom Body Project.  In that interview I shared one of the most valuable techniques I’ve ever devised for losing weight: the food line-up exercise.

You see, people tend to think about dieting in terms of giving up foods they already eat, and adopting new foods that they aren’t currently eating.  The point of this exercise is to show you that some of the foods you’re already eating are much, much healthier than others.  

Well, kind of.  For the sake of this exercise, we’ll only be looking at caloric density– how many calories per gram each food has.  That’s only one of several factors that determines how healthy a given food is, but it’s a very important one, especially as it pertains to weight loss.  

Here’s how to use a food line-up to assess your diet in just 30 minutes

Clear a long space on a table or countertop.  You’ll need to be able to line up a bunch of foods left to right, so this space should be at least three feet long.  The more well-stocked your pantry is, the more space you’ll need.  

Start a new note or word processor document on your phone or laptop.  Name it “food line-up,” “food calorie density,” or something like that.  

Pull out some coffee, tea, and/or diet soda and set it on the far left end of the space you’ve cleared.  In your note file, write “coffee/tea/diet soda- 0 calories/gram.”

Pull a bottle of oil and/or pack of butter out of the pantry and set it at the far right end of the space you’ve cleared.  Then write in your note file, below the last entry “butter- 9 calories/gram.”

Now pull out other foods, beverages, sauces, or other consumables one by one.  For each one, look at the nutritional information and calculate how many calories per gram that food contains.  Write that down in the note file somewhere in between your coffee and your oil- keep all of the entries ordered by calories per gram.  

After recording the food in your note file, place it in the line-up in that same order– further to the left for low-calorie items, further to the right for high-calorie items.

Once you’re done– once you’ve done this for every food item you have– take a photo of the whole thing. 

To recap: at the end of all this, you have a photo of all your food lined up, and a note file saying what order they’re in, and how many calories per gram are in each one.  

I just did this exercise today– let’s take a look at what I ended up with, and see what lessons we can glean from the exercise.  First, here’s my photo– the same one from the top of this article.