In a previous post, I put forth my opinion (I'd argue it's fact) that when it comes to getting lean diet is always going to trump exercise for fat loss. Unless you're a professional endurance athlete, the odds are that if you're trying to use exercise to compensate for a non-optimized dietary approach to leaning out is not going to work.
It's gotten fashionable to say that weight loss isn't about calories in calories out. Here's some dietary approaches that claim to be able to grant weight loss without the need to pay attention to caloric intake
Don't eat Carbs
Don't eat Fat
Eat like a Caveman
Eat according to your Blood Type
The Carnivore Diet (THIS IS A NEW ONE!)
Intermittent Fasting Protocols
I'd argue that if you're using any of these approaches, or another approach that gives you some kind of set rules of
what you can and can't eat
when you can and can't eat
and you're getting the results you want, what's happening is that these parameters are causing you to regulate your energy balance (calories calories out, which we'll refer to as CICO) such that you're taking in less calories than you're burning, which is resulting in fat loss occurring. If you're happy with how things are going, then great! Feel free to not read the rest of this post and only return if something has stopped working for you or you'd like to see if it's possible to tweak some things to get better results.
For those of us who either have tried some of these protocols and have had limited success, or want to peer under the hood a bit more, while i'm sure CICO isn't the be all and end all of how energy balance affects weight loss, I'd argue that it's the best approximation we have of what's going that lets us tweak our approach when necessary to get desired results.
Most of us beginning this journey aren't aware that the biggest contributor we have to caloric burn in a day is actually our Basal Metabolic Rate which is the amount of calories our bodies would burn to simply keep up with daily basic function. I think of this as "Coma Calories" i.e how much we burn when the body is at rest within a 24 hour period. Activity (both through exercise and non exercise activity - stuff like walking to the toilet or washing dishes) does also contribute but to a much smaller extent that we would hope.
Our bodies are also highly adaptive mechanisms that quickly adapt to any stimulus to become more efficient at the tasks we make it perform. From a standpoint of survival, this makes our bodies resilient to the stresses we put on it. Unfortunately this also means that if you're for example, running to burn calories, over time the body gets MORE EFFICIENT at running which means you start burning less and less calories for the same amount of time and effort you put into running over time. A strategy that uses caloric burn exercise as the main driver of creating an energy deficit becomes harder and harder as the body adapts to become better at executing the activity.
There are online calculators that allow you to plug in your gender, height, weight and age which will give you starting estimations on what your total daily energy expenditure would be. All of them also have functions where you also can factor in daily activity. I'd caution that since we overestimate the effect of exercise on caloric burn, it makes sense to under declare our inputs of activity into these calculators and input "sedentary" or "Exercise 1-3 times/week".
Here's one. https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html.
There are a few others and the results they will spit out will differ by +- 100 to 200 calories ... it's more important to just pick one and go with it since it's just a starting ballpark and you'll have to make adjustments later anyways.
The calculator then spits out a number which represents estimated caloric burn in a 24 hour period. Keep in mind that this is a crude estimation, but we need to start somewhere and most people actually will end up falling into a distribution of the standard deviation (which is a fancy way of saying this number won't be exact for you, but unless you're an extreme outlier, it won't be too far off)
If you're mathematically inclined and play with the calculator for a bit, you'll also find that your estimated caloric burn in a day will decrease as the input for weight decreases. This makes sense since work done (or caloric burn from activity) = mass x distance travelled, so as we reduce our fat mass our work done will also decrease for the same amount of activity.
If you're new to this, I'd recommend just plugging in the numbers with my recommendation for declared activity levels and just taking it that the calculator is giving you a perfect number as a start.
A pound of fat = about 3500 calories. Divided across 7 days, this means that to lose a pound of fat you'd have to find a way to create a 500 calorie deficit per day from what the calculator says is your daily estimated energy expenditure. Since the calculator already takes into account your estimations for activity throughout the day, that leaves us with the calories in part of the equation as the last factor that can be manipulated.
It bears repeating - tracking caloric burn from exercise is extremely difficult. All readings that you might get from your treadmill, your fitness tracker or some website telling you how much an hour of some kind of high intensity interval XYZ are crude estimations at best that usually overstate their effects. Also, since the body is adaptive and doesn't want to lose fat mass since that's the store of energy that's supposed to get you through a famine, it has mechanisms that will cause most people to compensate for caloric burn by either causing us to want to eat more/move less throughout the day to bring us back to a net energy balance or surplus throughout the day.
Seriously, I Need to Count Freaking Calories?
Ok so at this point, your lizard brain is going into fight or flight mode and you're probably saying something like "wait wait wait I have to count calories? Isn't that neurotic? You want me to do what?"
