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.
Hey! Subscribe
Thanks for reading and if you found it interesting
then subscribe so as not to miss my later blogs where I will cover some points in more detail.
Also, if you did find this interesting, would your friends find it useful too? if so please share so they can enjoy too - Thank You :)
No comments:
Post a Comment