Weight Gain/Loss - Simple Explanation

Why do we gain weight?

Think of your body as a bucket with a small hole drilled in the side and above is a dripping tap. The dripping tap is your calorie intake, the food you consume. The drilled hole is your body’s calorie usage, the calories you burn.

So, if the tap drips faster than your leaking bucket, we all know what happens, the bucket fills and eventually overflows?  But, this is a magic bucket!… and rather than overflowing it grows to always fit its contents. Now does that sound familiar?

So how do we lose weight?

We need to stop our bucket from constantly filling, overflowing and growing. To lose weight we need it to empty faster than it fills, we need a calorie deficit. To maintain our current weight, we need the tap to drip at the same rate as the hole in the bucket drips. So to lose weight you have two options, or even a combination of the two.

Option One: reduce the speed of the dripping tap!  I hope it’s obvious to you now, we need a calorie deficit to lose weight. Reducing our calorie intake to be less than our body’s usage will cause our body to lose body fat, simple.

Option Two: Increase the size of the leaking hole. Yes if we increase the amount of calories we burn, being more than we consume, again we create a calorie deficit and we lose weight.

The rate at which we burn calories varies, from person to person, based on your lifestyle, your normal daily activity, your workout methods, also your body type and muscle make up plus your current body fat percentage and all of this along with your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). Now this is a little complex for this simple explanation and something I will cover in far more detail in another blog.

So losing weight is easy then?.... well the idea is simple

Losing weight is just as easy as gaining weight, it’s just that we are all very good at gaining weight because we can all eat what we want, when we want without keeping track of the calories or the macros. Again keeping this simple macros are another subject I will cover in more detail, but basically they are the relative quantities of fat, protein and carbohydrates. Without keeping track of our calories, how do we know what rate the tap is dripping? To lose or maintain our weight we need to do a little homework.

So what do we need to know?      

This all depends on the amount of body fat we wish to lose. Trying to lose a few pounds before your holiday requires less homework and determination compared to losing stones of weight for health reasons, or shredding body fat to sub 10%-12% to get those visible abs. We need a starting point. All our bodies are different and as I mentioned above we naturally burn resting calories at different rates. So we need to know our goals, we need to know our starting point and a bench mark. Once we know these we can work and adjusting our dripping tap and our leaking bucket.

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