There are many ways that claim to help you to lose weight, including diets and exercise, fads and pills. However, before even considering how you want to lose weight, there are some things you should understand first: calories and the correct weight loss for you.
Calories
Anyone who wants to lose weight will be overly familiar with the word ?calorie?. Counting calories is drummed into anyone embarking on a weight loss program, with ?low calorie? everywhere you look. Furthermore, most of us have seen the food information table on the back of various food packets. They typically show how much fat, protein, carbohydrates and calories that particular food has. But is this information any good if you don?t understand what a calorie actually is?
What is a calorie?
Quite simply, a calorie is a measure of energy. So, in much the same way that a meter is a measure of length, or a liter is a measure of liquid, a calorie is a measure of fuel for our bodies. Because of this, everything we eat or drink is a potential form of energy for us to use.
Where do they come from?
Quite simply, calories come from eating food and drinking liquids. Different foods have different calorific values, meaning that some foods and drinks have more calories than others.
Where calories become confusing, is where in our food they are found. They come in carbohydrates, protein and fats, and each one has a different amount of calories. A gram of carbohydrates, for example, contains four calories, as does a gram of protein. A gram of fat, on the other hand, contains nine calories, more than double the amount found in carbs and protein. This is why many diets encourage ?low fat?.
How many calories do we need?
Every single thing we do uses up calories, from breathing to walking, physical exercise to simple bodily functions. In the same way that our cars need gas to even start, so we need calories to get going.
However, everyone needs a different amount of calories, and the number of calories a person requires depends on a number of factors:
1. Metabolism ? this is the rate at which you burn calories and is known as your basal metabolic rate (BMR). Your BMR is the amount of energy (or calories) that your body needs just to function while at rest. It basically includes all the calories required to do everything your body does while you?re not doing anything, such as breathing, blinking, your heart beat, and your body temperature within normal limits. Your BMR accounts for about 70 per cent of the calories you burn. It can be affected by several different things.
? Age ? Our bodies burn calories faster at different ages. As we age, our resting metabolic rate slows down. Our muscle mass also tends to lessen as part of the aging process. For both these reasons, we burn fewer calories the older we get so therefore need fewer calories to maintain our BMR.
? Gender ? The recommended calorie intake between the average man and woman differs. Men are recommended to consume 1900 ? 2700 calories a day, while women are recommended to consume 1200 ? 2200 calories a day. The reason for this is that men tend to have more muscle than women so they tend to burn calories faster. Also, in general, men tend to be taller than women and height also affects BMR.
There is a formula to work out your BMR, which in turn will allow you to better understand what your calorific intake should be.
Adult Male: 66 + (6.3 x body weight in pounds) + (12.9 x height in inches) ? (6.8 x age in years)
Adult Female: 655 + (4.3 x weight in pounds) + (4.7 x height in inches) ? (4.7 x age in years)
2. Physical Activity ? how active you are also has a huge impact on the amount of calories you will burn. A sedentary lifestyle, for example, will burn far fewer calories than a lifestyle that involves a lot of exercise or manual labor. However, physical activity also includes everything else you might do in a day, such as vacuuming, dusting and other household chores, walking to or from work, bending, lifting and any other day-to-day activity will all use up calories.
It?s difficult to determine how many calories any particular activity uses as the amount of energy used depends on your body weight. For example, cleaning and dusting can use up anything from 413 calories for someone weighing 130lbs, or 651 calories for someone who weighs 205lbs. However, it?s safe to say that the more physical the activity, the more calories are expended. There are many tools online that allow you to work out exactly how many calories you expend on a typical day.
3. Thermic Response ? the third and final way we use calories is, perhaps surprisingly, through eating. Your thermic response is the amount of energy your body requires to digest whatever you eat. From the moment you put food in your mouth, it begins to be digested by the body. From chewing, to swallowing, the digestive processes in the stomach and throughout the intestines; all of this uses up energy as your body transforms the food into substances it needs to survive, and expels the waste. Ten per cent of your total daily calorie intake is expended this way so, to work out how many calories you use eating and digesting your food, simply multiply the total number of calories consumed by 0.1.
How Many Calories?
You now have three numbers which, on their own, mean very little. However, when you add together your BMR, the amount of calories expended on physical activity, and your thermic response rate, you will have the exact number of calories you should consume in any one day to maintain your current weight.
Weight Loss and Calories
You should now understand the relationship between calories and weight. Your body only needs as many calories as it uses ? the number you have now worked out. So what happens to any calories that are left over? Quite simply, the body converts them to fat, no matter where they originated from. So, even calories from protein and carbohydrates will be converted to fat, and therefore weight gain, if you are consuming more than you are using.
Caloric Balance
Caloric balance is, quite simply, the maintenance of your current body weight. Imagine a balance weighing scale with calories in (what you eat and drink) on one side and calories out (the number you have just worked out) on the other.
? If these two numbers are roughly the same, then your body is in caloric balance and your weight should be stable.
? If you are gaining weight, your calories in are higher than your calories out.
? If you are losing weight, your calories out will be higher than your calories in.
Of the three factors that determine how many calories you need, the one that you can alter most quickly and easily, and therefore change your caloric balance, is your level of physical activity.
When you increase your level of physical activity, either by doing more or doing it more often, you increase how many calories your body is using. If, however, you don?t increase how many calories you consume, then your caloric balance will tip towards weight loss.
How Does Caloric Balance Cause Weight Loss?
As you know, calories are energy. For the body to do anything, even breathe, it needs calories. If you don?t consume as many calories as your body needs, in order for it to remain functioning and doing any extra activity you are asking of it, it will have to find calories from an alternative source.
You know that leftover calories are turned into fat and then stored beneath the skin. Well, this is so that, in time of starvation or emergency when calories are not in a large enough supply, the body can quickly make its own energy. It does this by breaking down fat stores and converting them back into calories.
That is why, when you consume fewer calories than you need or, on the flip side, when you do more physical activity than your calorie intake can support, you begin to lose weight.
How Many Calories Need to Burn to Lose 1lb?
To lose just one pound of excess weight, you need to use up 3,500 calories more than you take in. While that might sound like a lot of calories, the best way to maintain any sort of weight loss is to ensure it?s lost gradually.
So, to lose one pound a week, you need to reduce your calorie intake by 500 or increase your physical activity to burn 500 extra calories.
It?s generally considered safe to lose up to 2 pounds a week, and to do that you would need to reduce your calorie intake by 1000, increase your physical activity, or combine the two.
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