March 09, 2020
Losing body fat is hard. The next time someone tells you that they have some new, easy solution to fat loss that flies in the face of conventional wisdom, you have my permission to throw them off the nearest bridge. Through it all – the fad diets, the magic pills, and shake weights – one fat loss method has stood the test of time. It’s not sexy, it doesn’t have a fancy name, but it’s the core of why every diet works at all: energy management.
Few nutrition concepts are shrouded in as much misinformation as the management of Calories to cause changes in body weight and body composition. This is really a shame, because understanding this very basic idea takes out much of the guess work and frustration associated with losing fat and keeping it off.
In this article, I’ll briefly touch upon every pertinent bit of information you need to know about how Calories impact your body composition. Along the way, I’ll dispel a myth or two and show you an easy way to apply this knowledge to your diet so you can start getting sexy as hell and having the best workouts of your life.
Calories & Why They Matter for Fat Loss
The Basics of Fat Loss
Kelly Edelmann’s results using a Calorie management approach
When discussing nutrition, the Calorie applies to two interdependent concepts.
First, Calories measure of the approximate amount of energy your body derives from food per its weight – usually in grams or ounces. For example, there are approximately 125 Calories in six ounces of raw chicken breast. The approximate number of Calories you consume each day adds up to what I’ll refer to as your daily energy intake.
Second, we measure the amount of energy you expend each day in Calories. Everything you do within a 24 hour period, from sleeping to exercising to chewing up the aforementioned chicken breast results in an expenditure of energy, which we refer to as Total Daily Energy Expenditure or TDEE for short.
NOTE: In a few paragraphs, I'll expand upon why I keep writing "approximate" and why it's important to understand that these numbers cannot be interpreted absolutely.
The relative balance of energy intake with energy expenditure is called energy homeostasis and disrupting this balance causes either weight loss or weight gain. A Calorie deficit – taking in less energy than you expend – will result in weight loss, and a Calorie surplus will result in weight gain.
Do I Have To Count Calories/Weigh All My Food For The Rest of My Life?
No, you do not have to meticulously measure, weigh, and track everything you eat to apply basic Calorie management principles. I actually hate the idea that to see good results, you’d need to micromanage the crap out of your diet. To be clear, although they may appear to be different on the surface, all diets that result in weight loss over time – Paleo, Atkins, Zone, whatever – function on these principles. They restrict Calories indirectly by giving you a list of foods that will make it improbable that you’ll be in a Calorie surplus. Although you’re not counting Calories, you’re still restricting them.
For most people, weighing, tracking and logging food should be approached more like a “test” to see where things are, not as a lifestyle or a long-term behavior. The fact of the matter is that if you eat a pretty similar diet day-to-day, you don’t have to count Calories for your entire life. After you spend a short while developing a few meal plans that takes the basics of fat loss into consideration, you’ll have learned a set of skills that allows you to eat more intuitively while still being aware of how the food you’re eating will impact your body composition. A few days to check-in every few months to make sure things are still on track is all it takes.
Myth: “Calories In/Calories Out” Doesn’t Work
The Basics of Fat Loss
Provided that you manage your Calorie intake to create a deficit, you WILL lose weight. This is backed up by enough research that I am confident to label the dismissal of this very basic concept as bullshit, plain and simple. If you’d like to delve into some papers, check out this link and pick your poison. What you’ll find is that in practically every study where subjects restrict Calories, they lose weight. It’s not a coincidence and it’s not magic.
Of course, there is some logic behind the argument against using Calorie management as a weight loss strategy.
For instance:
There are hormonal differences between people that impact how food is digested and utilized.
Estimating energy expenditure is fuzzy – the numbers are approximate, never exact.
These same implications apply to the food we eat – not every chicken, potato, or head of lettuce is exactly the same – so estimating energy intake is also approximate.
Self-reported food logs are subject to a whole range of issues. Studies based on recall are typically inaccurate, and people outright lie about what they eat to avoid judgment, making some data unreliable.
Last but not least, metabolic adaptations to training and dieting make accurately estimating energy requirements and expenditure more difficult.
