Archivi tag: Calorie Deficit

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3500 Calories To Lose A Pound: Is This Formula All Wrong?

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Title: 3500 Calories To Lose A Pound – Is This Formula All Wrong?
By line: By Tom Venuto, CSCS, NSCA-CPT
URL: www.BurnTheFat.com
Word count: 1256 words

3500 Calories To Lose A Pound – Is This Formula All Wrong? By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS www.BurnTheFat.com

Most fitness conscious people have heard that there are 3,500 calories in a pound of fat, so if you create a deficit of 3500 calories in a week, you lose a pound of weight. If you create a deficit of 7000 calories in a week, you lose two pounds, and so on. Right? Well, not so fast…

Dr. Kevin Hall, an investigator at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda has done some interesting research about the mechanisms regulating human body weight. He recently published a new paper in the International Journal of Obesity that throws a wrench in works of the “3500 calories to lose a pound” idea.

Some of the equations in his paper made my head hurt, but despite the complex math he used to come to his conclusions, his article clearly prompts the question, “3500 calories to lose a pound of WHAT?” His paper also contained a lot of simple and practical tips you can use to properly balance your caloric intake with output, fine tune your calorie deficit and help you retain more muscle when you diet.

Below, I’ve distilled some of the information into a simple bullet-point summary that any non-scientist can understand. Then I wrap up with my interpretation of how you can apply this data in your own fat loss program:

Calculating the calories required to lose a pound and fine-tuning your caloric deficit

  • 3500 calories to lose a pound has always been the rule of thumb. However, this 3500 calories figure goes back to research which assumed that all the weight lost would be adipose tissue (which would be ideal, of course).
  • But as we all know (unfortunately), lean body mass is lost along with body fat, which would indicate that the 3500 calorie figure could be an oversimplification.
  • The amount of lean body mass lost is based on initial body fat level and size of the calorie deficit
  • Lean people tend to lose more lean body mass and retain more fat.
  • Fat people tend to lose more body fat and retain more lean tissue (revealing why obese people can tolerate aggressive low calorie diets better than already lean people)
  • Very aggressive low calorie diets tend to erode lean body mass to a greater degree than more conservative diets.
  • whether the weight loss is lean or fat gives you the real answer of what is the required energy deficit per unit of weight loss
  • The metabolizable energy in fat is different than the metabolizable energy in muscle tissue. A pound of muscle is not 3500 calories. A pound of muscle yields about 600 calories.
  • If you lose lean body mass, then you lose more weight than if you lose fat.
  • If you create a 3500 calorie deficit in one week and you lose 100% body fat, you will lose one pound.
  • But if you create a 3500 calorie weekly deficit and as a result of that deficit, lose 100% muscle, you would lose almost 6 pounds of body weight! (of course, if you manage to lose 100% muscle, you will be forced to wear the Dieter’s Dunce cap)
  • If you have a high initial body fat percentage, then you are going to lose more fat relative to lean, so you may need a larger deficit to lose the same amount of weight as compared to a lean person
  • Creating a calorie deficit once at the beginning of a diet and maintaining that same caloric intake for the duration of the diet and after major weight loss fails to account for how your body decreases energy expenditure with reduced body weight
  • Weight loss typically slows down over time for a prescribed constant diet (the “plateau”). This is either due to the decreased metabolism mentioned above, or a relaxing of the diet compliance, or both (most people just can’t hack aggressive calorie reductions for long)
  • Progressive resistance training and or high protein diets can modify the proportion of weight lost from body fat versus lean tissue (which is why weight training and sufficient protein while on calorie restricted diets are absolute musts!)

So, based on this info, should you throw out the old calorie formulas?

Well, not necessarily. You can still use the standard calorie formulas to figure out how much you should eat, and you can use a 500-1000 calorie per day deficit (below maintenance) as a generic guideline to figure where to set your calories to lose one or two pounds per week respectively (at least that works “on paper” anyway).

Even better however, you could use this info to fine tune your caloric deficit using a percentage method and also base your deficit on your starting body fat level, to get a much more personalized and effective approach:

15-20% below maintenance calories = conservative deficit

20-25% below maintenance calories = moderate deficit

25-30% below maintenance calories = aggressive deficit

31-40% below maintenance calories = very aggressive deficit (risky)

50%+ below maintenance calories = semi starvation/starvation (potentially dangerous and unhealthy)

(Note: According to exercise physiologists Katch& Mcardle, the average female between the ages of 23 and 50 has a maintenance level of about 2000-2100 calories per day and the average male about 2700-2900 calories per day)

Usually, we would suggest starting with a conservative deficit of around 15-20% below maintenance. Based on this research, however, we see that there can be a big difference between lean and overweight people in how many calories they can or should cut.

