We create healthy diets for people in Massachusetts to help you reach your weight loss goal. Traditional wisdom says just cut 3500 calories, and over time, you’ll lose a pound of fat. While cutting back on calories will eventually help you lose weight, it’s not that simple. First, body fat isn’t pure fat. It’s made up of protein, fat and fluid. Pure fat is about 4080 calories per pound, since it’s 9 calories per gram and 453 ½ grams in a pound. Since it’s not pure fat, the calorie content will be less.
It’s all about making it easier to explain.
It’s a bit of a misstatement that eating 500 fewer calories will make you continuously lose 1 pound every week. When you first start a calorie-deficit eating pattern, the estimate is pretty close. However, over the long term, the theory starts to fall apart. When you eat less for a long period, your body makes changes to use the calories more efficiently and it actually burns fewer calories. The term for this change is adaptive thermogenesis. Some people refer to it as starvation mode.
To continue to lose a pound a week, you have to make other changes.
The dreaded plateauing does become a problem after a few months, especially if you’re adding exercise as part of your weight loss program. You also have to train your body to burn fat and not lean muscle mass. When you burn lean muscle mass, you reduce the number of calories you burn, since muscle tissue requires more calories for maintenance than fat tissue does.
Each person is unique, so they’ll lose fat at different rates based on their diet.
If you want to maximize weight loss, you need a diet designed specifically for you. It’s all about the food you eat and how your body uses that food. It’s balancing the macro-nutrients, protein, carbs and fat, to increase weight loss until the goal is reached and changing your diet to maintain the weight loss. If you’re exercising, that should be also considered. You also have to make sure your body doesn’t enter starvation mode that makes weight loss harder.
- While you don’t have to exercise, doing strength building exercises can boost your efforts to lose weight, since it builds muscle tissue. It changes your body composition to more muscle tissue and less fat tissue.
- A macro-nutrient diet for weight loss will vary, but in most cases, you’ll be eating more protein, healthier carbs and fewer simple sugars and less processed food.
- As you lose weight, your body doesn’t have to work as hard, since it’s not moving as much weight each time it moves. If you have an extra ten pounds of bodyweight, it’s like carrying a ten pound dumbbell everywhere you go.
- Not only is body fat not pure fat, the body also has several types of fat. There is white fat, brown fat and beige fat cells. Body fat is also classed by where it’s stored. Subcutaneous fat is just under the skin, while visceral fat is deep abdominal fat that crowds organs.
For more information, contact us today at ProWeight Loss