How to Lose Weight According to Exercise Physiology
Living in the COVID-19 world, we are all stuck at home constantly raiding the fridge and then left wondering about how to lose weight.
The best advice for how to lose weight has to do with calorie deficit. It is a simple equation: calories in are less than calories out. It's not the sexiest topic; it's not the keto diet, it's not intermittent fasting, and it's not a cleanse (which by the way is one of my least favorite words). It takes a lot of work to make a plan and count calories while meal planning. The good news is, with all this extra free time, this is the best time to try this method. We're all about saving money right now and we are also about filling our time. I have laid out the easy 5 steps to managing calories below to make the process easier for you.
The 5 Step Process for Success
Figure out how many calories you burn at rest (resting metabolic rate), using this calculator.
Basal metabolic rate (BMR,calories you burn moving throughout the day). The calculator above has this listed as a simple choice of Light, Moderate, or Intense activity.
Create a food journal and see how many calories you're eating on a typical day (at least a 3 day average is recommended with one day being a weekend day). Logging a food journal really makes it real and holds you accountable to what you eat in a day.
Plan out a weekly menu, listing the calories of every item on your menu. If you are trying to lose weight without exercise, take your BMR and subtract 500 calories to give you your calorie goal for a given day. (7 day x 500 calories = 3500 calories or 1 pound of weight)
Set a realistic goal of 1 to 2 pounds per week if you want to have a better chance to keep the weight off.
Why is Calorie Counting Not Done More?
It can take a lot of time and a lot of effort to put all of this information together. Not everybody has the time, patience, or knowledge to do it. If you are one of those people who are looking at the 5 steps I have listed above, and you are thinking that is not for me, then I have all of the steps completed for you in my packet here. It takes a lot of the work out of figuring out where your daily allotment should be. It also goes a little bit further and breaks down the calorie requirements based on optimal carbs versus protein intake for building muscle, which I will talk about in another post. The point being I made a simple to use calculator that just takes some numbers from you and spits out all the data that you need.
This is something that I've used with a lot of clients with great success. many people out there think that this doesn't really work for them that their genetics are against them or some other limitation that they have. Only about 5% of people really have some sort of weight. For the vast majority the bigger issue is just doing an accurate calorie count. Not only does this method take time to plan out, it also takes a lot of willpower. This is a day in day out routine until you really learn an average that works for you and your activity level. The other problem is accountability if you don't have accountability then you're going to cheat and when you cheat it makes it hard to see results and why you don't see results and make you want to give up. But if you can really stick to your program, not only will you see results now, but you will also have a better chance of keeping the weight off 5 years from now.
Why Not Use One of the Sexy Buzz Word Diets?
As I mentioned earlier one of my least favorite words in the fitness world is the cleanse diet. There is nothing I hate more than hearing somebody say how much they love to cleanse their body. The body does not work that way. The body has the liver, the spleen, the intestines, large and small, to cleanse your body. There's no special food, drink, or anything else that is going to “clear out the free radicals” in your body better than your organs. As you can tell this is one of my biggest pet peeves. I am going to come off my soapbox now and talk a little bit more about these kinds of diets because they do have a place even if it's a small one.
Probably the biggest and ONLY benefit of these types of diets is it can help change your taste buds. By going cold turkey on sweets for a week or two, it will make you not like sweets as much when you come back to them. However, I do n’t think this outweighs the risks of low carb diets. I am going to detail this out now, with a summary of how the body uses energy. Note, this is an EXTREMELY abbreviated lesson in energy use in the body.
Diets like a cleanse, the keto diet, or intermittent fasting are all variations of the same kind of theme. Basically what you're doing is extreme calorie restriction for a set period of time. In the short-term you're going to see results from these kinds of “diets” because in the first few weeks of these diets you are dehydrating yourself and losing your body’s carbohydrate stores because your body cannot get the cars that it needs from your food, so it takes it from your muscles’ glycogen stores. When the body runs out of glycogen, it makes sugar from protein.
Why is sugar so important? Glucose is the start of the most efficient energy system your body has, the aerobic system (Scott & Howley, 2007). It makes energy using fat. If the body cannot get the sugar it needs from a carb, like a banana or bread, then it gets it from amino acids (protein) and fat (Marieb & Hoehn, 2019 ). What's the biggest source of protein in your body? You got it, muscle. Which negates the benefits of lifting. Also, if carbs and amino acids are not readily available, then fat is used as a primary energy source causing a buildup of ketones (Marieb & Hoehn, 2019 ). If ketones build up in the body they can lower the body’s pH level, causing death in extreme cases (Marieb & Hoehn, 2019 ). This is why I am not a fan of the keto diet, intermittent fasting, or other weight loss buzz terms.
Finally, a cleanse is just starving yourself. Your kidneys, liver, and spleen are CONSTANTLY detoxing your body.
Citations
Powers, S. K., & Howley, E. T. (2007). Exercise physiology: theory and application to fitness and performance. Boston: McGraw-Hill.
Marieb, E. N., & Hoehn, K. (2019). Human anatomy & physiology. Hoboken, NJ: Pearson.