All this means is that neither this method nor any other weight loss strategy is binary. It’s fuzzy – an approximation, an educated guess – and that although you need to do some experimentation to find the perfect balance, it’s a verified perspective to approach your goals.
Weight Loss vs. Fat Loss
The Basics of Fat Loss
With all this talk of weight loss, I feel like it’s important for me to emphasize that your aim should not be to lose weight indiscriminately – you want to lose fat – and that’s where things get the slightest bit more complicated.
The composition of your meals, along with your choice of exercise, will tip the scale in favor of losing less muscle mass/more fat as your weight drops. Losing muscle isn’t ideal at all if your goal is to look good in your bathing suit, so taking every advantage to preserve it is going to be important.
To keep this article from getting too long, I’ll only briefly touch upon macronutrients (macros for short) and exercise since these variables do influence body composition, but you can read more about them in related articles here on Eat To Perform.com.
How Macronutrients Influence Fat Loss
Macros are the bits and pieces of your food that you derive energy from. Protein and carbohydrate are worth 4 Calories per gram and fat is worth 9 Calories per gram. Beyond their contribution to your daily energy intake, each macro lends itself to different functions within your body.
Protein breaks down into amino acids, the building blocks of every itty bit of your body. Protein intake will influence lean mass (muscle) retention on a diet. You should keep it around 0.8-1 gram per pound of body weight when you’re trying to lose fat. If protein falls too low, you risk losing a disproportionate amount of muscle as you lose weight and you’ll potentially end up looking blurry, undefined, and skinny rather than looking lean. Better safe than sorry – eat more protein!
Carbohydrates are your body’s primary source of energy. Your brain uses a lot of carbs, and your muscles store several hundred grams of carbs as glycogen. Muscle glycogen is immediately available during exercise so keeping your stores full is important to maintain strength, speed, and overall performance. In the simplest terms, your workouts will suck if you don’t eat enough carbs and that will make it difficult to provide a stimulus to maintain and potentially gain new muscle.
Fat is necessary to build cell walls, produce hormones, and transport fat soluble vitamins. Your body usually has plenty of fat hanging around to make this happen (you know, the stuff you have chilling around your tummy) and I’d recommend that you use fat as a way to round out your daily energy intake, especially on days when you’re not exercising (more on what I mean by that later).
Few nutrition concepts are shrouded in as much misinformation as the management of Calories to cause changes in body weight and body composition. This is really a shame, because understanding this very basic idea takes out much of the guess work and frustration associated with losing fat and keeping it off.
In this article, I’ll briefly touch upon every pertinent bit of information you need to know about how Calories impact your body composition. Along the way, I’ll dispel a myth or two and show you an easy way to apply this knowledge to your diet so you can start getting sexy as hell and having the best workouts of your life.
Calories & Why They Matter for Fat Loss
The Basics of Fat Loss
Kelly Edelmann’s results using a Calorie management approach
When discussing nutrition, the Calorie applies to two interdependent concepts.
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First, Calories measure of the approximate amount of energy your body derives from food per its weight – usually in grams or ounces. For example, there are approximately 125 Calories in six ounces of raw chicken breast. The approximate number of Calories you consume each day adds up to what I’ll refer to as your daily energy intake.
Second, we measure the amount of energy you expend each day in Calories. Everything you do within a 24 hour period, from sleeping to exercising to chewing up the aforementioned chicken breast results in an expenditure of energy, which we refer to as Total Daily Energy Expenditure or TDEE for short.
NOTE: In a few paragraphs, I'll expand upon why I keep writing "approximate" and why it's important to understand that these numbers cannot be interpreted absolutely.
The relative balance of energy intake with energy expenditure is called energy homeostasis and disrupting this balance causes either weight loss or weight gain. A Calorie deficit – taking in less energy than you expend – will result in weight loss, and a Calorie surplus will result in weight gain.
Do I Have To Count Calories/Weigh All My Food For The Rest of My Life?
