Don’t be fatalistic, don’t keep your calories in your diary.

Today’s article will deal about how we can manage our energy balance.

With the good tools, we can change our daily energy expenditure to lose (or to gain) weight.

The idea is to put through the total of calories that we have consumed (eaten) over the day and the caloric expenditure in order to know if we are in a surplus (weight gain) or in a deficit (weight loss) situation.

There are a few things to know in order to manage in the best ways such strategy.

THE ART OF COUNTING CALORIES

One key element when dealing with weight is the tracking of the calories. This is a key method to know what you bring to your body, and so, to follow your weight loss or gain. It can be reassuring for the person involved in such process since it gives more information about nutrition and the types of calories consumed (proteins, fats and carbs).

In case of digestion problem, it can also give more information as you have this kind of “journal” which gives you the days when you consumed t his or that foodstuff.

Therefore, and especially at the beginning, it takes time to enter all the food that you consume over the day. And everybody might be not able to do spend so much time. By the way, once you roughly know the inputs of the food, it will allow you to save time and adapt you strategy when you go out for a meal for example.

Therefore, this is not a 100% science as far as we know that there are some variations in your diet and between what you put in your plate, and what does the packet indicates.

CALORIC EXPENDITURE

Apart from the nutritive aspect, the daily expenditures are key to the weight loss goals.

In the current situation, people stress with the idea of being enclosed in their home, without being able to do sport, and beyond that to consume more calories in order to be on a deficit.

The biggest component in terms of movements on the caloric expenditure is rarely the physical activity linked to training, but mostly to the energy cost related to the spontaneous activity (NEAT).

This “Non-exercise Activity Thermogenesis” is marginal for us, such as working in an office, but for a bricklayer this is absolutely not the same values generated from this NEAT.

Overall, if the activity is reduced to the strict minimum such as the family home, there are necessarily less energy expenditure lead by movements.

The compounds of energy expenditures are as follows:

- Resting metabolic rate (to keep the basal functions such as breathing, blood circulation…etc);

- Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (also known as NEAT); which stands for the amount of energy that our body uses to do the daily activities such as walking around, typing on your computer, cooking, dancing in front of the mirror…etc);

- Calories burned during exercises;

- Thermic effects of food but this is something very not marginal. Just to tell you, this is thermic effects generated by the consumption of macronutrients, that doesn’t burn as much calories.

HOW TO ESTIMATE THE NEEDS ?

There is a formula based upon several factors:

- Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) which stands for what the body consumes over the day, and depends of age, genetic, weight, gender…etc;

- Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) which stands for the total daily activities and the calories burned;

- Macronutrients which are the:

°Proteins (meat, fish, diary product or leguminous plants…) and they weight 4kcal/gr;

°Fats (oils, butter and carbs, nuts…) and they weight 9kcal/gr;

°Carbs (potatoes, rice, pasta, fruits…); and they weight 4kcal/gr.

With this last information, you can pursue to see where we want to land. We know that macronutrients don’t have the same weight which enables to make variations along our diet in order to reduce, for example, the amount of fat we consume as they are the ones that weight more calories.

Thus, the formula given by Harris & Benedict, is as follows:

- TMB (femme) = 655 + (9,6 * P) + (1,8 * A) – (4,7 * E)

- TMB (homme) = 66.5 + (13,75 * P) + (5 * A) – (6,77 * E)

P = weight in KG A = height in cm E = age in years

It would give us the amount of calories the body consume if we were lying in a bed without producing any efforts over the day.

That is why, we need to weight it, with a physical activity factor in order to a global idea of what we need for 24 hours. It, usually, differs from 1 to 2 (Sedentary > Light activity > Moderate activity > Very active), the more active you are the higher is the factor.

Example of calculation :

- For a 25 years old man of 1m80, weighing 75 kg, which have a light activity (1.2)

TMB = 66.5 + (13.75*75) + (5*180) – (6.77*25) = 1 830 kcal

And if we update with the physical factor: 1 830*1.2= 2 200 kcal

- For a 30 years old woman of 1m60, weighing 54kg, which has a very active job (1.8)

TMB = 655 + (9,6 * 54) + (1,8 * 160) – (4,7 * 30) = 1 600 kcal

And if we update with the physical factor: 1 600*1.8= 2 880 kcal

We can see that we the update, which is necessary, the value vary a lot. This is key since it leads to the increase of the food that you need to eat to maintain your weight, based upon your daily activities.

Tips :

- Manage the quantities you put in your plate. You can also trick your mind by eating in a smaller or a bigger plat.

- Eat mostly non-processed food. Indeed, it tends to be high on fats and (raw) sugar, and low on nutrients and vitamins.

- Use food volume to reduce the amounts of calories you eat. In fact, your plate can be composed of nutritive and good food, but not necessarily with calorific ones. The proteins are a good example as they enable to faster reach satiety, the potatoes, or a big plate of vegetables.

See below a scheme which gives you more information about satiety of common foods.

- The consistency of your nutrition will be the key to reach your goals. You can document your progress by counting your calories.

You can use MyfitnessPal (https://www.myfitnesspal.com/) or Cronometer (https://cronometer.com/) to track your calories.

- Running won’t make you burn more calories, except maybe if you run a marathon each day…. The fat is that before going for a job, maybe should we take time to study our nutrition to target weight loss.

- Eat with pleasure. Being to restrictive won’t make you last a long time as far as our goal is to target long-term nutrition habits.

TO GO FURTHER

It goes further than the simple aspect of caloric expenditure/intake: other parameters need to be considered:

- Even if the formula seems to give good overviews on a day, for most of the cases, BMR doesn’t take into account the body composition, since two person with the same age, weight, age and gender will get the same results. We know that muscle and fat doesn’t require the same number of calories for maintenance, which means that estimations could be reviewed. By the way, that is why the Body mass index (IMC in French) is a questionable data. Let’s just see the BMI from the bodybuilder

- In order to cover mistakes or take some margin of error, we might recommend to add more or less 200 calories.

- A stressful state can impact the weight loss. One first step should be to care about the environment (jobs pressure, relationships, state of mind…Etc).

- Eating disorder needs to be studied seriously.

Thanks for reading.

:)