Let us begin with at least the attempt to divorce ourselves from he allegiance we often hold to be concepts and methods that are most familiar to us. This is the first step in a discussion about weigh loss. This is admittedly a dismal disclaimer but a necessary one since I believe the concepts involving weight loss are often misguided, incomplete and certainly in many, cases flat out wrong. It is not your fault or anyone's fault for having developed a misunderstanding of this topic. There have long been numerous vested interests in connecting fiction to fact so there is no blame, and there will be no shaming. With all that out of the way, lets get started.
To start off with, weight loss, though a common phrase and aspiration, is incredibly unspecific and as a result obscures any promise it may seem to hold in terms of improving our health or appearance. Unspecified weight loss is not rare nor is it even challenging. We all both gain and lose weight all day, every day, or at least all of us that choose to consume and eliminate food from our systems. What is hard and also more mysterious is the much sought-after fat loss. Though this is what is often being indirectly referenced in the use of the phrase "weight loss" it is certainly not the always the form our weight loss takes. After all no one is running to the scale after a trip to the bathroom. Why not? Well because in that case it is clear that any weight lost in the bathroom, Olestra products aside, isn't fat. Most scales do not in any way discriminate or differentiate between all the things that may add or deduct weight from your total mass. We are composed of bone, muscle, water and fat. No one has ever asked me how to reduce their weight of their water, bones or muscles. My job as a personal trainer would be quite simple if clients that wanted to lose weight didn't really care what was really lost. But I assure you that if in one's efforts to lose weight they only manage to lose water and lean mass (bone and muscle) the scale may deliver compliments that are soon erased by the mirror.
Basic scales are not equipped to deduce wether fat has actually been gained or lost. Let me give you an example. One of the best outcomes one may hope for as they attempt to "lose weight" is in a week they lose a pound of fat and gain a pound of muscle. Why? Well because one directly reflects their goal and the other will help them to move closer to their goal respectively. How would this progress manifest itself on the scale? It would read as no change. Please imagine how one who has worked to achieve this goal may respond to what many would regard as stagnation. I believe it is safe to say that they would feel deflated and perhaps even lose the motivation to continue to work toward their goal. This is common, as are the other possibilities of elation over a loss simply of water or devastation over a loss of healthy metabolically active muscle. So what are we to do, should we just throw our scales out the window? Well, yes you should, provided the window is open there shouldn't be anything that keeps you from chucking your basic mass reading scale out of your life. I know the response to this suggestion so please allow me to share with everyone what you may already be thinking.
"Well though my scale won't tell me what I have gained or lost, I know that I was at my healthiest when I weighed blah, blah, blah. "
To which I respond with the sad complicated truth; health and fitness is confusing and though it is absolutely tempting to reduce it to a number, such as, I am healthy at this weight, it is after all just a number. Why is that we openly embrace the perspective of active older adults proclaiming age as just a number but weight, well wait a minute I don't like where this is going, because when you reduce weight to a number you strip it of all if it's baggage. How is anyone to know what is good and bad in the world if we can't utilize an age old metric to decipher fat from not fat?
I have also heard the other argument which begins...
"But I once wore clothing that I thought I looked really good in, at that time a weighed such and such."
Do you think that means that those are the clothes that you will always look good in? Is it prudent to accept that styles change but our bodies should remain a rigid three digit mass for all of our lives if we are to live the healthiest lives we can? Though I understand the allure of defying time's natural tendency to wrap it's years in thick layers around our midsection, it is not always fat or at least not always just fat that pushes the numbers on the scale north. Sometimes we gain muscle, or bone and sometimes, yes we gain fat. Fat that we can work our hardest to reduce but with the comparison between your ideal weight (high school) and your current weight (over) it is important to acknowledge that along with activity and dietary changes your weight may very well reflect the stresses you have collected since high school. Perhaps your new normal reflects not only the doughnuts you regret but also the mortgage, children and job that largely comprise your life. How many extra pounds do kids add? Sorry I don't know.
