Weight Loss Facts
The Truth about Dieting and Weight Loss - Fad Free Version
There is a massive industry surrounding diet, dieting and weight loss. That industry does not sustain itself and continue to expand and rake in billions and billions of dollars by providing facts that can empower people to take control of their own weight. It does so by obfuscating truths behind an overwhelming deluge of competing exclamatory proclamations, partial truths and outright misinformation. Why would they do this? Same reason as always. To sell you things. Products, subscriptions, literature, you name it. The primary weight loss goal of the weight loss industry sometimes seems to be to lighten your wallet.
This article is different. It will instead explain in the most basic way possible, the actual mechanics of how to achieve completely predictable weight loss, all without tying to sell you a single thing.
I hope that after you go through this article you will wonder why the weight loss industry never told you any of this to begin with. Well, no need for wonder, we already discussed why they never told you any of this. Certain elements of the industry anyway. None of this stuff is exactly ‘state secret’ material, it’s all out there as accepted fact. I’m just doing my best to put all of the important things together here in a neat and tidy order that almost resembles a ‘system’ for how to approach fact based weight loss and ignore all the noise.
Anyway, we’ll get on with it very soon, but first a couple of disclaimers on the scope of this discussion:
- This article is about the mechanics of weight loss, not nutrition per se. There’s more to dieting than just losing weight, so always eat a well balanced diet composed of healthy things.
- This article is general information intended for a general audience. It does not consider any particular requirements of anyone with any sort of specific condition. It is not medical advice, or even diet advice really (see above bit about not being about nutrition). I’m not a doctor, or a dietician, nor a nutritionist or even an aesthetician. I’m someone who did a lot of research on this topic for my own use a while ago, assembled and followed this advice and got the exact results expected, all without donating a cent to the “diet industry.” I didn’t invent any of this stuff. If you have any specific questions or concerns, please let me know! I’m happy to share this summary of my research (in clear step by step ‘method’ format) in the hope that it helps someone else. Capiche?
So, without further ado then, let’s let the empowering flow of knowledge commence:
How Does Caloric Intake Affect Weight?
Please excuse me for getting all technical here for a second, and don’t be too surprised if the diet people forgot to mention this small little point to you, but here it is:
Eating 3,500 calories will add one pound to your weight.
That’s the heart of the matter right there folks.
And yes, a calorie is a calorie. A calorie of vegan tofu earth-blossoms has just as many calories in it as a calorie of pork rinds.
Surely it can’t be that easy, right? Well, yes and no.
First of all, those earth-blossoms are way healthier than the pork rinds, so let’s dispel any false hope about that right there. They just have an equivant number of calories is all we’re saying here…
The main thing though, is that while you’re busy eating those calories, your body is also busily burning calories. Even if you’re not jogging around the block while consuming the calories. So it’s sort of a balancing (or unbalancing) act between input and output.
The really great news is that our bodies are always burning calories, even while we’re just lazing around, sleeping, or selecting snacks from the junk food aisle (go look in the produce section every once in a while!) In fact, for the vast majority of us, we’ll burn far more calories just going about our day than we will by ‘exercising.’ Which does not, of course, mean that we shouldn’t exercise … but that is another topic.
So what we need to know is, how many calories are we burning, so that we can compare to that by how many calories we’re consuming?
If we consume more calories than we burn, we put on weight. If we burn more than we consume, we lose weight. If we balance the two, we maintain a steady weight.
We now know that 3,500 calories equals a pound, gained or lost. So, the next thing we need to figure out is:
How Many Calories Do I Burn in a Day? What's My BMR?
How many calories we burn in an average day through our ‘metabolism’ is determined by a number of factors. These include our:
- Age
- Sex
- Height
- Weight
- Activity Level
The easiest way to approximate our daily caloric burn rate is with a very simple online BMR (basal metabolic rate) calculator.
Now one day I might figure out how to integrate such an exotic feature in to this very webpage, but for the time being, I’ll direct you to one of the many other BMR calculators available on the interwebs, such as this one:
Now, if you’ve visited a BMR calculator site and completed the form without too many little white lies in there, you have your starting point for how many calories per day you burn. We’re all a little different (some of us more than others, not necessarily pointing at myself here), so the number won’t be exact, but it’s pretty much the best starting point we have.
Remember that number. Write is down even, like with a pen and a physical piece of paper maybe. It’s the other one of the two important numbers here (to go with the number 3,500, as we’ve discussed – you can write that down too if you want, but otherwise you can just refer to it a couple of lines up. Maybe we’ll even repeat it again, for convenience and what not.).
