Fundamentals of Weight Loss

Energy Balance

There are hundreds of weight loss plans, practices, and beliefs being peddled around our society. The diet industry is a multi million dollar one, and its salesmen have muddied the waters for us all. 

The truth is, there is only One Way to lose weight. A lot of the convoluted diet plans floating around out there can help you towards your weight loss goals, but only because one way or another they accomplish the One Way (but most often these restrictive, rule-laden plans ultimately fail because they aren't sustainable). And here it is, The Secret: 

A CALORIE DEFICIT. 

Our bodies are incredible, mind-blowingly complicated and intricate things. However, they are also straight-forward in a lot of ways. Thankfully, we are able to understand a lot about our bodies’ need for and use of energy. Like cars run on gas and electricity uses joules, our bodies’ unit of energy we call a calorie. We are able to make a pretty educated guess on the amount of these units any body uses in a given day, and the exciting thing is that that number is manipulatable!  

Here’s how it works:

1. We use units of energy (calories) to run all our body processes that are automatic (brain function, breathing, body temperature, all organs, etc.). Without even employing our bodies in any active way, we all have a resting metabolic rate (RMR), or calories we utilize just staying alive and functional every day. 

2. We use units of energy (calories) to digest our food. This is called the thermic effect of food (TEF). Most people say that about 10 percent of the calories you eat go directly to fueling the digestion process. However, the truth is that calories that come from fat and carbohydrates use about 5-10% of their own energy for digestion, BUT protein uses aout 30%. 

3. We use energy to fuel non exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). This encompasses all movement you incorporate into your day that isn’t formal exercise. All fidgeting, all walking, cleaning, grocery shopping, standing, etc. falls into the NEAT category. This is one of our secret weapons! We can manipulate this number a lot to create a larger calorie deficit! 

4. We use energy to fuel our formal exercise. This is also a very manipulatable number, as more calories burned in exercise can create a bigger deficit. But truthfully this 4th aspect probably burns the least calories of the 4 categories during your day.  Here’s where its major importance comes in: because skeletal muscle uses more energy just being sustained, the more muscle you develop, the higher your RMR (see #1) will be. 

If we can bring our energy intake (the amount of calories we eat) down below the amount we are utilizing every day, we will lose weight (more on the importance of protein later!) Research shows that about a 3500 calorie surplus or deficit equals one pound of weight gained or lost. So all we have to do is manipulate either how much energy we consume or how much energy we are burning, or even better, BOTH, to create weight loss! 

We aim to do this in a gentle, unrestrictive way (more on the pitfalls of restriction later!) that is straight forward, without rules, without food labeling, that creates a sustainable lifestyle. We want to love our bodies well, fuel them in a way that meets their needs and keeps our spirits calm!