Fitness – Tsensational Fitness

What is Energy Balance and Why Does It Matter?

tsen — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 15:00:06 +0000

Have you ever gone on a diet that didn’t work? Or perhaps it did, but you gained the weight lost right back? If you’re looking for mastery over your weight loss and maintaining your weight after a diet, this is the article for you! The biggest “secret” behind how I consistently create client success stories isn’t exactly a secret, but rather an uncomfortable truth. Whether or not a person gains or loses weight is wholly dependent on a simple principle called Energy Balance–how many calories you eat versus how many you burn.

Energy Balance is a basic representation of physics and the law of conservation of energy. Energy (the calories you eat in food), cannot be created or destroyed; rather it can only be transformed from one form to another. In plain English, it means:

When you eat too much food (calories, energy) it has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is fat in your butt, waistline, etc.

Eat just what your body needs, and your weight stays the same.

Eat less than what your body needs, and the body eats its own energy stores (fat, glycogen, muscle) to make up the difference.

(Insert gfx to illustrate these points.)

Intuitively, we all know this. However, because the fitness and supplement industry constantly bombards us with news of special “fat burning foods”, supplements, and diets that claim to give some fat-loss advantage that others don’t, we conveniently forget because they do some damn fine marketing and often by twisting or withholding scientific truths. Plus, not a lot of people like being told that they have to eat less in order to lose weight. People want shortcuts, and I hate to be the one to say the harsh truth, but If you’re eating too many calories, you’ll never lose fat no matter what diet or supplements you’re on.

As a coach in the industry for a decade, I’ve heard it all. “Calorie counting doesn’t work.” “Intermittent Fasting is the best way to lose fat.” and more recently, much pushback from dogmatic proponents of the Keto lifestyle. Hell, even I was a skeptic about calorie counting in my early years. However, opinions are just that. Science is the truth. People have mixed results when they diet because they aren’t using the principle of Energy Balance correctly. Here is the step-by-step “secret” to how I consistently create client success stories:

Step 1: Take your measurements.

Record the following:

Weight

Height

Body Fat Percentage

Step 2: Find your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).

BMR is the total number of calories you burn just to keep the body alive. It does not include energy burned through exercise, and daily movement. We have two equations to choose from.

If you have determined your Body Fat Percentage:

Use the Katch-McArdle BMR formula

370+(21.6 x lean body mass in kg)

If you do not know your Body Fat Percentage:

Use the Mifflin-St Jeor BMR formula

Male: (10 × weight in kg)+(6.25 × height in cm)-(5 × age)+5

Female: (10 × weight in kg)+(6.25 × height in cm)-(5 × age)-161

As a quick review…

1 lbs = 0.45 kg

1 ft = 12 inches

1 inch = 2.54 cm

Step 3: Find your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE).

TDEE is the total number of calories you burn on an average day going about your business, working out, fidgeting at your desk, etc.

Take your BMR from Step 2 and multiply it by the appropriate Activity Multiplier:

Sedentary: little or no exercise, x1.2

Lightly Active: light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week, x1.375

Moderately Active: moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week, x1.55

Very Active: hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week, x1.725

Extra Active: very hard exercise/sports and physical job, x1.9

For best results, I strongly recommend erring on the conservative side–at least for your initial baseline calculation. My clients slay it in the gym 4-5 days a week and I typically use between a 1.15 to 1.2 multiplier when estimating their TDEE. This number is highly variable depending on genetics and lifestyle as well. Fine-tune it as necessary.

Step 5: Find your dieting target

TDEE (your total daily energy expenditure) is the amount of calories necessary for you to maintain the current body weight. In order to lose meaningful weight, we need to consume fewer calories than TDEE, putting us in a caloric deficit. I suggest a 20-25% reduction.

Daily Calorie Target = TDEE * (1 – % Reduction)

Ex. A TDEE of 2000 calories and a 20% reduction.

2000 * (1 – 0.2) = 1600 Calories/day

Step 4:

The goal is to stay at or below your TDEE. To do this, make a meal plan (link to our service page) or track your calories daily. Tracking and looking up the calories in food items can be done with various free apps and websites such as MyFitnessPal and CalorieKing, to name a couple.

I know doing math sucks. So, to make things easier for you guys, we have developed a handy dandy calculator for you to use! Just punch in your measurements, activity multiplier, and voila!