Whew, that was a lot of writing, let’s go get an ice cream sundae!
No, no, no, let’s carry on with this thing… :
The Mathematics of Weight Loss
Now it’s time to get ready to hunker down for some maths here.
Armed with our two numbers (I think they’re written down somewhere), we are ready to begin.
Let’s look at the first number that you have written down, from the BMR calculator, that we shall henceforth refer to as the BMR number. You know what your number is, but I do not. (I know the other number, 3,500, so don’t worry about that).
If you consume a daily number of calories equal to your BMR number, your weight should stay steady. Eat more, you gain weight. Eat less, you lose weight.
For our example here, I shall select a completely random BMR number that only coincidentally is nicely rounded to make the math as straightforward as possible: 2,000.
So, in my nice little fictional world that I’ve invented for myself here, if I eat 2,000 calories per day, I remain at my current weight, my caloric intake being equal to my metabolism’s burn rate.
Now, say that I want to lose one pound per week. (Spoiler Alert: you’re about to find out why a weight loss rate of a pound a week is probably about about the max we want to shoot for.)
To lose that one pound, over a week, I will need to eat 3,500 calories less than I burn over the course of that week. So far so good? Because the cost of that pound, as we know, is 3,500 calories.
Neatly, a week is 7 days long. Which divides quite nicely in to 3,500, to give us 500 calories per day.
Therefore, with my daily metabolism burning 2000 calories, and my need to eat 500 fewer calories per day to meet my weeklong weight loss goal, that means that I can only eat … wait for it … 1,500 calories per day.
Trying to lose 2 pounds a week would mean eating a mere 1,000 calories per day, or only half of my burn rate. Does that put those absurd “lose 5 pounds per week” weight loss ads in context? Do the math on that…
The other side of the equation would be to increase our activity level to increase our metabolistic burn rate number.
For example, with my BMR of 2,000, I could still lose a pound per week while continuing to eat 2,000 calories per day, if I were able to increase my activity level such that I was now burning 2,500 calories per day.
Sounds like a pretty easy option, but to burn 500 calories through exercise, depending on our weight and other various factors, could mean something along the lines of going for a nice brisk walk for around an hour and a half. That’s a lot more than just strolling over to the fridge and back!
The reality for a lot of people will be to try to increase our activity levels absolutely, but also to start consuming fewer calories.
The simple takeaway here, is that for every pound per week that you want to lose, you must consume 500 calories per day less than your BMR number. And that is really all that there is to that.
If it’s long since time for some happy news here, to get more, like, inspirational and all, remember this: Once you’ve achieved your weight loss goal, you can start eating that 500 calories per day again that you’ve been missing so badly for the whole time. (Except that your BMR will have decreased a bit along with your weight, so it will actually be less than that, but let’s not worry about that nasty little detail just now… let’s just focus on the inspirational part.)
How Many Caloires Am I Eating Per Day?
The biggest challenge to monitoring weight loss, hands down, is keeping track of how many calories we consume.
Probably the easiest way to keep track of our calories is to use an online calorie tracker. There are good free versions out there. The idea is that whenever we eat something, we go online and input what we ate, and the software keeps track of all the numbers for us.
I used a free online calorie calculator that I found quite helpful, My Fitness Pal. It wants to try to be a bit more comprehensive than what we’re talking about here, and it of course suggests you sign up for their ‘premium’ service as well. However, we’re going to be concerned with the ‘Food’ tab that keeps track of our calories. I found it to be a well designed tracker, but there are others out there as well. Basically when you eat something, you enter what you’ve eaten. There is a searchable database of things that can be quickly entered, generic entries for things like fruit, or you can create custom entries. It then updates your daily total against your target and helps to keep you on track. The free version was all I needed.
The online calculators are a bit more work up front when we first start using them, as we get them figured out and get our commonly used food items entered, etc. I found this to be a really interesting time though, because really I had no idea how many calories I had previously been eating or anything like that, so it was very educational learning about being mindful about food choices.
As another benefit, the tracker will keep track of how much protein vs. fats vs. carbs you’re eating, so you can try to balance those as well. You can also input your weight as you go and it can track that for you as well.
A kitchen or postal scale, or some kind of scale is pretty handy to have here, to keep track of how much we’re eating in a serving, but there are other ways to estimate portion sizes as well.
