Nutrition: Losing weight myths

For my first blog I was thinking about starting a series talking about the different concepts of nutrition and the myths that come with it. Starting with the biggest one of them all eat nothing to lose weight.

The typical thinking of going on a diet is to only eat salad for breakfast, lunch and dinner with drinking water and eating ice cubes… This is no way to fuel your body to lose weight. Your body works on a very simple system, calories in calories out. If you burn more calories that you consume you will lose weight. This the most basic idea/way to lose weight.

This doesn’t mean you need to be in the gym 8 hours a day doing just cardio, training is 20% of losing weight the other 80% is nutrition and this may confuse some people but let me explain.

Calories is another word for energy, your body utilizes this energy to perform daily functions. So if you don’t exercise and you operate in your ordinary daily life you still burn calories. You walk to your car, you breathe, you walk from your couch to the fridge and back, etc. Your body still does normal things to function and this burns calories. So if you work out how much calories your body needs to function you take that caloric amount and you eat 10 % less then you will lose weight, it’s that simple.

So in saying this you need to calculate your BMR, as well as how much calories you would burn in a regular day.

So that BMR is your Basic Metabolic Rate, this by definition is: The amount of energy that is expended at rest in a neutral environment after the digestive system has been inactive for about 12 hours.

In other words, is the basic amount of food your body needs in order to just survive, function and maintain the same physique you currently have. If you just eat 10% less than this amount, then you will begin to lose weight.

There is no reliable formula to work out how much calories you expend on a daily basis, so you could use a fitness watch or a health app on your smart phone to accurately see how much calories you lose in a day and go from there. A few affordable brands for affordable fitness watches is: Totalsports brand, Volkano, Tempo. That’s just a few but there are others that are affordable which I haven’t mentioned.

But at the end of the day you will obviously have to put in the work to get the results.

If you have any questions or would like further in-site on this topic feel free to email ronin@macromeals.co.za as well as for personal training &/or meal prep assistance.