Have you ever heard the instruction,”And all you have to do is A and B, and then, you’ll get what you want” and thought, “Well, heck, anybody can do that,” and you start to knock the leather off the A ball, and while your smiling like a mule eating briars thinking about taking your lap around the bases and unexpectedly the pitcher knocks the snot out of you with the B ball? Yeah, me, too.
If you followed that introduction, then you’ll enjoy the rest of this post.
Continuing with the idea of Eat Less CRAPF (the P is silent and so is the processing) and Move Your Fat Ass More, we covered using meal replacement bars to eat less. Now, however, we need to discuss how eating less does very little good if you don’t move your fat ass more.
Growing, losing, or maintaining body weight is all a matter of energy intake and use balance. If you eat no more calories than you use, then, all other factors being equal, you will maintain your body weight. There are several factors that shift this input/output balance equation to one side or the other, but they are beyond our scope here and now. But one factor that we are concerned about is the factor that when you rob your body of energy input, it responds by slowing your metabolism to conserve energy.
So, if you only eat less CRAPF and don’t move more, you are not going to lose as much weight as you could if you moved more and you won’t be able to keep it off either. So, how much less should you eat and how much should you move?
The US government researchers say 55-60-year-old men who are not overweight should eat about 2,200 – 2,600 calories a day, depending on their level of activity and metabolism. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Department of Agriculture. 2015–2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 8th Edition, December 2015. Available at: http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/guidelines/ (Accessed on April 25, 2016).
If you are overweight or obese, however, then you have to eat much less than this to lose weight. Why? Because a pound of human fat cells (adipocytes) store about 3,500 calories. So, to lose a pound of fat in a week, you have to have a 3,500 calorie energy debt that week. But, if you just starve yourself for 3,500 calories a week (500 calories a day), then your metabolism is going to slow to preserve your fat.
Therefore, to compensate, you have to get and keep your metabolism ramped up to have the maximum weight loss beneficial effect of eating less. For the past two days, while I have been dropping from 186 to 178.4 pounds by eating only 5 food bars containing 270 calories each totaling 1,350 calories, I’ve been doing an hour of intensive exercise first thing each morning and burning about 2,000 extra calories a day.
(This 2,000 calories of exercise is the figure that shows on the Free Motion Cross Trainer I’m using. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I am working up a maximum pulse rate of 150-160 beats per minute for most of the hour. My maximum training rate should only be 80% of (220 – my age of 57). 220-57 is 163 and 80% of 163 is 130.4. I hope I don’t kill myself trying to get that average healthy BMI of 25.)
Regardless of what the energy intake/use numbers are, eating the meal replacement bars and doing a maximum effort hour of exercise a day has helped me drop 4.1% of my high starting body weight in two days. It would not have happened just by eating the food bars without increasing my exercise. I know this from many cycles of gaining and losing these 30 extra pounds a few times over the past three years.
I’m not recommending anyone do exactly as I do. Talk to your own doctor first before making any sudden change to your eating, drinking, exercise, and other health issues.
Nonetheless, do not just eat less and expect to lose weight. You have to move more at the same time.
Check in next post to see if we have three good weight loss days in a row.