Gradually it gets quicker to input foods, because we start being able to quick-select commonly eaten items, have custom entries made, and are just more used to it. After a while, you even get to a stage where you don’t need the calculator as much, because you have educated yourself with it to the point that you can approximate your caloric intake pretty well on your own.
The educational value of going through this whole food tracking routine, and its contribution to a more mindful approach to eating is a major benefit of this whole process, regardless of anything else.
Putting It All Together
So now we know our BMR.
We know that we need to consume 500 calories per day fewer than we burn in order to lose a pound a week.
So we know that our target caloric consumption is our BMR-500 calories per eay.
We know that we need to track out calories to stay on track, and the easiest, most accurate way to do that is with an online calorie tracker.
Now we need to make healthy food choices, eat a good balance of proteins, carbs and fats, hit all our food groups, avoid eating a lot of garbage, and settle in to a routine of self-discipline. By that I mean discipline in what we eat, but also discipline in keeping track of what we’re eating, at least until we get the hang of what we can eat to stay within our caloric goals. If we keep track of math, we will have very predictable results.
The whole ‘eat this, don’t eat that’ thing is beyond the scope of this article, but lean proteins will make us feel fuller, and there are lots of vegetables that contain very few calories, so those are important.
A calorie of carbs isn’t any worse than a calorie of anything else in our little system here, but the carbs are relatively packed with calories and a bit more devoid of any other benefit, so they can cause us to use up our allowance of calories quicker than we want, and are best kept in moderation. You may want to aim to keep your calories from carbs to around 40%, while shooting for about 30% each protein and healthy fats. There’s no hard and fast rule there, but I thought that was a good ratio to start working from for weight loss. The tracker will help you keep track of this ratio.
Alcohol can be a tough one. Even a straight shot of something like vodka or tequila is going to have around 100 calories in it, so a few of those is good chunk out of your daily food allowance. Minimizing alcohol intake while dieting is going to be important.
Anyway, once we get used to the egg white omelettes (you can get egg whites in a carton and they provide a lot of food for the number of calories!), and get on an established roll, we can start to watch the pounds gradually coming off.
Schedule a weekly weigh in, and keep track of the results. If your caloric tracking is accurate and your BMR is in the ballpark, the results should be as expected. Don’t fret if the scale doesn’t tell you exactly what you expect from week to week because there are still a few red herrings to discuss:
The Red Herrings of Weight Loss
If you keep accurate track of your caloric intake, and develop a sound understanding of your BMR, your weight loss journey will be extremely predictable based on the math we’ve discussed.
From week to week though, your scale might not give you a number precisely as expected each and every time. There are lots of little reasons that your weight might be higher or lower than expected by a few pounds at any given time. The overall pattern will be very accurate however, so watch the trend more than what’s going on that particular minute.
Some reasons that there may be slight variance in your weight from day to day or hour to hour include:
- Your scale isn’t 100% accurate and varies depending on where it’s placed on the floor, humidity and its inherent day to day animosity level;
- You just drank half a gallon of water (a pint of water weighs around a pound);
- Your body is retaining a bit more water than usual today;
- Your body is retaining a little less water than usual today;
- You need to go to the bathroom;
- You just went to the bathroom; or
- Probably a lot of other little reasons why things are a bit off today.
If your results are consistently different from those expected, and you’ve been tracking your calories accurately, then there might be something off in your BMR estimation. Most likely your estimation of your activity level was a notch low or a notch high, or maybe your metabolism is just a bit different. Reconsider your results with a modified BMR number and if the results start making sense based on the modified number, use that going forward.
For best (and possibly most consistent) results, weigh yourself in the morning, butt naked, after using the bathroom and before eating or drinking anything.
Stick with the plan, ignore the red herrings and pink elephants, and the results will follow.
You Can Do This!
If you were to re-read all of the above text, you will not find anywhere where I said that this was going to be easy. It’s not. There is no “lose massive amounts of weight while eating whatever you want and not exercising a whit” promise being made here.
But I think that knowledge is empowering. Here, we at least can understand exactly what we need to do to achieve predictable results. And that, at least, is not something we always have in life. So it could be worse!
Congratulate yourself often on your small wins, your own inspiring dedication and self-control, and your daily and weekly victories. But do not celebrate these victories at the ice cream stand (too often). Don’t beat yourself up too badly for the odd errant way, but instead just simply put things back on track.
Wow, that was really starting to sound like one of those whole self-affirmation type things there, sorry about that, we were talking about math I believe.
It’s OK, let’s take inspiration from ourselves when we can.
Enjoy the journey and good luck.