If you have very high body fat to begin with, the typical rule of thumb on calorie deficits may underestimate the deficit required to lose a pound. It may also be too conservative, and you can probably use a more aggressive deficit safely without as much worry about muscle loss or metabolic slowdown.

If you are extremely lean, like a bodybuilder trying to get ready for competition, you would want to be very cautious about using aggressive calorie deficits. You’d be better off keeping the deficit conservative and starting your diet/cutting phase earlier to allow for a slow, but safe rate of fat loss, with maximum retention of muscle tissue.

The bottom line is that it’s not quite so simple as 3,500 calories being the deficit to lose a pound. Like lots of other things in nutrition that vary from person to person, the ideal amount of calories to cut “depends”…

Note: The Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle program not only has an entire chapter dedicated to helping you calculate your exact calorie needs, it was designed very specifically to keep a fairly conservative approach to caloric deficits and to maximize the amount of lean tissue you retain and minimize the amount of metabolic adaptation that occurs when you’re dieting. The approach may be more conservative, and the fat loss may be slower, but it has a better long term track record… You can either lose weight fast, sacrifice muscle and gain the fat back like 95% of people do, or lose fat slow and keep it off forever like the 5% of the people who know the secrets. The choice is yours. For more information, visit: http://www.burnthefat.com

References:

Forbes GB. Body fat content influences the body composition response to nutrition and exercise. Ann NY Acad Sci. 904: 359-365. 2000

Hall, KD., What is the required energy deficit per unit of weight loss? Int J Obesity. 2007 Epub ahead of print.

McArdle WD. Exercise physiology: Energy, Nutrition, and Human performance. 4td ed. Williams & Wilkins. 1996.

Wishnofsky M. Caloric equivalents of gained or lost weight. Am J Clin Nutr. 6: 542-546.

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder, certified strength and conditioning specialistTom Venuto 8

(CSCS) and a certified personal trainer (CPT). Tom is the

author of “Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle,” which teaches

you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using

methods of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness

models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase

your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com

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What No One Is Telling You About Calories In VS Calories Out

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Title: What No One Is Telling You About Calories In VS Calories Out

By line: By Tom Venuto

URL: www.BurnTheFat.com!

Word count: 776 words

I’m going to share with you the most crucial weight loss strategy that will literally make or break your success. This is the number one fat loss tip I could ever give you. If you don’t get this right, you can kiss your fat loss results goodbye. This is the one absolute requirement for weight loss, and it’s something you’ve probably heard of before. However, there’s one critical distinction about this familiar advice that you might not have considered – and this one thing makes all the difference in the world…

Let me quote Melvin Williams, PhD, professor emeritus of exercise science at Old Dominion University and author of the textbook Nutrition for Health, Fitness and Sport (McGraw Hill):

“Human energy systems are governed by the same laws of physics that rule all energy transformations. No substantial evidence is available to disprove the caloric theory. It is still the physical basis for bodyweight control.”

There are a variety of diet programs and weight loss “gurus” who claim that calories don’t count. They insist that if you eat certain foods or avoid certain foods, that’s all you have to do to lose weight. Dozens, maybe hundreds of such diets exist, with certain “magic foods” put up on a pedestal or certain “evil fat-storing foods” banished into the forbidden foods zone.

Other weight loss “experts” invoke the insulin/carbohydrate hypothesis which claims that carbs drive insulin which drives body fat. That’s akin to saying “Carbs are the reason for the obesity crisis today, not excess calories.”

They are all mistaken.

Of course, there IS more to nutrition than calories in vs calories out. Food quality and nutrition content matters for good health. In addition, your food choices can affect your energy intake. We could even point the finger at an excess of refined starches and grains, sugar and soft drinks (carbs!) as major contributing factors to the surplus calories that lead to obesity.

However, that brings us back to excess calories as the pivotal point in the chain of causation, not carbs. A caloric deficit is a required condition for weight loss – even if you opt for the low carb approach – and that’s where your focus should go – on the deficit.

Now, here’s that critical distinction…

You’ve heard it said, “exercise more and eat less” a million times. However, saying “focus on the calorie deficit” is NOT the same thing. If you don’t understand the difference, you could end up spinning your wheels for years.

You could exercise more, but if you compensate by eating more, you cancel your deficit.

You could eat less, but if you compensate by moving less, again you cancel your deficit.

This type of compensation can happen unconsciously, which leads to confusion about why you’re not losing weight or why you’re gaining. That often leads you to make excuses or blame the wrong thing… anything but the calories.

Therefore, “focus on the calorie deficit” more accurately states the most important key to weight loss than “exercise more and eat less.” Make sure you understand this distinction and then follow this advice.

