Calorie Conundrum

by: Pm - January 31st, 2008

Okay, you’ve cut your calories by the prerequisite 3,500, but you’re still not losing weight. Maybe there’s a problem with your math. Theoretically, creating an energy deficit equal to 3,500 calories should equate to a loss of about a pound of body fat. The question is: do you really know where to start counting?

The good news is your body is burning calories as you read this. The bad news is you’re probably not accounting for them.

As everyone at the Academy is fully aware, it’s impossible to completely exercise-away the detriments of overeating. Regardless of how dedicated and well conditioned you are, you can most certainly do more caloric “damage” in a few bad meals than you’d ever be able to work off in your toughest workout. That’s because you can (and do) eat more than you train. So, why aren’t we all so morbidly obese that we aren’t able to walk? We have our resting metabolic rates (RMR) to thank.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with this concept, RMR is equal to the average energy metabolism of someone not engaged in any type of physical activity. RMR includes the BMR, or Basal Metabolic Rate, (the energy, or calories, expended to keep your vital organs functioning) plus the thermic energy that’s given off as food is being digested.

In a laboratory setting, RMR can be measured. Unfortunately, we don’t live under controlled conditions. So, it’s not easy to exactly measure how many extra calories that the combination of walking the dog, moving some boxes, 6 small meals, and training with weights 3-4 times/week contribute to the cause.

It gets more complicated…

Even when we can readily estimate our caloric expenditure (as can be done on cardio equipment like treadmills, elipiticals, and exercycles), the math isn’t as simple as subtracting whatever the computerized viewing screen tells us. Assuming the machine is accurate in its measurement (beware: most overestimate by as much as 15%), we still need to be careful to subtract out whatever we might have burned anyway had we been sitting back watching television or surfing the web.

Example: 210 lb guy burns 450 calories during a really tough 1-hour leg session. Because of his general size and lean body mass, that same guy probably burns over 100 calories/hr regardless. So, for purposes of weight-loss, only 350 calories of the 450 calorie deficit that the training created, should be counted toward his goal.

Keep in mind, we are only talking about one day and one activity here. If our guy works out 5 times a week, he could be overestimating his energy expenditure by 500 calories/week. Over the course of a month this equates to over a ½ lb of fat; over the course of a year, the amount jumps to nearly 7 lbs of body fat. Now just imagine what happens if the same calculation error is applied to multiple activities throughout the week…

What to do:

• Approximate your RMR and make sure that you subtract this amount from the calories that you estimate that you are burning during exercise. There are plenty of complicated RMR equations in nutrition textbooks and on the web, but using a simple rule-of-thumb formula is accurate enough for most. To estimate RMR multiply your body weight in pounds by 11 (women) or 13 (men) and then divide by 24. This will give you your approximate RMR/hour. So, our 210 lb guy burns about 2,730 calories/day at rest (210 x 13) or about 114 calories/hr (2,730 calories/day / 24 hours = 113.75 calories/hr).

• Make sure that you’re eating at least 4-5 smaller meals daily. Research shows that how frequently you eat is as nearly as important as how much you eat. When two groups of people were fed the same number of calories in either 3 or 5 meal increments over the course of the day, researchers found that the group that ate more often lost more weight. Why? Because a greater percentage of their energy was given off as heat as the food was digested.

• Don’t go too intense with your workouts. Don’t get me wrong, intensity is a key component of a well-stoked metabolism, but if you go so intensely that you’re too sore to move for 3 days, your immune system weakens to the point where you get sick, or you injure yourself, you’ll be relegated to relying on your RMR rather than your RMR plus any additional calories that you’d be burning with exercise. I like 8-10 rep ranges for weight-loss. They’re intense enough to support lean mass, but not so intense that you risk overtraining.

Hopefully, I didn’t over complicate the matter or make it seem so wrought with pitfalls that you throw-in the towel figuring that you’re damned no matter what you do, because that certainly wasn’t my intent. To the contrary, the purpose of this article is to point out a few reasons why you might not be seeing the results that you’re looking for so that you can make the adjustments in time for summer.

…till next time.

Happy Heaving,

PM

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