PART ONE – HOW THE BODY GAINS WEIGHT
A 2-year study from the New England Journal of Medicine included a low-fat diet, a low-carbohydrate diet and a Mediterranean diet. The findings indicate that it’s not what foods you eat, but it’s the amount of foods eaten, that leads to weight loss.
I’ll even go one step further than them and say it’s the amount of foods NOT eaten that leads to weight loss.
But before we get into that, let’s talk about what leads to weight gain.
As you already know, the foods you eat are energy. The term we use for that energy is Calories.
Most people that are overweight gain weight as a very slow process.
For instance, if you gain 1 pound of fat, over the course of the month, you probably weren’t sitting around gorging on burgers, fries, and chocolate shakes all day during the whole month…well, hopefully not.
What you did do however was take in more calories than you were expending.
The body burns calories in 3 major categories. The first is the amount of calories your body burns while at rest (RMR). Your body burns calories just to work it’s normal metabolic functions and to keep you alive, keep the organs and brain working, and keep other systems, such as the cardiovascular system, in working order.
My wife ate small meals like this open chicken breast sandwich with tomatoes and onions to lose 20 lbs. She also took up dancing.
The second major category is your daily activity level. In other words, for most of your waking hours, what are you doing? Are you sitting at a computer or in front of a television all day – are you sedentary? Do you stand on your feet all day, like a retail clerk at a grocery store? Maybe you work for UPS and unload 50 lb boxes from trucks all day (I actually used to do that years ago at the Oakland hub). Whatever the case, your activity level is a factor for consideration when determining how many calories you need in a day to lose weight.
The last major category is your exercise. A 180 pound individual burns about 250 calories walking at a normal pace, let’s say 2.5 mph, in one hour. That means that to burn 1 pound of fat, you would have to walk for 14 hours! (I personally prefer higher intensity workouts, such as our bootcamp, to cut my workout time down to only 4 hours…but that’s another article.)
So if you gained 1 pound over the course of a month, that means you ate an extra 3,500 calories – ON TOP OF WHAT YOU NORMALLY EAT. Divide 3,500 calories over the 30 days for the month, and you get 116. That 116 calories per day is all you would need to have eaten over the amount that your body needed to gain weight that 1 pound in a month.
Some days you eat a little more, some days a little less, but your average still comes out to be at 116 calories over your daily need per day.
So let’s say you repeated that scenario over the course of 12 months. Well, that means you just gained 12 pounds, right? Let’s repeat that for 10 years. That means that you will have gained 120 pounds in ten years…JUST BY EATING 116 CALORIES OVER YOUR DAILY CALORIC NEED PER DAY!!
Now this is what I hear all the time. “Forrest, you’re gonna have to work me extra hard today…I just gained 2 pounds over the weekend!”
No you didn’t!
It may say that on the scale, but that’s just water weight (possibly from the alcohol and salty foods you ate at the Olive Garden the night before).
There’s NO WAY you gained two pounds of fat over the weekend. Not unless you ate about 12 big macs ON TOP OF the amount of food you normally eat in a day.
The way weight gain occurs in the real world is in small increments, calorie by calorie, day by day, month by month, and year by year.
So now that we have weight gain in perspective, we can talk about weight loss, and understand that the same concepts apply.
Weight loss, to me, means fat loss. In other words, I believe that when losing weight, it’s best to do weights training, not just cardio and diet, to reduce body weight.
That way, you can keep muscle, and keep your metabolism, and even add to your body’s ability to burn more calories.
More on how the body loses weight with Part II later.
Your Trainer For Life,
Forrest Folen, MCT
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 4:12 pm.
