Thousands of articles are written each year on how to lose weight, each suggesting a different way to do it. However, the truth is that any excess weight you may be carrying is related to the number of calories you eat and the amount you eat each day. It is as simple as that and no one can prove otherwise. It’s like the gasoline you put in your car: you put so much in and you travel so far. In the case of your body, you eat a certain amount of food and it sustains you for a certain period of time. If you eat more than you use, the excess calories are stored as fat.
Let’s consider in detail the calories you eat and consume each day. It turns out that there are three main types of calorie burning. The first is known as the basal metabolic rate or BMR. It is the largest of the three and is your resting metabolism; In other words, it is the number of calories you burn when you are sitting down. It is used to fuel cells, keep the heart beating, the lungs working, the brain working, etc. About 60 to 80 percent of the total calories you burn each day are BMR calories.
The second biggest calorie burn comes from the thermionic effect of eating. It may seem a bit strange, but it takes calories to burn calories – in other words, to digest food. For protein, about 25 calories are needed for every 100 calories consumed, and for carbohydrates and fats, 10-15 calories are needed for every 100 calories consumed. And that can add up to a substantial amount of calories. It represents between 10 and 30 percent of the total calories you burn each day.
Finally we come to the one that might surprise you, that is, exercise and body movement in general. Most people think that exercise makes a big contribution, but it doesn’t. This does not mean that it is not important, it is. You can easily burn 500 calories in an intensive workout, but overall, for most people, exercise and body movement account for only about 10 to 15 percent of the calories you burn in a day.
Now let’s apply the above to a typical woman and man. First of all, we need TMB formulas, and they are as follows:
Adult male: 66+ (6.3 times his body weight in pounds) + (12.9 times his height in inches) – (6.8 times his age in years).
Adult female: 655 + (4.3 times her weight in pounds) + (4.7 times her height in inches) – (4.7 times her age in years).
As an example, we will assume that you are a 40-year-old woman who weighs 140 pounds and is five feet two. Substituting the appropriate numbers, we find that his BMR is 1360. For his thermionic calories, we multiply .15 by the total number of calories he ingested during the day. Suppose it was in 1900; his thermionic calories are therefore 285. The contribution of exercise and body movement is a bit more difficult to determine exactly, as it depends on the intensity and duration of exercise during the day. We will assume that it did not work; in this case, your contribution is probably about 200 calories. And this gives you a total of 1845 calories.
If you ate 1,900 calories during the day, you ate in excess of 55 calories. This doesn’t sound like much, but in two months (if you do this every day) you will gain a pound and in a year you will gain 6 pounds. (I’m using the fact that there are 3,500 calories in a pound here.)
Let’s do the same with a six foot man in his 40s who weighs 170 pounds. Substituting in our formula for TMB we obtain 1793. In this case we will assume a calorie intake of 2600; Multiplying it by 0.15 gives 390 times your thermionic calories. For exercise and body movement, let’s say you consume 300 calories (this means you didn’t exercise during the day). So your grand total is 2,483, and if you ate 2,600 calories during the day, you would be in excess of 117 calories. This will add up to a pound of weight every 30 days and about 12 pounds in a year.
It’s easy to see from this that weight gain can slip if you’re not careful. Even a few extra calories each day can add up to significant weight gain throughout the year. The best way to monitor how well you are balancing your calories in and out is, of course, to weigh yourself every now and then, and if you see that you are gradually gaining weight, you need to take steps to change things up asap. . You will need to slightly reduce your calorie intake or exercise more. And I would like to emphasize that while exercise doesn’t seem to make a huge contribution to the total calories we consume in a day, it can be very important. As I mentioned earlier, a good workout can consume up to 500 calories, and this could easily make up for any excess you may have.