No, you do not have to meticulously measure, weigh, and track everything you eat to apply basic Calorie management principles. I actually hate the idea that to see good results, you’d need to micromanage the crap out of your diet. To be clear, although they may appear to be different on the surface, all diets that result in weight loss over time – Paleo, Atkins, Zone, whatever – function on these principles. They restrict Calories indirectly by giving you a list of foods that will make it improbable that you’ll be in a Calorie surplus. Although you’re not counting Calories, you’re still restricting them.
For most people, weighing, tracking and logging food should be approached more like a “test” to see where things are, not as a lifestyle or a long-term behavior. The fact of the matter is that if you eat a pretty similar diet day-to-day, you don’t have to count Calories for your entire life. After you spend a short while developing a few meal plans that takes the basics of fat loss into consideration, you’ll have learned a set of skills that allows you to eat more intuitively while still being aware of how the food you’re eating will impact your body composition. A few days to check-in every few months to make sure things are still on track is all it takes.
Myth: “Calories In/Calories Out” Doesn’t Work
The Basics of Fat Loss
Provided that you manage your Calorie intake to create a deficit, you WILL lose weight. This is backed up by enough research that I am confident to label the dismissal of this very basic concept as bullshit, plain and simple. If you’d like to delve into some papers, check out this link and pick your poison. What you’ll find is that in practically every study where subjects restrict Calories, they lose weight. It’s not a coincidence and it’s not magic.
Of course, there is some logic behind the argument against using Calorie management as a weight loss strategy.
For instance:
There are hormonal differences between people that impact how food is digested and utilized.
Estimating energy expenditure is fuzzy – the numbers are approximate, never exact.
These same implications apply to the food we eat – not every chicken, potato, or head of lettuce is exactly the same – so estimating energy intake is also approximate.
Self-reported food logs are subject to a whole range of issues. Studies based on recall are typically inaccurate, and people outright lie about what they eat to avoid judgment, making some data unreliable.
Last but not least, metabolic adaptations to training and dieting make accurately estimating energy requirements and expenditure more difficult.
All this means is that neither this method nor any other weight loss strategy is binary. It’s fuzzy – an approximation, an educated guess – and that although you need to do some experimentation to find the perfect balance, it’s a verified perspective to approach your goals.
Weight Loss vs. Fat Loss
The Basics of Fat Loss
With all this talk of weight loss, I feel like it’s important for me to emphasize that your aim should not be to lose weight indiscriminately – you want to lose fat – and that’s where things get the slightest bit more complicated.
The composition of your meals, along with your choice of exercise, will tip the scale in favor of losing less muscle mass/more fat as your weight drops. Losing muscle isn’t ideal at all if your goal is to look good in your bathing suit, so taking every advantage to preserve it is going to be important.
To keep this article from getting too long, I’ll only briefly touch upon macronutrients (macros for short) and exercise since these variables do influence body composition, but you can read more about them in related articles here on Eat To Perform.com.
How Macronutrients Influence Fat Loss
Macros are the bits and pieces of your food that you derive energy from. Protein and carbohydrate are worth 4 Calories per gram and fat is worth 9 Calories per gram. Beyond their contribution to your daily energy intake, each macro lends itself to different functions within your body.
Protein breaks down into amino acids, the building blocks of every itty bit of your body. Protein intake will influence lean mass (muscle) retention on a diet. You should keep it around 0.8-1 gram per pound of body weight when you’re trying to lose fat. If protein falls too low, you risk losing a disproportionate amount of muscle as you lose weight and you’ll potentially end up looking blurry, undefined, and skinny rather than looking lean. Better safe than sorry – eat more protein!
Carbohydrates are your body’s primary source of energy. Your brain uses a lot of carbs, and your muscles store several hundred grams of carbs as glycogen. Muscle glycogen is immediately available during exercise so keeping your stores full is important to maintain strength, speed, and overall performance. In the simplest terms, your workouts will suck if you don’t eat enough carbs and that will make it difficult to provide a stimulus to maintain and potentially gain new muscle.
Fat is necessary to build cell walls, produce hormones, and transport fat soluble vitamins. Your body usually has plenty of fat hanging around to make this happen (you know, the stuff you have chilling around your tummy) and I’d recommend that you use fat as a way to round out your daily energy intake, especially on days when you’re not exercising (more on what I mean by that later).
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