When people think of fitness, they think of going to the gym and working out to get in shape. Or they think of sitting on an some machine to burn calories. They believe that the only way to win the battle of the bulge is to bust your ass working out.
What most don't understand is that while working out is important, fitness isn't won in the gym. It is won at the kitchen table. While working out builds muscles and makes one look buff, it is the fuel we put in out bodies that makes the gains possible. It provides us with the energy to work out and makes it easier for us to lose weight.
All foods we consume are broken down into a unit of energy called a kilocalorie. We generally refer to them as just calories. Our body needs a certain number of calories to function daily. This is known as the basal metabolic rate or BMR. This is an easily calculable value. Below is the formula for men and women. The results of the calculation should be accurate within 10%.
Women:
655 + (4.3 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) - (4.7 x age in years)
Men:
66 + (6.3 x weight in pounds) + (12.9 x height in inches) - (6.8 x age in years)
Plugging in numbers for myself I get a BMR value of 1758 calories. That means I burn that many calories a day doing nothing more than breathing. For someone with a day to day desk job like I have, you can multiply that number by 1.2 to get the basic number of calories that I burn in a given day. This number is what I call the tipping point. When I do the calculation I get 2109. Thus 2100 calories is my tipping point.
Weight control is simple equation. All of the fancy plans and diets you read about all come down to this simple equation. If I eat more than my tipping point of 2100 calories a day I store the excess calories as fat and gain weight. If I eat less than 2100 calories a day, I burn excess body fat to meet my daily needs. By doing so I lose weight. Now if I want to lose a pound of weight I must burn off 3500 calories worth of fat. That means I would have to eat at a 500 calorie deficit or 1600 calories a day for an entire week to lose 1 pound of fat.
The reason we exercise is to change the basic formula. If I burn 400 calories a day in exercise then my tipping point is 2500 calories a day. That means I can eat 2000 calories a day and still lose 1 pound a week. A much more reasonable way to lose weight.
Since the formula for BMR is not completely accurate and your daily activities can vary, you might have to play around to find out what your tipping point is calorie wise. The only way to know for sure is to track your daily caloric intake.
The only way to know that number is to track what you eat every day. I know that can sound painful, but sites like Fitday make the process a lot less painful. They have most foods in their database so all you have to do is plug in what you ate and they calculate all of the calories automatically. I have been using it for a few months now and I find it is easy to track my food intake.
If you are looking for additional motivation to track your food, a recent study has shown that people who track their food lose considerably more weight than those who do not.
Keeping a food diary -- a detailed account of what you eat and drink and the calories it packs -- is a powerful tool in helping people lose weight, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
The study involving 1,685 middle-aged men and women over six months found those who kept such a diary just about every day lost about twice as much weight as those who did not.
The findings buttressed earlier research that endorsed the value of food diaries in helping people lose weight. Companies including Weight Watchers International Inc use food diaries in their weight-loss programs.
The third step in my program is tracking the food we eat. By doing so we can learn what our tipping point is. That gives us powerful knowledge. It allows us to make smart decision about what we need to eat and how much we have to work out to meet our goals. It is a vital metric in living a healthy lifestyle. In the next step we will discuss what we need to be eating to live a healthy life followed by a strategy for exercising.
