Dietary advice series...part 1

Greetings true believers.  I began poking around in some of my writings & found some nuggets worth putting out for the masses to consume.  This series will be some of my thoughts on diet in general, with the primary focus on losing body fat (or at least not gaining any).  The key to losing body fat or maintaining a low body fat level is calories.  To a very large extent, our body weight is the result of a sometimes complex energy equation.  There is no explicit formula for this equation but I’ve devised some general rules of thumb.
 

1)  It is a zero-sum game.  In other words, calories in – calories out = 0.  Absolutely.  It always does and always will.  The fuzzy part is determining the calories you consume (in) and the calories you burn (out) to any degree of accuracy.  Regarding calories in, there’s nutrition information everywhere (labels on all packaged foods, & there are websites like www.calorieking.com for everything else) that should make building a database of your regularly consumed foods fairly easy.  Seeking to determine your calories in accurately implies the necessity of measuring your foods.  Measuring cups, measuring spoons, and a food scale will become necessary tools to do this.  Over time, you’ll develop the ability to measure out your foods without all the tools based on experience, but until that day comes, use the tools.

     Regarding calories out, this can be harder to determine.  There are devices like Bodybugg that claim to be able to calculate your calories burned with up to 90% accuracy.  I’m not a fan of this technology b/c of the metabolic variation between individuals.  Height, weight, sweat rate, & body temperature aren’t the only factors that determine how many calories a person burns in a given time period.  The best way to determine your caloric expenditure is to instead determine your caloric needs to fall within one of three zones…losing weight, maintaining weight, and gaining weight.  Determining this involves trial & error as we all have a particular metabolic rate that’s dependent on so many factors, it would be impossible to predict.  What’s worked for me is to pick a starting number of calories that seems reasonable for someone of your stature and activity level (I started with 2000 calories per day.  I’m 6’4” with a desk job & I tend to gain weight easily) and eat precisely that many calories daily for two weeks.  If your weight goes down, you know you’re below your maintenance level.  If your weight goes up, you’re above maintenance, and if you’re weight stays the same, you’re within your maintenance range of calories.  I say maintenance range because there isn’t a particular number of calories that will make you gain weight that if you come in 1 calorie less then you’ll maintain.  Instead, I’ve found there to be a range of calories that allows you to maintain your bodyweight (for me it’s 2200-2400 calories per day).  Once your two weeks are up & you’ve determined which zone you’re in, your goals then come in to play.  If you are trying to gain weight & you maintained, you need to increase your calories until you start to gain weight.  If you are trying to lose weight and you maintained, you need to decrease your calories until you start to lose weight.  All of this is predicated on the assumption that you are on a sound strength & conditioning program.  These baseline calories need to revisited periodically as changes in body composition , age, and activity level create different caloric needs over time.

So that's part 1. Start to track your calories & get ahold of that waistline!

More to come...

PW