I fought this for a long time myself and tried to find some diet that allowed me to eat as much as I wanted as long as I didn't eat food XYZ. You might find eventually find one, but the conclusion I came to was what I stated above
I'd argue that if you're using any of these approaches, or another approach that gives you some kind of set rules of
what you can and can't eat
when you can and can't eat
and you're getting the results you want, what's happening is that these parameters are causing you to regulate your energy balance (calories calories out, which we'll refer to as CICO) such that you're taking in less calories than you're burning, which is resulting in fat loss occurring.
What I'm also saying is, just like gravity, the equation of CICO exists, and is true whether we want to acknowledge it or not. When I got to the point where I was ready to accept it as a law governed by the science of physics, I decided I'd rather come to grips with a reality I couldn't change than bury my head in the sand and try to hope away an unchanging truth.
I don't think it's realistic to set out on a plan that involves tracking the calories of every single piece of food you're going eat for the rest of your life but for most of us Recovering Fatasses we got to a state of wanting to lose fat because we're unaware of
the caloric load that different foods provide
the quantities of said foods that we're actually consuming throughout the day
You won't have to count calories forever. But if we accept that the calories in part of the equation is the most important manipulatable part of the CICO equation then coming to grips with a basic understanding how we can manipulate our caloric intake becomes paramount in the pursuit of getting lean.
Just like a person who's starting to learn to manage his money, the beginning is tedious You'll probably find yourself outraged when you realize that your money was unconsciously spent on a combination expensive lattes, meals out/meals delivered to your doorstep that weren't even that great or that you hardly even remember tasting, cab/Grab/Uber rides that you really didn't need to spend on where you don't remember where you were going to or coming from and a bunch of dumb shit you bought to make yourself feel better about the fact that you didn't have as much money as you wanted and you had to work a job you didn't like to make more money to buy more dumb shit to make you feel better.
But if you keep plugging to get to know and make improvements to your spending habits, over time you'll probably find that with minimal effort (note : it will still take MINIMAL effort, not zero effort) you'll get the hang of it and be able to bring your expenditure down because through building the awareness gained through tracking your expenditure you'll be able to control and optimize your spending habits without having to hold on to every single receipt and reconciling your bank statements in a tedious and clunky excel sheet.
I think the the comparison of money and caloric intake is pretty self explanatory. If you were one of those people that was naturally thrifty you wouldn't need to go through the tedious exercise of tracking expenditure. Spending less than your income would already be part of your emotional DNA.
Similarly, if without any effort put into managing your caloric intake you were already in the physical state you wanted to be, then you probably would have no use for this blog since you wouldn't be a Recovering Fatass like I am. But if you're not effortlessly in your desired physical state, accepting that CICO exists is as fundamental to your success as accepting the fact that the world transacts in money and trying to manage your money without putting any thought into expenditure only works if you're already naturally thrifty and don't have a problem with money or you're Elon Musk and you have more money that you're ever going to able to spend.
Similarly, of course there are people who genetic outliers who have metabolisms that will burn much much more than they will ever be able to consume but they're called outliers for a reason. Being upset that we're not one of those outliers is emotional effort spent on something we can't change. When we accept what we can't change, we can then focus our energy on the things we can change. The hope for all of us is that the the skillsets that are painful to learn initially can eventually become tasks that we can undertake with minimal mental and emotional effort.
Training Wheels
Ok. So if you've read this far and haven't told me to go and F**K myself yet, then it's time to talk about some points of action.
When it comes to caloric intake, we need to know the caloric load of the foods we're eating and the quantities of said foods. There's a bunch of free apps that we can use to do this. I like MyFitnessPal. It has a great database and you should be able to find at least 80% of whatever it is that makes up your diet. Search for the food and input it into your log and you'll get an approximation of your caloric intake.
Just like your estimated Total Daily Caloric Output, your estimated daily caloric intake is an imperfect number. This number is imperfect because it's impossible to know down to the calorie just how many calories is in each piece of food. The label on every snickers bar may say that the snickers bar is 280 calories, but the actual caloric load of each candy bar may vary. Compound this with our own human tracking errors and the fact that we all lie to ourselves from time to time and the odds that we're going to get a completely accurate number are close to NIL.
In the game of getting lean, we're concerned with trends, not one-offs. We beat Adiposity through a war of Attrition and success comes from winning more small battles than we lose over the course of time.
Take 2 weeks out of your life to track your weekly caloric intake versus your estimated caloric output. If you've managed to chalk up a caloric deficit of about 7000 cals, you should lose about 2 pounds on the scale. Maybe slightly more, or slightly less, but somewhere around there. Try to weigh yourself in the same state each time. I recommend in the morning, first thing in the morning before any water/food intake. Also resist the urge to binge and eat everything you can before your first weigh in and starve yourself before your second weigh in. You want numbers that give you as close to an accurate representation of the trends as possible so if you're screwing around with the numbers you're only screwing yourself.