(Javascript app like https://legionathletics.com/macronutrient-calculator/)

Weight loss is at its most basic, simply a math problem. The uncomfortable truth is that there are no magic foods or diets to cause fat loss. Regardless of diet type, in order to lose weight (fat), you must eat 20-25% fewer calories than your body burns every day. This forces your body to go hunting for energy within itself and make up the difference by burning your fat or muscle. So, find your daily calorie target, stick to it, adjust it up or down as needed, and enjoy week after week of consistent weight loss! If you need help, I gotcha covered with personalized meal plans and full-service online coaching programs.

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What’s the BEST Weight-loss Diet?

tsen — Fri, 02 Apr 2021 15:00:06 +0000

Keto, Intermittent Fasting, Paleo, Vegan, Atkins, Whole 30, Jenny Craig, Weight-Watchers,…the list of weight loss diets goes on and on, each proclaiming itself to have a distinct fat burning advantage. Some people say they get great results with one diet, but not the others. Some people even say none of the diets they tried have worked! So, which diet is the best?

The answer is simple: Calories being equal, the best diet is the one you enjoy, because it’s the one you can stick to more easily. Furthermore, it doesn’t even have to have a label or name for it! In my decade of coaching and helping thousands of individuals achieve the body of their dreams, I have observed that people have a much easier time sticking to a long-term weight loss diet when the foods and meal timings are similar to what they’re already doing. And, because they are able to stick to the diet longer and more consistently, they get far better results.

The key to fat loss is long term diet adherence. Losing weight in a healthy and sustainable manner (~0.5-1% bodyweight per week) is, in most cases, at least a 3-month journey. In the short term, it’s relatively easy to try a new diet and follow its rules and restrictions. It’s fun, it’s new and exciting, and you feel great doing something good for your body. But, how long can you keep it up? A diet will have moments of hunger and cravings that will test your mental fortitude–especially when you’re giving up things that you enjoy or are part of your life.

People, for the most part, don’t do well with restriction over a long period of time. We like to have the freedom of choice. We like having options. Take that “havingness” away, and all those diet restrictions will backfire on you, creating a phenomenon of “must have”. Cravings can turn on harder, and it’s psychologically more stressful over the long term–especially if it’s an aggressive diet. While this doesn’t happen to everyone, it does happen to most people who are making consistent and meaningful fat loss progress week over week.

For the reasons above, when I make customized meal plans for clients, I deep-dive into their dietary and eating preferences so it’s a smooth transition going into their fat-loss diet and they are able to keep it up for weeks and months on end. When you’re dieting, pick a diet that most closely resembles what you’re already more or less doing, or simply but just eat less.

And that brings us to the one big caveat to all this that no one likes talking about because it’s not sexy or marketable. No diet will ever be successful in helping you lose weight if it does not follow the most basic, fundamental principle of weight loss: Energy Balance–how many calories you eat versus how many you burn.

If you’re eating too many calories, you’ll never lose fat no matter what diet you’re on. It’s just basic physics and the law of conservation of energy. Energy (the calories you eat in food), cannot be created or destroyed; rather it can only be transformed from one form to another. In plain English, it means:

If you eat too much food (calories, energy) it has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is fat in your butt and waistline.
Eat just what your body needs, and your weight stays the same.
Eat less than what your body needs, and the body eats its own energy stores (fat, glycogen, muscle) to make up the difference.

(Insert infogfx to illustrate these points.)

If you’re eating too many calories, you’ll never lose fat no matter what diet you’re on.

And there you have it, folks. There is no magic fat loss diet that’s better than the rest. To lose weight, simply eat fewer calories than you burn and pick a diet that you know you can follow and enjoy. The diet you choose doesn’t even have to have a label for it, and you even can eat how you’re already eating, but just eat less!

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Realistic Weight-loss Expectations

tsen — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 15:00:06 +0000

We’ve all seen and heard the claims before: “Lose 30 pounds in a month!”, “Three sizes in three weeks!”, and so on and so forth. The grocery store magazine rack, social media, and even self proclaimed experts frequently make these exaggerated promises in order to sell their products and services to unsuspecting hopeful consumers. In this article we’ll talk about:

Realistic weight-loss targets
Sustainability
Scientific strategies for rapid weight loss

One of the top ways to sabotage your diet is to wreck your morale by starting with unrealistic expectations of how much weight you’ll lose in X amount of time. You could be doing very well by professional standards, but because you originally had an unrealistic expectation–whether set by an advertisement claim or yourself–you’ll feel like you’ve failed. Low morale over time can kill any motivation, even if you’re doing well. So, let’s set realistic targets.