Last but not least, keep in mind that there are a lot of ways to establish a deficit and many of those ways are really dumb. Eating nothing but grapefruits, cabbage, twinkies… but in a deficit?… Dumb!

The bottom line is that a calorie deficit is required for fat loss, but once your deficit is established, the composition of your hypo-caloric diet DOES matter. That’s why any good fat loss program starts with “calories in vs calories out” but doesn’t stop there – you also need to look at protein, essential fats, macronutrients, micronutrients, food quality and how the diet you choose fits into your lifestyle. This is the pivotal strategy that my entire Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle system hinges upon.

Don’t let the simplicity of this idea fool you. This is the #1 key to your successful weight loss now and in the future: Focus on the deficit!

Train hard and expect success,

Tom Venuto, author of Burn The Fat Feed The Muscle www.BurnTheFat.com!

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a fat loss expert, lifetime natural (steroid-free) bodybuilder, freelance writer, and author of the #1 best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle: Fat-Burning Secrets of The World’s Best Bodybuilders & Fitness Models (e-book) which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com!

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Q & A: Intensity or Insanity: How Much Training Effort is Enough?

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Title: Intensity or Insanity: How Much Training Effort is Enough?
Author: By Tom Venuto

Word Count: 1705

QUESTION: Tom, do you think that the intensity of your workout is “THE THING” that gives you results or is it more about being consistent with your workouts? The reason I ask is because I’m following your www.BurnTheFat.com! nutrition program and I also just got a new high-intensity workout program called the Insanity series. I like doing these workouts, but I’m having a hard time pushing myself that hard every day and I’m finding now that I’m starting to dread doing them. I have been doing these workouts only 2-3 times per week instead of the 5 times per week that is recommended in the program. This workout brings me to my knees. I’ve started questioning myself and wondering if it’s even worth the torture. – Paul

ANSWER: Intensity is one of the most important training variables, and at times, you’ll definitely want to train with high intensity to get maximum results in the shortest time.

But the real answer to your question may depend on your goals, the shape you’re in now and even your personality type.

Some things to consider:

  • Are you a beginner or already in shape and looking for the next challenge?
  • Do you like home bodyweight workouts or are you a gym and weights/ cardio machine type?
  • Are you the “hard-core” fitness nut type of person or do you simply want to get leaner and healthier, nothing crazy?
  • When you say you want “results”, are you talking about fat loss, cardiovascular fitness improvement, muscle growth or all of the above?

With that in mind, let’s answer the HOW MUCH INTENSITY question in the context of fat loss first.

I’m sure you can appreciate that people can lose weight while lying in a hospital bed. If someone is sick and can’t keep food down, then there can be a significant calorie deficit even without exercise. That rules out high intensity training as an absolute prerequisite for weight loss. In fact, this simple example proves that exercise is not a requirement to lose weight at all.

Obviously, starving yourself is NOT the approach I recommend! My burn the fat program (www.BurnTheFat.com!) is based on the opposite: train more and feed the muscle and fuel the training. I’m simply making the point that it’s NOT intensity PER SE or even ANY type of particular workout that creates the fat loss, IT’S THE CALORIE DEFICIT!

To burn fat, focus on establishing and maintaining a calorie deficit.

To increase speed of fat loss, focus on increasing the size of the calorie deficit.

Calorie deficit = fat loss is a liberating concept because it makes you realize you have endless options for achieving your fat loss goal using all kinds of different combinations of nutrition and exercise. Furthermore, none of the workouts have to beat you into submission to achieve a calorie deficit, especially if you work diligently on the nutrition side of the equation.

Countless thousands of people have acheived their goal weight with walking (low intensity exercise) as their only cardio. They chose walking because that’s what suited their needs and their personality.

Here’s where intensity comes in:

From a bodyfat loss perspective, using higher intensity training makes the workout more EFFICIENT. The higher the intensity, the more calories you burn. The more calories you burn, the more fat you lose, if all else remains equal (ie, if you don’t compensate by eating more).

Some trainers claim that low intensity steady-state exercise is “ineffective” or even “totally worthless.”

THIS IS TOTALLY FALSE!

Low intensity training is not ineffective, it’s simply less efficient. For example, it takes a lot of time walking to burn enough calories to put a major dent in your fat stores. If you were to increase the intensity of your cardio, you’d burn more calories in less time and you’d drop the fat faster. You’d also be improving time efficiency by achieving a calorie deficit with less time investment.

But think about this: If that high intensity workout made you start to dread it, or if you started to think of it as torture, or if it got you injured, then how long would you stick with it?

If you can’t stick with it, what good did it do you? It gets tossed on the ever-growing pile of other quick fixes.

It’s surprising how often a moderate approach, or even the slow and steady approach, beats out the quick and intense approach if you extend your time perspective and think long term.