I do know that I can't write a post about losing weight (which I hope you have already corrected to losing fat) without talking about diet. So let's talk about the most dominant conception in fitness and dietetics; the energy equation. The energy equation is the theory that as long as we utilize (burn) more calories than we are consuming than the deficit will inevitably contribute to a loss of fat. How much of a deficit is needed to lose a pound of fat? Glad you asked. One pound of fat is approximately 3,500 calories of energy, for those long wondering but always too afraid to ask, a calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water one degree Celsius and technically should be referred to as a kilocalorie, some countries use that term, for some reason America does not. So according to the energy equation, someone that requires, let's say 2,500 calories, excuse me, kcals, to sustains there current weight could trim 250 calories from their diet and burn 250 calories in their workout for a net loss of 500 kcals a day and if they did that for 7 days a week, well 500 x 7 = 3,500 which means that they would lose 1 pound of fat a week. That is the energy equation and as you are reading this sentence I am lacing up my boxing gloves to begin punching holes in this theory.
Round 1
The energy equation makes the assumption that all calories are created equal which is like saying you can put either rocket fuel or gasoline into your car, whatever, they are both fuel. Since I don't think your car is going into space, this of course is not true. Kcals come in the form of one of four macronutrients which you may recognize as carb, fat, protein and alcohol. We need a balance blend of the first three, alcohol's attributes lie outside of our metabolic needs. So once again to reduce our energy needs to just a number is an oversimplification and excludes the acknowledgment that different macronutrients play different roles and thus we need different amounts of each. A diet in which the 2500 kcals are composed entirely of either carb, fat or protein would be insufficient despite the mathematical accuracy of calories in and calories out.
Round 2
Even amongst macronutrients, there is great variance. Not all carbs, fats and proteins are created equal. For example, both table sugar and oatmeal are both examples of carbohydrate but they are of course far from equal. So once again here we encounter more complication. It simply isn't just a number, we must consider macronutrient ratios and even once we do that we must also consider the effect that different options of the same macronutrient will have.
Round 3
Nutrient timing. What if one were to consume all of the 2,500 calories in one meal at one time, think Thanksgiving? Since again according to the energy equation time is not a factor but in reality the combination of starving for a good portion of the day only to gorge one's self for one meal at night, though not uncommon, may result in weight loss but it will certainly not result in a loss of fat.
Round 4
Even if the macro ratios are ideal for reaching one's goals along with the food choices, the deficit we create in our attempt to reduce fat, if too great can actually trigger our bodies to start storing fat. Yes as advanced as we are our primitive brain's biggest fear is starvation. If you are here, (and judging by the stats of this web site, you aren't) that means you have inherited the DNA of those that learned to adapt to famine, deprivation and a literal kill or be killed link in the food chain because. Food simply has never been as plentiful as it is now. Food is everywhere I even remember when gas stations just sold gas. Now every gas station is a full deli / convenient store and thus starvation is not as much of a risk now as it was for our ancient ancestors. Culture and technology, which has made food so plentiful, moves far faster than evolution. As a result we panic when there is too much of a deficit between what we are taking in and what we are expending. We respond to that alarm the only we know how, the only way our ancestors survived; we start storing fat. We will begin this process by shedding that metabolically expensive muscle and as we in turnslow down our metabolism, so we are expending less energy, we ensure that the food we do eat will be turned into fat far faster than we normally would. Yes our ancestors were fatties. They just didn't live in an environment that allowed them to become obese. Those are the genes we inherited. I estimate that a caloric deficit between 200 - 500 kcals a day (depends on the person) for most will result ina triggering of our starvation response.
In closing whether we are adding up the pounds gained or lost or counting calories, there is more to losing weight than just numbers. The reason that trainers and dietitians have jobs is because there is more to losing weight than any one thing. Losing weight is easy for some and hard for many but it isn't simple for any of us.
