How gluten-free oatmeal fits in with Calorie Cycling…
I understand that if you’re primary purpose for being here is to get
an answer to the question: “Is oatmeal gluten-free?” and not to learn anything about Calorie Cycling. However, if you’re in a situation where part of your diet research has to do with weight-loss, then you might be interested to learn both about Calorie Cycling and the answer to the question is oatmeal gluten free.
Calorie Cycling is a weight loss technique whereby you alter your
weekly caloric intake, so as to keep your metabolism guessing and to
avoid going into starvation-mode, while still maintaining a calorie
deficit and helping weight loss. That’s a mouthful, so let’s break
that down.
Your body needs a certain amount of calories per day in order to
maintain its current weight. There are a few different equations out
there to determine exactly how many calories that is, but the one
we’ll focus on is the Harris-Benedict equation, which takes into
account your current weight, height, gender, age and activity level,
and then outputs how many calories somebody of your type go through in a day.
I’ll give you an example. I’m 5’11”, 36 years old, male, and 210
pounds, and my exercise level is little-to-no exercise (desk job).
According to the Harris-Benedict Equation, I need 2445 calories per
day in order to maintain my current weight. If I eat more than this,
I’ll gain weight. If I eat less than this, I’ll lose weight. That’s fairly straightforward. Note that 2445 calories a day is 17115 calories per week. We’ll get back to that in a second.
The question is, how much weight will you gain or lose? Here’s where the math gets interesting. It takes 3500 calories to make up a pound. So, if I want to lose one pound a week, based entirely upon dieting, all I need to do is consume the weekly maintenance average of 17115 - 3500, or 13615 calories. If I eat that amount in a week, according to my body type and exercise level, I should lose one pound per week. I could have simply divided 3500 / 7 to figure out the daily amount, but we’re not going to do it that way, the reason being that we’re going to incorporate Calorie Cycling.
The basic idea here is to establish a calorie deficit. You consume
fewer calories than you need to maintain your weight, and you lose
weight. The opposite of that would be a calorie surplus, but since
we’re talking about weight loss, let’s pretend that term doesn’t exist, because we really don’t want to explore that option. 
Here’s where the theory of Calorie Cycling comes into play. As we
mentioned before, we could have just said 2445 calories per day, minus 500 calories per day, leaves us with 1945 calories, and that should be an adequate calorie deficit to ensure weight loss at one pound per week. However, the thing we want to avoid is to have the body go into starvation mode, to sense that it’s not getting enough calories and therefore adjust its metabolism downward. A lower metabolism means fewer calories are getting burned, and so you’ll lose some of the effectiveness of the deficit. An additional problem is that your body will increase your levels of appetite, meaning that you’ll be plagued with hunger and it’ll be tougher to keep enthusiastic about your diet.
Enter Calorie Cycling. The idea is to adjust your day-to-day calorie
consumption levels so that on one day you eat more than average, and on the next day you eat less than average. To put it simply, your body never gets a chance to think it’s starving. All you have to do is make sure that over the course of the week, you’re still averaging a calorie deficit of 3500 below your maintenance.
Let’s say you have the same stats that I do. A diet plan might involve something like this:
Monday: 1956 Calories
Tuesday: 1680 Calories
Wednesday: 2348 Calories
Thursday: 1956 Calories
Friday: 1761 Calories
Saturday: 2152 Calories
Sunday: 1956 Calories
Notice that this day essentially includes some days of relative
binging. Wednesday and Saturday could include an extra snack of some kind, perhaps an extra helping of something you like, or else a dessert.
Does this work? The science is still new and the results are going to
be anecdotal. I learned about all this through researching a few
different Calorie Calculator websites, and I evenually learned that
this was a part of some people’s body-building diet plans. What I can
tell you is that I started using a Calorie Cycling technique of my own
starting on my 36th birthday, when I weighed in at 250 pounds, and
here, about a month before my 37th, I’m now down to 210 pounds, and I have done this without any strenuous exercise. There have been a few extra tweaks to my diet (including more fiber, less sodium, bans on sugary soft-drinks and regular water consumption), but the biggest and most profound change that I’ve made is a combination of maintaining a calorie deficit, and incorporating Calorie Cycling throughout the week.
