mistermack wrote:Coito is perfectly right about calories in and out. It's bleedin obviously true.
(Although I still haven't had an answer about whether some people actually utilise less of their food than others, and exctrete more calories).
I answered it before. Yes, of course they do. There is a statistical spread from a norm, like most everything else. Shitting is one way to get calories out, to some degree. If you can shit them without digesting them and getting them into the blood stream then they are out without becoming fat. Very difficult to control that, though - might be a bit easier to leave that factor alone, put down the cream puff, and go for a jog.
mistermack wrote:
But the practical problem is how to achieve a long-term negative calorie equation.
Less in than out. And Coito hasn't got an answer to that, or he would be a multi millionaire of the diet industry.
Of course I have an answer to that:
1. Calculate your estimated daily basal metabolic rate.
2. Keep track of your calories in by taking note of the calorie content of all food and beverage intake
3. Consume fewer calories per day than your basal metabolic rate for the day.
4. Keep track of estimated calories burned exercising per day with a calorie-tracking device.
5. Figure your estimated caloric deficit by adding the calories burned via exercising to the caloric deficit from eating less than your basal metabolic rate.
6. Adjust as you go along, keeping track week by week how the exercise and weight loss is going. Recall that you'll be working with estimates, and you may need to tweek calories in down a bit, or exercise up, depending on how you're doing.
7. Generally speaking, you want to lose about 1 pound to a maximum of 2 pounds a week for healthy weight loss. For a man, don't go below 1400 calories a day caloric intake and for a woman don't go below about 1200 calories a day caloric intake to avoid undereating and depriving the body of necessary nutrients and energy to operate.
8. Take in calories via healthy foods in a good carb/fat/protein balance, so that your body gets useful compounds, plenty of vitamins, and all that.
9. Drink plenty of water - maybe about 8 glasses of water a day, give or take. Water is essential to the body.
This is, of course, not rocket science, and is just about exactly the same thing, maybe using different verbiage that amounts to the same thing, that a trainer or a nutritionist will tell you.
For me - I would add while dieting a multivitamin. Generally speaking I think vitamins are woo, but during dieting the reduction in calories might make it more likely to not get enough of needed vitamins and minerals, and they generally can't do anything bad to you.
As tricks and tips to achieve the calorie reduction - stop eating between meal snacks, except those that are factored into the daily food intake. If you eat a snack bar or something at 3pm, then that should be added to your daily total.
It's not to imply that this has to be done with mathematical precision. Once you start paying attention and trying to keep a good estimate of your daily caloric intake, it can become second nature. You can know by looking at food about how many calories are in it, roughly. That's usually good enough.
Is this stuff really news to anybody?
mistermack wrote:
So while it's perfectly true that just taking in less calories than you put out will make you lose weight, it's not an answer. It's the mechanism. If you could answer how to make that achieveable, for someone with a strong addiction, then you could claim to have an answer. ( as many do ).
I never claimed to know how to make people eat right. That doesn't change what it means to eat right.
There is no one way to motivate people, and some people may simply refuse to do the right thing, for one of a myriad reasons.
However, I would say that to use your addiction analogy - the first step is usually to acknowledge that one has a problem. A person needs to not only acknowledge that they are overweight, but also that they eat too much. Until a person is willing to recognize that they do, in fact, eat too much, then they will not stop eating that much. That just stands to reason - if I don't think I'm eating too much, then why would I stop eating so much?
That's where this resistance to the calories in/calories out thing is so frustrating to me - because it is a basic refusal to acknowledge the problem Yes - of course it is hard - and I've never claimed it is easy. It's one of the most difficult things for a human to do, losing a lot of weight. But, that doesn't change the fact that people are overweight, for the most part, because they eat too much.
mistermack wrote:
And to top it all, what works for some people doesn't work for others.
The mental mechanisms that motivate someone to eat less can be different - but what does work for everyone is that if your basal metabolic rate is 2000, and you eat a regular diet, except cut the calories down to 1500, and you'll lose weight. Or, do you dispute that? Don't change the facts on me - assume the metabolic rate stays at an average of 2000 per day...and assume we have perfect calorie calculation at 1500 per day - I think you will agree that for almost everybody, that would work to reduce weight.
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