Weight Loss Basics
The glossy pages of so many magazines scream, “Lose 15 pounds in two weeks!” And you get flyers on your car about miracle diets based on everything from your blood type to “detoxifying your body.” You read about stick skinny models and in the next article you read about the number of Americans who are overweight and obese. What is real anymore? And how do you sort through it all? That’s what I’m here to do. I’m educated and trained to do it–AND I LOVE IT. (Maybe I need a cape and a hidden identity. I’m “weight-loss-myth-debunker-woman”!)
Here’s the deal, weight loss is based on a very simple premise: eat fewer calories than your body needs or use more calories than you eat. But what does that mean and how does it work and how do you do it?
- A calorie (what we call a “calorie” on a food label is actually a “kilocalorie” in scientific terms) is a unit of energy. A kilocalorie is equal to the amount of energy required to raise one liter of water one degree centigrade. (From now on I’ll refer to them in the common term, “calorie.”)
- For human beings, 3500 calories is equal to about one pound. So, if you eat 3500 calories more than your body needs, you’ll gain one pound and if you eat 3500 fewer calories than your body needs, you’ll lose one pound. Can you see why losing 30 pounds in 30 days isn’t very realistic? Since most of us only need about 2,000 calories per day, that’s pretty much impossible!
- The number of calories we need depends on several factors: body composition, age, weight, gender, activity level and health status. (For our purposes, we aren’t concerned so much about health status, but for information’s sake, I’ll tell you that very ill people or people with burns and serious infections often have very high energy or calorie needs.)
- Body Composition: Because muscle requires more fuel than fat, people with more muscle use more calories.
- Age: You ever seen a teenage boy eat? Whew! They’re growing like crazy so they need lots of calories to build bone and muscle on top of the fuel they need to go to basketball practice. Also, as we age we tend to lose muscle mass. Some of it is that we’re not going to basketball practice anymore and some of it is just the aging process.
- Weight: We need food to maintain our weight. A 35 year old woman who weighs 110 pounds needs far fewer calories than a 35 year old woman who weighs 180 pounds. This is also one of the reasons we hit plateaus when we’re losing weight. As the weight disappears, we require less fuel.
- Gender: I know it’s frustrating ladies, men seem to just drop the weight when they want to. First, it’s because they usually weigh more and second it’s because they tend to have more muscle mass than we do.
- Activity Level: A ha, something we finally have some control over! The more we move, the more energy we need to do it. Also, the more muscle we build, the more calories we need to simply exist as we sit watching “The Mentalist.”
So what does this mean for you? If you take in 500 calories less or spend (through physical activity) 500 calories more per day than you need, you’ll lose about 1 pound per week. (Get it, 500 calories X 7 days = 3500 calories or one pound.) I like this link to help you figure out how many calories you need: http://www.webmd.com/diet/healthtool-metabolism-calculator
How do you do that? You can count calories if you want–that’s how Weight Watchers works. And for some people it’s a fantastic solution. Some people hate counting calories so they just eat smaller portions by sharing an entree, having one scoop of ice cream instead of two or having a six inch sandwich instead of a foot long. You can trade lower calorie foods for higher calorie foods by having strawberries for dessert instead of chocolate cake. You can get rid of some calories all together by switching from regular soda to diet soda. You can also add physical activity to burn calories (be sure that you don’t increase how much you’re eating though!)
In my posting, I’ll talk about different ways to lower calories to lose weight and ways to add more activity. I COMPLETELY understand that when put into practice weight loss is far more complicated than “calories in vs. calories out” but I wanted to provide the basics. I’ll talk about emotional eating, motivation, enjoying food, mindless eating, planning meals, exercising, creating an exercise plan and lots of other things. And if there’s anything you would like to read about, please let me know!
