Weight Loss Simplified

I was reading a post from one of my favorite Facebook pages called Ripped Goddess. She asks if her readers find it easier to lose weight or gain muscle. This is an intriguing question because it is multifaceted. Most of you may already know that there is no “cookie-cutter” method to lose weight or gain lean muscle. However, there is a general rule to the process. For this argument, I will address fat loss first because it is the most common goal.

You can raise your chance of success by planing you meals ahead

Before anybody can begin an actual weight loss program, the number of calories consumed daily must be known. The easiest way to get a handle on how many calories you consume daily is by starting a food journal. This can be as simple as writing down everything you eat in a notebook, to using a phone/computer app to record your meals. One of my favorites is “My Fitness Pal”. It helps you establish your target weight and daily calorie goals as well as breaking down your food entries into macro and micro nutrient content. Next is to record your meals for seven days. So if you ate 3000 calories per day for seven days your weekly consumption will be 21000 calories. The next step is to reduce those calories. We are not going to do anything stupid like starvation, we are just going to reduce daily calories by 500. That could be as simple as cutting out that quarter pounder with cheese (520 calories). Just by doing that you change your weekly consumption to 17500. That would be a reduction of >3500 a week. That is fantastic for several reasons.

The first reason is that you haven’t changed anything else in your lifestyle. You can do everything else same as before. Second, one pound of fat is equal to 3500 calories. So by reducing 3500 calories a week you will lose one pound and never set foot in a gym. Third, by increasing your activity level in conjunction with a diet change you will lose even more (be forewarned, for this you may actually have to sweat).

The next step (without going all fitness nerd on you) is to figure out how many carbohydrates, proteins, and fats you need to consume. There are many apps/programs that will calculate this for you already, but it isn’t as difficult as you may think. Ball park numbers are 45/35/20 of carbs/proteins/fats respectively. Using the daily consumption we established earlier, we would break down 2500 calories (remember 3000-500=2500) into 1125 calories from carbs, 875 calories from protein, and 500 calories from good fats. I bet your saying “how the heck am I supposed to know how many calories of carbs/proteins/fats are in my meals?” HA! HA! Let the learning continue!

A little discretion goes a long way toward your weight loss goals

We are going to take the calories needed per macronutrient and divide them by the calories per gram. It is widely accepted that there are four calories per gram of carbohydrates and proteins and nine calories per gram of fat. If we take the figures from earlier we discover we should be consuming 281.25 g of carbs (1125/4=281.25), 218.75 g protein, and 55.5 g of fats (personally, I would not round the numbers at this point, you will see why in a minute).

The final step is to break these values down per meal. I suggest eating more than three times a day. The more often you eat, the longer you metabolism is working to digest and utilize the food. Another reason to eat more often is to reduce the number of calories per meal. It is easier for most of us to eat six small 300 calorie meals rather than three large 600 calorie meals. Ideally we would take the number of grams per nutrient divided by the number of daily meals. This would give us 46.9 g carbs (281.25/6=46.9) per meal, 36.5 g protein per meal, and 9.3 g fat per meal. This is where I would round carbs and protein up, and fat down giving me carbs 47g, protein 37g, and fats 9 g.

So, now we can ball park our progress at a glance by knowing what we require per meal to begin weight loss. This will also help your body function properly by providing the proper amount of macronutrients for work (barring any medical anomalies).

I hope this helps you understand why knowing your daily calorie consumption is the foundation to obtaining your weight loss goals. I admit I made this very simple to comprehend and without scrambling your brain with technical jargon. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

I hope everyone has a blessed day.