It’s the classic story of the tortoise vs the hare:

The hare comes blazing out of the gate in a sprint and leaves the tortoise in the dust. Looks like the hare will be the clear winner. But the hare gasses out after that sprint and takes a nap.

The tortoise, being the more consistent of the two, slowly but surely keeps making progress, getting closer and closer to the goal, never missing a step.

As the fable goes, the tortoise eventually passes the complacent and or exhausted hare, who is lazily snoozing under a shady tree. In the end, the Tortoise wins the race. Leisurely, I might add… (no “pukey” t-shirt necessary).

Intensity gets you there faster, if you can stick with it, but consistency ALWAYS pays in the long run when it comes to fat loss.

What about intensity in the context of fitness improvement?

It’s important to know that you can get health benefits from moderate and even light exercise. But when you compare it to intense exercise, there’s no contest. Higher intensity types of cardio kick low intensity’s butt.

In fact, it’s almost shocking how much cardiovascular improvement you can get from a fairly small amount of intense, or sprint-like training:

This is one of the reasons High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is justifiably so popular.

A paper just published in the ACSM’s Exercise and Sport Sciences Review (July 2009) discussed the research suggesting that intense aerobic interval training provides greater benefits for the heart than low or moderate intensity exercise.

The benefits discussed included:

Increased maximal oxygen uptake

  • Improved heart muscle contractile function
  • Improved heart muscle calcium handling
  • reduced cardiac dysfunction in metabolic syndrome
  • Reversed pathological cardiac hypertrophy
  • Increased physiological hypertrophy of the heart muscle
  • Overall: improved quality of life and length of life by avoiding fatal heart attacks.

The researchers concluded:

“The studies indicate that high intensity may be an important success factor for designing effective exercise programs and that high intensity may be particularly critical for improving cardiac function.”

Ok, so that covers intensity in the contexts of fat burning and cardiovascular improvement. What about for building muscle?

Once again, training intensity is a critical factor. For muscles to grow, you have to literally break down muscle fibers, disrput your body’s homeostasis and create a stress response. The adaptation to that disruption is strength and hypertrophy, but it only occurs if you can recover from the stress. The major point is that intensity is a critical factor for all kinds of health and fitness training, but it’s also the one variable that has to be managed the most carefully… and sensibly!

Doing knock-you-to-your-knees workouts of any kind, every single day is not a smart strategy.

I know a few guys – like my friend Mike the kickboxing instructor – the dude is indestructable! He could take any workout you give him, chew it up, spit it out and then say, “Is that it?” (Then he would go teach 3 classes in a row!)

But unless you’re one of these super-human genetic mutants, your body just can’t take a nonstop pounding. Yet there are lots of people with the dispostion and personality type to go in the gym and beat themselves to a pulp each time. Despite the heroic effort, they may be doing their bodies more harm than good (of course, I was never one of those crazy “insane training” people, ahem, cough, cough)

This is why most experts today are recommending only 2-3 HIIT style or high intensity cardio workouts per week when you’re concurrently doing intense weight training. If you want to increase your calorie deficit so you can burn more fat in less time, go ahead and do more training. But for most people, the additional workouts should be low or medium in intensity so they don’t interfere with physical recovery or lead to mental burnout.

Intense daily boot-campish workouts may appeal to the “I want to be tough as a navy seal” personality types and advanced workouts serve their purpose – to provide an appropriate challenge for advanced fitness enthusiasts. If you enjoy it, and if you can recover from it, and if you can stay injury-free, and if you can stick with it consistently, then go for it. But be sure to balance your intensity with recovery:

* Balance your weight training and cardio (volume, frequency and intensity) so you can recover from both and reap the benefits of both forms of training.

* Vary your workouts with some form of periodization or intensity-cycling system.

Last but not least, I believe that weight training should sit atop the exercise hierarchy as one part of a total fitness program.

Fat loss programs that are based entirely on calisthenic, aerobic or body weight exercise are popular today, but I recommend a 4-element model:

1. Nutrition
2. Weight training
3. Cardio training (low/moderate and intense)
4. Mental training (mindset and motivation)

For total fitness and physique development – muscle, strength, conditioning and leanness, combine weights with cardio…

Judiciously balance hare-like intensity with recovery…

AND do it all with tortoise-like consistency…

Then, watch what happens to your body. You will like it!

Train hard and expect success,

Tom Venuto
Author
www.BurnTheFat.com!

PS. You can learn more about my 4-part model of fat loss in my burn the fat program at: www.BurnTheFat.com!

 

About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder, certified strength and conditioning specialistTom Venuto (CSCS) and a certified personal trainer (CPT). Tom is the author of “www.BurnTheFat.com!” which teaches you how to get lean without drugs or supplements using methods of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and increase your metabolism by visiting: www.BurnTheFat.com!