Calorie Counting, striking a balance

I initially lost some weight by calorie counting. Basically, I would track EVERYTHING I ate as well as logging all of my work-outs and calculating my deficit. It could be time consuming but I really didn't mind too much. The problem is that this isn't a truly realistic way to lose weight and keep the weight off. Now that I am in school again, it is really hard to continue to calorie count.

Eating clan when you are always on the run really is hard, and I keep making resolutions to do better every day, but then something happens to mess it up. So this week (Friday to Friday) I want to try to see how closely I can eat to my healthy calorie counting ways and still lose some weight (hopefully 1 pound) without calorie counting. Hopefully I will be able to post often to report how this goes. Also, I want to try to not eat even a gram of refined sugar if I can avoid it and see how I feel. I have tried to do this a few times but I always mess up. It's amazing how food can just sneak up on you like that. This is Especially true if I wait until I am really hungry to eat, which I will have to try to avoid this week.

Agave Noway

The first time that I remember hearing about agave nectar was when I worked at a tea shop in Chelsea Market. My boss there insisted that everyone used it as the new natural sugar. We had to endure plenty of customers complaining that we didn't have regular or artificial sugar. However, I was under the impression that agave was better for you! We were told at work that agave was a "natural" sugar that the body knew how to process better than other sugars. Unlike white or even regular raw sugar, the body supposedly knew what to do with agave, so that it wouldn't be stored as fat.

This is the type of marketing misinformation that is just ridiculous. Then there end up being plenty of people (myself included) who think that it's okay to have agave and that is better for you than regular sugar.

The problem with agave is that it has an even higher percentage of fructose than the dreaded high fructose corn syrup! It is also a myth that agave is unprocessed or "raw" although agave nectar is not AS processed as HFCS, it is processed to get it into the nectar state you buy in the store.

Also, I do understand that HFCS isn't much worse for you than regular sugar, so we should be just trying to avoid ALL processed sugar really, and the higher the fructose percentage, the worse it is.

Just as a reminder, these are the reasons why fructose in excess is so bad for you (weather is is in the form of regular sugar, HFCS, or agave) :
1) Fructose does not release the hormones insulin or lechten, which would normally tell the brain that you are full. Therefore if you are eating fructose you will continue to feel hungry even after you have eaten.
2)They raise your triglyceride levels and LDL cholesterol levels (all sugars do).
3) High fructose products are highly processed (including agave!)
4) Fructose is processed entirely by the liver whereas glucose is processed only 20% by the liver. This leads to the liver turning the fructose into fat cells and this not only leads to storing fat on the body, but also non-alcoholic fatty liver syndrome or gout!

So I'm sorry that it turned out this way, but agave is not better for you than regular sugar, it is actually worse for you, because it has a higher percentage of fructose.

If you are interested in learning more about this on your own, I got the information for this post from the Dishing Up Nutrition Podcast, a q&a with Marion Nestle, and Sugar: The Bitter Truth .