NUTRITIONAL DEFICITS CALORIES

A nutritional deficit is a concept that focuses on how many calories we can consume a day without increasing our waist-line. Let's say we can eat 2,000 calories a day without expanding out of control. Than each calorie in these 2,000 calories needs to contribute vitamins, minerals, enzymes, amino acids, carbohydrates, and fats to fill our body's daily needs. The calories need to deliver a 100% of the nutrients necessary for our bodies to rebuild. When part of our 2,000 calorie intake is in empty calories such as: sugar, processed flour, etc, those calories delivery energy to the body with no nutritional value. Thus, those calories create a nutritional deficit that the remaining calories need to make up.

Moving this explanation on further, we consume a great amount of pre-processed foods. Almost everything in the grocery store is pre-processed foods. What isn't pre-processed has been grown on soils with significantly reduced mineral counts due to our farming practices. It is easy for us to create a nutritional deficit in our bodies.

And than comes the cravings. Suddenly restricting our calorie intake feels like a diet because we are still hungry and we eat. Interestingly enough, it appears that our cravings in a nutritional deficient body are not for what we are lacking, but for sugars and fats. Just typing this makes me want a McDonalds burger. Suddenly, that McDonalds burger consumed 500 of the 2,000 calories I was going to limit myself to and now I'm at 2,200 calories. The burger is predominantly fat and empty sugar calories. I'm going to feel great for a couple hours and than I'm going to come down too quickly and become hungry again. So, maybe I end up this day around 3,000 calories and never get my nutritional needs met.

It use to be, a couple centuries ago, that excess weight was a sign of great wealth. Our food was more organic and wealthy people had the finances and freedom to consume great amounts of very wealthy food. Today, obseity is more a sign of great poverty. This analogy makes sense also, because many over-weight people today are actually starving to death. The nutritional deficits that we rack up during the day compound over our lifetimes. Chronic diseases set in and our slow, debilitating decline into aging and senility started in our childhood.