..............IBIZA PERSONAL TRAINER - HEALTH & FITNESS ARTICLES
............................"ARE YOU EATING ENOUGH TO LOSE WEIGHT?"
.......................................................- Kev Grant
............................................www.ibizapersonaltrainer.com
It may sound like a strange question to ask a weight-conscious person, and an unlikely solution to weight-management issues, but as a working Personal Trainer it is a surprisingly common scenario I come across, and especially so with females. I would estimate that perhaps as many as two out of every ten of my clients fall foul of this seemingly strange metabolism anomaly whilst trying to control or lose weight, that they are actually not eating enough.
In this article I will explain this surprisingly common problem, and over the next few articles will also attempt to debunk some of the more common myths that I regularly come across during the course of my work with Clients.
Whilst the multi-billion-dollar diet industry seems to go from strength to strength, preying on people’s insecurities with a never-ending procession of fad diets, dubious products or latest “miracle” discoveries, the simple fact is that there is no escaping the basic rule, or rather equation, the Energy Balance Equation. It’s really very simple and based on the unchanging Scientific Law, which states that energy can neither be created, nor destroyed. It simply changes form, in the case of the human body, from chemical energy in the food we eat, to chemical, heat or sometimes motion - kinetic energy, in the body. Because it can’t be destroyed, we can therefore assume that all energy in the food we eat will either be used or stored.
It therefore follows that we can affect our bodyweight in one of two ways, we either can take in less energy, or use more. Either will have the same effect, that is to reduce the amount of energy stored as fat in the body, although one is significantly more effective than the other at doing this. We’ll come back to this in a later article.
A Pound (lb) of fat stored on the body equates to consuming 3500 extra calories over and above the amount our body actually required over that time period. This might sound like a lot, but it’s only an extra 115 calories per day for a month. Obviously however, if we consume an extra 500 calories per day, it will only take a week to store an extra pound of fat. Happily this also works the other way round, at least with the first of our examples, and if we consume 100 calories less than we need per day, we will lose a pound of fat in a month. At this point I would like to make an important distinction between losing a pound of fat, and losing a pound of weight, because they are not always the same thing.
To simplify things a bit at this point, let’s to compare the human body to a car. Our metabolism, which is linked directly to our bodies’ muscle mass, as only muscle tissue can burn calories, is the engine, and the food we consume is the petrol. As we know, the fuel economy we get from our car depends largely on how we drive it. If we drive it hard, it will not go as far as if we drive it really gently. This is exactly the same with the body. If we are very active, or do a lot of exercise, we need more fuel. So just like if we have a long way to go in your car, and not much petrol, we would drive gently, this is what the body does when it’s fuel intake is lowered for any reason. It doesn’t take much of a reduction; in fact a reduction of only 15% in calories is the threshold to drop the metabolism into “emergency mode”, which allows the body to run on significantly less fuel, up to 30% in fact. Now at this point it’s necessary to do the maths to explain how it is possible to eat less, and gain weight, or eat more and lose weight.
Consider Scenario One.
I am trying to lose weight. My calorie intake should be 2400 calories per day but I am under-eating by 600 calories per day on average, and only consuming 1800. This is only 75% of my daily requirement, and well under the “emergency mode” threshold and will cause significant metabolism reduction of up to 30%. This effectively means that I can now exist on 1680 calories, and because I am consistently not getting enough fuel, any extra over and above my new subsistence level will be stored as fuel reserves, or fat by my body (which thinks we are in a famine situation and is desperately trying to ensure we survive it.) Effectively I will now be overeating by 120 calories per day, and as we know this can mean putting on 1lb+ per month!
Now consider Scenario Two
I am still trying to lose weight, however now I am only under-eating by 10% of my daily requirement, i.e. 240 calories and am consuming 2160. My metabolism is still running at full steam ahead, and doesn’t think I being under-nourished on a long-term basis, and hence is happy to deplete my fat stores a little every day to make up the energy shortfall. So 3500/240 equates to losing a pound of fat every 14 days.
So we can see that I can eat 600 calories too little and possibly actually gain weight, or 360 calories more than that, and lose weight. Admittedly this is a simplified version of the figures, but the principles hold true.
Now to compound this effect, and coming back to the difference between losing weight and losing fat, it is likely that whilst looking at the scales in Scenario One I would see a reduction from time to time, particularly if I dropped below my new requirement of 1680 per day, and whilst it is true to say that the reduction would be partly comprised of body fat, it would also be partly comprised of muscle tissue (catabolism, which is where the body is forced to start breaking down muscle tissue to use as fuel) and this will only exacerbate the lowering of my metabolism, because as we know, it’s only the bodies’ muscle mass that can burn calories, and the less muscle you have, the less calories you burn.
Each individual’s figures are different, and are based on Age, Sex, Muscle Mass (weight minus body fat %) and activity levels which is the other main factor in metabolism, so it is rarely as simple as the examples given above, but the 15% threshold is the same for all of us. If you are starving yourself and struggle to lose weight, or perhaps even gain weight, there is a good chance this is you. The lesson is, that whatever your daily energy requirement, you should not go lower than 15% less than that figure, or you are likely to be not eating enough to lose weight.
.................Kev Grant is a REPS3 Qualified Personal Trainer based in Ibiza
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