Perhaps the reason that you don’t hear more about this is because of a few factors. The weight-loss that I’ve been experiencing has been extremely satisfying, but it’s also been long-term. Magazines and websites want to sell you on the idea of drastic weight-loss over the short term, like losing 10 pounds in a couple of weeks, using some simple adjustments. I’ve always been a proponent of the idea that just about any reasonable diet should work, so long as you sustain it over the long-term. The problem is that many of the drastic measures that short-term weight-loss plans offer aren’t that sustainable. Your body senses that it’s starving and craves food, and either you give in to those cravings (and spoil your diet) or else you suffer (and probably end up spoiling it anyway). Also, while exercise plans are an effective component of most weight-loss strategies, if you get injured or your schedule changes and you can’t make it to the gym, then you can’t maintain your current calorie-consumption levels, since you’ll no longer be losing calories through exercise — you’ll need to be doing it strictly through diet anyways. I will say that if you’ve got the time, money and body constitution to handle a regular exercise plan, then you will be in a great position to lose weight more efficiently than strictly through diet control. I made the choice to do it only through diet simply because some short-term plans that I tried led to injuries — my own fault, to be sure, but that meant that weight loss had to occur strictly through diet.
This means setting up long-term discipline. That’s not easy. People
want simple solutions that happen quickly. If I’d taken a more drastic approach, I could have lost more weight more quickly, but I also wouldn’t have developed the long-term strategies I needed to get comfortable with a plan that didn’t make me feel like I was starving myself. It’s not as exciting to hear about plans that help you lose one pound per week, as compared to losing 10 pounds per month. If you can keep at it, though, you don’t burn yourself out and end up hating your diet.
The other part about Calorie Cycling is that it does take some work to figure out how many calories you’re eating. I personally have a simple diet that involves a lot of repeat meals that I like, and so how I handled it was to do all that research up front, measuring calories,
sodium, fiber, etc. and coming up with a regimen that worked for me. By doing all that research, I could take a look at my daily
consumption (which might have altered due to unforeseen circumstances) and then say “Yeah, I can have that muffin.” or “No, I can’t have that extra helping of spaghetti.” as needed.
But here’s where oatmeal comes into it. (Sorry this took so long) Oatmeal is an EASY food to incorporate into a Calorie Cycling plan,
since all you have to do is to measure out a bit more or a bit less.
Do your research on the proper amount, buy a measuring cup, and the difference is less than a second of pouring. Even a relatively small amount of oatmeal that works out to about a 400 calorie serving can be really filling, and that helps a lot if you want to get full without consuming too many calories, making it a great meal to start the day when you’re on a low-calorie stage of your Calorie Cycling schedule
On days where I’m allowed to eat more, I can either have a bigger amount for breakfast, or maybe have a light mid-afternoon snack of oatmeal, or simply maintain the same amount and know that I can have a larger helping… Whatever. Oatmeal in general makes it easy to both stick to a set breakfast, as well as adjust when needed.
Of course, as discussed before, since this is also a website devoted
to gluten-free approaches, you’ll need to ensure that (a) any oatmeal you buy is uncontaminated by potential exposure to wheat, and (b) that you’re not also sensitive to avenin. However, if you’re safe on both counts, and if you’re looking to lose some weight, then oatmeal can be a great modular addition to plug into your diet. In my case, it’s helped tremendously with the Calorie Cycling techniques talked about above.
So, there you go! I know that was a lot to read, and it had only a
little bit to do with the question “Is oatmeal gluten-free?” at first.
Hopefully, though, you can see how oatmeal can be a great part of a
diet that either maintains a healthy weight, or else helps you lose
weight.