A good weight loss standard for the average person is about 0.5-1% of bodyweight a week. Above that and you run an increasing risk of your body cannibalizing its own muscle to use as energy, leading to a shapeless, not-toned skinny-fat physique. That’s not what you want, right? A lean, toned physique requires both sufficient muscle development plus a lower body fat %. A lot of people are happy to just be skinnier, but I recommend taking a long-term big-picture view. Losing muscle is bad for your health, it’s bad for your physique, and it makes you weaker.

Here’s what being skinny-fat looks like versus strong and lean on the right:

Speaking of getting weaker, lose more than 1% of your bodyweight a week and you’ll soon run into issues of having low energy, lacking motivation in life or to even move because your body wants to conserve energy by convincing you to move less. This not only means feeling hangry and tired all the time, but also having poor exercise and training performance, leading to fewer calories burned. Losing weight really doesn’t have to be a miserable experience.

While the 1%-per-week rule is a nice average target to shoot for, it’s common to lose a lot more weight the first couple weeks due to loss of water weight. This effect can be pretty major. I’ve seen anywhere from 2-7 pounds disappear from a client’s first week. I myself can even drop 3-5 pounds overnight when I start my diet! But, eventually, it slows down and should settle into a 0.5-1% loss each week–provided that you’re sticking to the correct daily calorie target.

When crunching numbers, the outrageous claims we see make even less sense. Each pound of fat in your body contains about 3500 calories. Meaning, if you are looking to lose two pounds of fat a week (7000 calories), you’d have to be in a 1000 calorie deficit through all seven days of the week! To put this into perspective, a relatively average sized woman burns about 1800 calories a day, and a little over 2000 if they’re on the heavier side. To lose two pounds a fat a week (or eight pounds a month), they’d be eating only 800-1000 calories a day. That’s about the caloric equivalent of two 5oz chicken breasts, salad, a protein shake, and a 4.5oz serving of plain potatoes. Think you could handle that day in and day out and still function like a normal healthy human being? I know I sure can’t!

Still believe those Lose-30-in-a-month ads?

Don’t get me wrong. I love fast and easy results just like anyone else, but we have to be realistic here. Healthy, sustainable weight loss is a marathon not a sprint. That’s the totally unsexy, uncool, and unmarketable truth that the industry doesn’t tell you because it doesn’t sell. People don’t’ want to hear it. But, it’s the truth. People’s expectations have just been skewed after being bombarded for years by false advertising and ridiculous claims. The good news is, though, losing 0.5-1% of your weight each week really adds up over time.

Check me out at 200 pounds dropping to 175, losing 25 pounds in 14 weeks:

And here’s my client Ariel after 12 weeks at about -1lbs/week:

Weight loss should be treated as a marathon, not a sprint. It’s all about consistency of correct actions taken over time. Your diet protocol should be dictated by science and driven by data such as knowing your daily calorie target required to lose meaningful weight and a record of your body measurements (weight, waist) so you know if you’ve hit a plateau.

As an aside, most people aren’t measuring their body weight or waist measurement correctly to track or gauge their progress. A quick guide:

Hop on the scale the first thing in the morning after using the restroom for best consistency.
Weigh yourself every day so you have lots of data points for #3, and don’t freak out over sudden overnight weight spikes–it’s just water weight fluctuation.
Keep a written or digital record so you can see weekly trends. Bonus points if you use an app that graphs the data for you. If the trend shows little or no progress, then you know something has to change–eat less and/or move more.

All that being said, there are ways to create larger than usual amounts of weight loss–at least in the short term. By manipulating your water weight and flushing it out, you can make jaw-dropping effects on the scale in 1-2 weeks.

The first method should only be done under professional supervision, and I won’t detail it here so you’re not tempted to try it by yourself. It’s an intense protocol that involves high water intake and manipulating your diet to minimize water retention before a water fast and flushing all that water through sweat in a short amount of time. Dramatic results brought by dramatic means.

The second is actually quite simple and something you can apply even in when not dieting to keep water bloating to a minimum. Eat a high protein, low carb, and medium fat diet that is low in sodium and high in potassium. (For the number-crunchers who know your daily calorie targets, that’s 1.2g protein per pound bodyweight, 30-35% calories from fat, and the rest as carbs.) Don’t forget to stay well-hydrated too.

I hope that puts things in perspective. Don’t fall for sales and marketing gimmicks and wild scientifically impossible claims. Be aware that crash diets only serve to burn you out quickly, waste away lean muscle, and typically flushes out mostly water weight instead of burning actual fat. Follow the basic principles of weight loss and keep it sustainable so you stay healthy and maintain good gym performance to burn more calories and build your physique.

Remember:

Weight loss should be treated as a marathon, not a sprint. It’s all about consistency of correct actions taken over time. Your diet protocol should be dictated by science and driven by data.