The Key to Fat Loss

Posted by: Curt | Under: 40's/fit, 50's/fit, Children/fit, Diet and Weight Loss, General Fitness, Health, Ladies/fit, Prime/fit, Quick Tips, Seniors/fit, Sports, Travel/fit, Youth/fit | (0) Comments

Everyone is looking for the magic formula, pill or tip. So here it is- eat fewer calories if you want to lose weight. It is just arithmetic. If you want to lose fat, you have to burn more calories than you consume. The guy who works out with me had a startling discovery this week- he found out that even though he eats a good clean diet, he was eating about 50% more calories than he thought he was. The only way to really know how much you eat, is to write down everything that goes into you mouth (drinks, snacks, fruit etc.) and calculate it. One place most people get tripped up is with portion size. If you use the nutrition label to calculate the calories, make sure you are eating only one portion. Most people eat two and calculate for one and then can’t figure out why they aren’t losing weight when they “are only eating 1800 calories”. The reason is because they are really eating 3000 calories!

That said, Alwyn Cosgrove has a great post on the heirarchy for fat loss over at his blog. Definitely take the time to go read the entire post. But here are the 2 main highlights-

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Yep. It really is that important. Not eating a Big Mac with a large fries and a large soda saves you about 1400 calories and takes zero seconds. Eating them and then trying to burn off the calories will require 2+ hours of pretty hard work….

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I think it’s fairly obvious that the bulk of calories burned are determined by our resting metabolic rate or RMR. The amount of calories burned outside of our resting metabolism (through exercise, thermic effect of feeding, etc.) is a smaller contributor to overall calories burned per day. The biggest chunk is your RMR.

We can also accept that RMR is largely a function of how much muscle you have on your body — and how hard it works. Therefore, adding activities that promote or maintain muscle mass will make that muscle mass work harder and over time- elevate the metabolic rate. This will become our number one training priority when developing fat loss programs. There are studies showing RMR to be elevated after 12 weeks of only 800 calories when resistance training is performed. Other studies show an acute effect of increased metabolism for 38 hours post workout.

So if you only have time to do one activity – make it resistance training.

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So here is the pop quiz- what do you do to lose fat?

EAT LESS and do resistence training to build muscle mass.