Last week I briefly touched on the subject of diet being a prerequisite for fat loss, and the fact that exercise alone won’t do much for taking inches off of your waist. Yet my little rant didn’t do the subject justice, and I feel that there are some folks that may benefit from a more detailed analysis of diet vs. exercise for fat loss.
I think most anyone who’s struggled with weight loss has at one point or another come to the conclusion that if they just work out regularly, they can eat whatever they want and not gain any weight, or even lose weight in the process. This may be true for some genetically gifted individuals (I can think of at least 2 that I know personally) but it tends to be the exception and not the rule. I know that if I don't watch what I eat, it doesn't matter how much I exercise, the fat stays put.
Making the fat go away generally comes from your energy balance. Your body uses ‘X’ amount of calories in a given day (I’ll tell you how to determine your own ballpark number here in a moment). If you take in fewer calories than you expend, your body must draw from its stores to fuel itself. If you take in more calories than you expend, your body will store them in fat cells. This is why people cutting weight will limit their caloric intake, while people looking to put on a lot of muscle are increasing it.
Where people start to have trouble is in determining the amount of energy their body expends on a daily basis, which is understandable because everyone has a different rate of expenditure and varying activity levels. Without going into too much detail, multiplying your body weight by about 14 for women, and about 16 for men will give you a number to work with. This isn’t going to be your exact number, but it will get you in the general area.
If you lead a very sedentary life, you will probably have to use a lower number to get a closer match. Someone who is on their feet all day at an active job can comfortably use the BW x 16 guideline to get a figure on about where they are. On the other hand, if you sit in front of the computer all day, or behind the wheel of a car, you may have to drop the number to as low as BW x 8 to make up for your lowered energy expenditure.
A difficult thing to work through is getting a decent mark on what your activity levels are. Some people think they’re doing a lot more than they are which can mess them up at first and actually cause weight gain. I’ll use myself as an example.
I’m fairly active, but let’s say hypothetically that every day I start feeling really tired in the afternoon so I feel like I’m expending more energy than I actually am. I’ll say my weight (200) x my perceived energy marker (16) and I’ll find that I have to eat about 3200 calories a day to maintain my current weight. Knowing myself in real life, I understand that eating 3200 calories a day would make me gain a lot of weight. So my actual marker is probably closer to the 12-14 range. This would drop my maintenance rate to around about 2400-2800 calories a day.
Now, to get an idea of how many calories you have to consume to lose fat, subtract anywhere from 10 to 25% from your maintenance number to determine a healthy amount of deficit. That would make my weight loss range be between 1400 and 2400 calories. Obviously the larger the deficit, the faster the weight loss, and generally, the more fat you have to lose, the faster it will come off at first, slowing down as you lean out.
So, following this guideline, if energy in is less than energy out you should be able to achieve varying degrees of fat loss. For some people, however, this isn’t the case. I believe that calories have context, and the way that different food types effect the body can change the results of your diet. I’m going to get back to this in a moment, but first I want to look at the energy balance equation from an exercise standpoint.
Now the above calculation of 14-16 calories per lb of body weight isn’t just an arbitrary number, it’s determined by a range of different variables that must be taken into account, such as resting metabolic rate (RMR) which is calculated by your age, weight, and height. There’s also the thermic effect of activity (TEA), which is the increased expenditure when the body starts to increase levels of activity. There’s the thermic effect of food (TEF) which is the body expending energy to digest and make use of the nutrients you’ve consumed, and there’s the NEAT or non exercise activity thermogenesis, which is the energy expended by the body performing basic functions, like thinking.
TEA and the NEAT are tricky because these results vary widely from person to person and even from day to day. A person who is active all day will obviously be expending more energy than someone laying in bed, but using average exercise amounts, the total outcome only really equates to an extra 3-5 calories burnt per lb of body weight. For a 200 lb man, exercising heavily for about an hour a day can burn an extra 600-1000 calories.
1000 calories sounds like a great loss to most people, but when you step back and realize how easy it is to eat 1000 calories in a meal, you can see how it’s possible to throw dirt back in the hole you’ve been digging. At McDonalds, an angus mushroom and swiss burger, with a regular fry and a medium coke is 1360 calories. I could polish that meal off in five minutes, and maybe still be hungry enough to eat an apple pie afterwards.
The point is that if you’re going to the gym, but aren’t watching what’s going down your gullet, you are running the risk of delaying your efforts at best, and actually wasting your efforts at worst. It’s sad that people pay gym fees and put so much physical exertion into looking and feeling better, but they don’t commit to properly fueling themselves, which causes them to fail.
While food amounts are important, the types of food you eat are just as much so. Basing the majority of your diet on grains, dairies, and sugars can cause insidious weight gain, even if you think you’re exercising enough and eating the right amounts. I’ll devote a more detailed article to the topic, but if you’re not seeing results, cut out all sugar from your diet. That means bread, pasta, corn, rice, table sugar, excess fruit, and excess dairy. These will all have negative effects on the results if not kept under close tabs.
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