You might find you lost slightly more than 2 pounds, or slightly less than 2 pounds. This could be due to fluctuations in water weight, tracking errors, or just that fact that you haven't cleared your bowels before either weigh in. Again, we're looking at trends and we're working with imperfect numbers. So if you're about there, that basically means you roughly know your input and output metrics. From there you can either keep going at the rate you're going, or manipulate your input numbers (since it's really tough to effectively manipulate your output numbers) to lose fat at a faster rate. I wouldn't recommend trying to lose more than a pound a week though, especially at this stage when you're just figuring things out. Going too hard too fast inevitably leads to cracking and going on an all out eating spree.
If the results you're getting differ greatly from the expected results your estimated input output equation should be giving you, there's a few possibilities
You're a genetic outlier, and your actual energy expenditure is either greatly higher/lower than what can be expected for your age/weight/height/gender
There is a significant amount of tracking error in your caloric input
Let's talk about the tracking error first. There's a possibility that you might have logged all the food you've eaten across two weeks, but you've gotten the portion sizes wrong. If you're one of the lucky ones and you're good at estimating your portion sizes you then you won't run into this problem.
I found that if I went by what the fitness tracker said was a "Medium Sized" XYZ food I almost always underestimated how much I was actually eating. Myfitnesspal also usually has functions to track food by weight/metric volume, so when I finally bit the bullet and starting weighing/measuring my food I found that almost everything that Myfitnesspal said was a "Medium" was actually an "Extra Large" in terms of caloric load. When I took the time to clean that up and weigh everything for a while, then the numbers started to make a lot more sense.
The next possibility is that you're either not logging everything, or just lying to yourself. It's fine, everyone does it. I've definitely done it. It doesn't make you a bad person - it's just hampering your odds of success. I want you to win, so I'll encourage you to be good to yourself and not lie to yourself, because the only person you're screwing is you. Just rinse, repeat and buckle down for the next two weeks and do this again. The truth exists and affects us all whether we want to come to terms with it or not.
Studies show that humans in studies for behaviour related to tracking of food intake highly underreport their intake. So if you find that the first time you do this, you're one of these people, then know that you're normal. The good news is that since almost everyone does this, you only need to put in a bit more effort than the average person to work towards getting much more than average results.
Ok, so if you're sure you've got your caloric intake on lockdown, that leaves only your caloric output. Remember, the first number the calculator gave you was just a starting point. Adjust that number up or down by +- 100-200 calories accordingly till you end up getting weight gain/maintenance numbers that make sense. Remember, 3500 calorie deficit = about 1 pound of weight loss a week.
If in the first two weeks you lost anywhere from 3-10 pounds, first off, thank the fatloss gods for blessing you with a great start. I don't want to burst your bubble, but many people lose more weight than expected when they first get their numbers correct because of loss of water weight. A win is a win is a win, so enjoy the victory but keep to the numbers you're currently going at. If in weeks 3-4 numbers stall a little and you don't lose as much as the first two weeks don't worry your metabolism hasn't crashed - things are just evening out. Averages over time are what we're concerned with.
This post isn't so much about strategies on how to deal with the diet, but more so that we have a common understanding of how these metrics work and a shared acceptance of the truth of CICO. I don't recommend tracking your food meticulously forever and at some point the weighing scale also isn't going to be giving you complete representations of your fat loss since there are other factors that can affect overall weight such as water retention/undigested food mass/muscle mass gain/loss. If you're really killing it in the gym your first two weeks, you may not even see the pounds drop on the scale but you should definitely be able to see some visual difference if you take before and after photos.
The underlying truth we need to come to terms with is that in the war against Adiposity is the Fog of War is ever constant and we need to do our best to get the best semblance of metrics we can gather with the tools we have at hand. What we track gives us an image of the truth we can manage and if we can get 80% correct information a 100% effort yields the 80% results that over the long term can drastically affect body composition.
If you're not in the physical state you want to be in, then the likelihood is that either you don't know how you got to this state, or you don't want to know how you got to this state. If you don't want to know then unfortunately you'll need to accept that you may not be able to effect desired changes because you won't know which levers you can pull on. But if in the beginning you didn't know, the method i've outlined above is the best way I know to get a sense of what steps can be taken to get the results you want.
Absolute freedom is an illusion and everyone has to live with certain constraints. I believe freedom comes from the ability to make conscious choices with correct information to create the lives we want that can exist within the context of what is realistically possible.
I'm not a genetic outlier and any kind of progress I made, I made when I finally was able to accept the reality I needed to deal with. Within those constraints, I realised that I was privileged that my circumstances allowed me to even have the bandwidth from an emotional and financial capacity to even be concerned with such matters. Anytime we get to choose what we want to be, the option to be able to work on ourselves is a gift we shouldn't take lightly when a large part of the world is starving and dealing with a problem that is the opposite end of obesity.
Being rich, or getting lean doesn't guarantee that you'll lead a life of happiness. But i'm pretty sure it helps. Carrying around too much bodyfat to be happy is a first world problem and in a strange way a privilege. Exercise your privilege to choose to get the life you want.