Weight reduction may seem like a confusing or daunting task but in reality there exist many strategies that can help people lose and keep off weight. In order to understand how to lose weight, it is first necessary to know the factors that cause people to gain weight. There are a few concepts which can help illuminate weight loss and gain that are important.
Think of your body as if it was an older car, in order to get the car to run you must first fill up the tank with gas. The more that you run your car the more gas that you will consume as well as the more maintenance required to have your car running properly day to day. Maintenance can be seen as the bare minimum that your body needs in order to run or in our case, stay alive. All the processes in the body require energy including breathing, organ function, and thinking. This maintenance represents your RMR, or resting metabolic rate which is the amount of calories needed to keep all the parts of your body functioning properly.
Gas can be seen as the calories in the food and drink that you consume on a daily basis. You can have a perfectly working car with maintenance but in order to get it to move you must add gas into the tank. The maintenance and gas together can be thought of as your TDEE, or total daily energy expenditure which represents all calories needed to maintain your body and any work or movement that it performs in a day.
The more you move, the more gas you will need however if you overfill your gas tank, you will need to have extra gas canisters in order to hold that gas. Those canisters may be thought of as excess fat, which are the body’s reserve energy storages. Excess fat was used in ancient times when food availability was low as a mechanism to keep enough fuel to survive but in modern times, with convenient and widely available food those storages aren’t necessary and can cause damage by holding too much weight in the car or in our case, our bodies.
In order to lose weight, you must burn off all that excess gas (calories). This can be done by not filling up the tank quite as much and using up the reserve tanks (excess fat). This is the basis of a caloric restriction diet, lowering the total calories coming in and increasing the amount burned through things like physical activity and exercise. By calculating your TDEE (with simple tools like www.tdeecalculator.net) and lowering the amount by 500-750 calories per day, weight loss can be achieved. This may seem simple enough, but there are a few culprits that can make this difficult.
There are four components of our diet which are energy containing or that which produce calories when metabolized by the body. Protein, carbohydrates, lipids (fats) and alcohol. Proteins and carbohydrates each contain 4 calories per gram, while fats and alcohol contain 9 and 7 calories respectively per gram.
Added sugars are one of the biggest culprits when it comes to overconsumption of calories. They are found in a myriad of processed foods, from bread and pasta to soft drinks and sauces. A single 12 Oz can of soda may contain anywhere from 30-60 grams of sugar which adds 120-150 calories to your body without making you feel full (satiety) or giving you many vitamins and minerals which help the maintenance of your body. Cutting out many added sugars, by checking the nutrition facts label on the back of products which you buy can help lower the amount of calories consumed in a day.
High fat foods are another big culprit which may be adding excess calories into your diet, with 9 calories per gram. Fat is an important component of your diet and should not be avoided altogether but choosing low or fat free products can help lower your total caloric intake significantly. Fat also does not fill you up(satiate) as well as protein does per calorie ingested.1 Make sure to check the nutrition facts label to ensure that added sugars are not being substituted for fats, as that is often the case with fat-free foods.
As a bottom line, whole foods, or raw ingredients should be consumed as much as possible.
Physical activity and movement is almost as important as a caloric restriction. Movement of all kinds requires calories so by increasing physical activity you increase your TDEE. Try to get at least 150 minutes of physical activity per week, which has been shown to increase weight loss of approximately 2-3 kg and 225-420 minutes a week, a weight loss of 5-7.5 kg.2 Physical activity is a critical component of weight loss.
Ortinau, L., Hoertel, H., Douglas, S. and Leidy, H. (2014). Effects of high-protein vs. high- fat snacks on appetite control, satiety, and eating initiation in healthy women. Nutrition Journal, 13(1).
AWM: Executive Summary of Recommendations (2014). (2014). Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Evidence Analysis Library, pp.1-5.
