Losing Weight

Transcript

In many ways the human body is an amazing self-regulating machine. If you set an appropriate goal, and eat enough of the necessary nutrients alongside the calories estimated for your lifestyle at that goal weight, you'll eventually reach that goal, if you live that lifestyle.

As impatient creatures, humans usually want a little bit better than, "eventually", so let's talk about what the body needs to make changes. As mentioned before extra calories and nutrition cause the body to release hormones that cause cells to absorb sugars and proteins, which we refer to as being in an anabolic state. When the body is absorbing nutrients from food it favors anabolism.

When the body's demands are not being met, it releases hormones to break down nutrients and make them available in many different ways.

It can break down muscle for protein, create sugars from fat, and even create sugars from protein, if it becomes necessary. These are catabolic processes.

When we think about dieting, society often tries to put their body into a catabolic state as often as possible, but there's a serious side effect to catabolism.

Because it's a "breaking down" state, it stresses the body in many ways, and prevents many necessary bodily functions

Long-term effects of being in catabolism include mood swings fatigue problems with your adrenaline system and muscle and bone loss so how do we plan a body composition change without suffering ill effects from constant catabolism?

We plan for a moderate long-term lifestyle change based approach. It's generally estimated that it takes 3500 calories to burn a pound of fat, and it takes slightly less than 3000 calories to build a pound of muscle through muscle protein synthesis

It's generally considered safe to lose one or two pounds per week at a consistent rate. For the obese faster rates can be maintained longer but they aren't necessarily advised

Once an individual has determined their daily energy needs from the Harris Benedict Equation losing weight is simply a matter of eating the sufficient amount of proteins, essential fats and vitamins, but limiting their calories by 3500 calories a week or 500 calories a day. That will lose one pound per week.

Seven thousand calories a week would lose two pounds a week but one thousand calories is a significant restriction.

Likewise, gaining muscle requires eating almost 400 more daily calories and gaining fat occurs when you've eaten at least 500 extra calories per day.

You simply take your daily needs, subtract 500 to 1000 and the daily intake of calories will eventually result in weight loss. Take the number of pounds you want to loses and project out one pound per week and you've got a plan for your weight loss

Anecdotally, there's a common pattern for weight loss.

Bodybuilders jokingly call it the whoosh

What seems to happen is, while the body is adjusting, it retains waters and calories even when calorie restriction is not severe enough to cause a starvation reaction.

At some point relatively soon, though, whatever body situation that causes that water retention sorts itself out and the body suddenly loses a large amount of water weight.

This is not like the fluid loss during exercise that needs to be replaced and often after the whoosh the body falls into an orderly and consistent weight loss, based on your calorie deficit. Studies have shown that the body can adjust to a wide range of calorie levels body fat percentages and activity patterns and function reasonably well, so when we're trying to lose weight, it's often helpful to think of the answer to the question, Why do we gain weight we gain weight?

In the simplest terms, because the body was told to store additional sugars fats and proteins from the blood and muscle cells aren't absorbing enough of them to prevent fatty tissues from taking them up. Losing fat's the opposite.

Fat is mostly stored in adipose tissue under the skin.

It's released to be broken down into sugars, when the body requires it. We can simply lose fat by starving ourselves but that opens us up all to the pitfalls of extended catabolism.

The simple pattern we want to follow is eating enough protein to keep muscles happy but little enough food that we eventually run out of energy and need to burn fat for fuel. Many articles have made breathless claims about meal timing, fasting and other related topics. Some of these claims have merit and some of them do offer improved performance through discipline, because exercise at a moderate intensity has been shown in peer-reviewed studies to have the biggest fat burning response once the available blood sugar is exhausted.

There are strategies for optimizing the performance of fat burning through nutrition timing but in general it's enough to know that pretty good results can be achieved by simply monitoring proteins, calories, and exercise.

Just by having a rough idea of the correct number of calories for your lifestyle and having that lifestyle include a few days of moderate exercise can allow for a total body change over the course of a year.

Creating an exercise and eating plan doesn't need to be complicated the most important factor is accurately assessing your current lifestyle and recognize that eating too few calories to support your desired lifestyle is equally as harmful as eating too many.

It's tempting to calculate the necessary number of calories at a time when it's easy to feel particularly uncharitable towards yourself and underestimate your necessary calories for the life you want. Then, having done that, a commitment to exercise for only 30 minutes three times a week significantly boost your metabolism. What you calculated as a small deficit suddenly has become a massive one. Instead, start with the life you want to have. Right now, decide where you want to be on the Harris Benedict chart and go from there.

In 2012 in korea a small study on police officers found that the harris benedict equation was the most accurate predictive equation but it was only accurate in around 40 percent of the subjects. In all the remaining cases they predicted too few calories indicating that the subjects were not accurately assessing their lifestyle demands. These researchers were investigating why shift-working police officers were experiencing such high rates of psychological and physical problems, many of which were associated with malnutrition. With that in mind, a lifestyle goal change is a matter of choosing your physical requirements first

For example you might want to lift a moderate amount of weight comfortably in your day-to-day life, like a child, so you want to be able to lift a higher amount of weight exercising two or three times a week.

If you want to be heart and lung conscious, you might commit to riding a bicycle two or three days a week and elevate your heart rate for at least 30 minutes.

Described like that doing a circuit on weight machines twice a week and riding a bike casually hopefully doesn't sound like a lot of exercise, but from our perspective that's not even light exercise, it's moderate to active, depending on how intensely you lift weights and what you do with the rest of your day. The difference between moderate and light is enough to lose a pound a week all by itself.

That's why thinking of yourself as sedentary then increasing your activity to active and reducing calories based on a sedentary lifestyle is so problematic.

A more consistently successful strategy is to plan to be active, eat to be active, then be active and allow plenty of time to achieve our goals in a pleasant way.