Metabolism and bone structure are fat people’s two favourite excuses to being fat. I’m sure you’ve heard enough of them. “I don’t really eat all that much, I just have a very slow metabolism.” “I’m not fat I’m big boned.” Yeah, right! As Denis Leary would say: dinosaurs are big boned, ok – you’re big assed!
Now, before you start on me, I’m fat people! I’m allowed to take the piss because I’ve seen and heard it all before and I have used a number of excuses for not taking charge of my life over the years. It’s safe and comfortable to have a zillion excuses. If you never try you can’t fail and if you never fail you don’t risk defeat and humiliation. Simple. But oh so depressing.
There’s nothing you can say that would make me believe your life is so much harder or more difficult than anyone elses, so let’s just stop all the bollocks now and get down to business. If you need to grab hold of your life, there will never be a better time than this very moment. Trust me. Mondays don’t work! Neither do Tuesdays, Wednesdays etc. The one single moment you can control is this one. This moment. Here and now. Right now you have the option to choose change. To change the things you can. Pick one! And take one step towards a change for the better. What can you do? Make a plan of attack? Pay a bill? Put a 20p coin in a nice vase to start a savings fund for [insert suitable dream/object]?
If the answer has anything to do with fitness and weight loss, then this blog is the right place for you. (To be honest, this blog is the right place regardless of your answer as any change for the better fits in with the underlying personal and professional theme of this blog.) Congratulations – you’re only a week away from measurable results!
To lose weight is a simple equation (really!). If you’re following a reduced calorie diet, you need to figure out how many calories your body burns in a day, and then make sure to keep the intake a certain number of calories lower than that. Complicated? No, not really.
3500 calories equals a pound of fat. For a healthy weight loss, you shouldn’t try to lose more than a pound (3500kcal) a week. That’s a calorie reduction of 500kcal/day. But if you want to be more specific, you can try to figure out how your metabolism works. Your baseline metabolism accounts for the calories you burn simply to sustain vital life functions. It is estimated based on your weight, height, sex, and age. If you check online there are a few different baseline calculators and they don’t give exactly the same answer, but near enough. Pick one or add all the results you get together and then divide them by the number of results to get the average. My baseline metabolism is 2002kcal/day.
Once you know your baseline metabolism, you need to guesstimate how many extra calories you burn based on your lifestyle and level of activity. (If you use a tool like fitday.com this will be done for you.) My estimated “consumption” is about 1500kcal extra based on a seated work with some movement profile + an hour’s brisk walk per day. In total, my metabolism burns off around 3500kcal/day.
A realistic weight loss goal is to lose around a pound per week. Looking at your weight now and your goal weight – how big is the difference? As I’ve said before, I don’t do scales anymore so I have guesstimated my weight. For most people the number of centimeters you have around your waistline pretty accurately tells you how many kilos you weigh. My waistline was 119cm when I started my programme last Tuesday. That should translate to rougly 119kg but I’ve added 10 to be on the safe side. (I think I might pop in to my GPs at some point to get a reference weight.) My goal is to have a 78cm waistline (it was 68cm once upon a time but I don’t think that would look good on me now).
Next up is the time span. How long is this going to take you? For me, I have decided to put 18 months down as my primary goal. If I have to, I’ll adjust it later, but I think I could get there in 18 months. That’s 78 weeks and 3 days today, which means I’d need to lose 1.43 pounds/week.
Knowing that 3500kcal is one pound, we can use a simple maths operation to figure out that 1.43 pounds is 5019kcal. Or 717kcal/day. In other words, I need to eat 717kcal less than I burn each day to have a realistic chance of reaching my weight goal within 18 months. So, how am I doing so far then?
Well, as you can see in my calorie buget, so far I haven’t burned quite as many calories per day as my target. But I have eaten less calories than my limit, and, in fact, on average had a calorie reduction of more than double the amount I’ve been aiming for. This looks good in a graph, but as we know it isn’t the healthiest way of dieting so I will have to keep trying to up my intake a little.
I’m proud to say that after only nine days of regular exercise (a one hour brisk walk in the morning) I feel the need to increase the effort a little, so I have started to add short streches of low impact jogging into my walk which does wonders for my heart rate, my breathing and my sweat levels.
If I can keep this up, I have bumped my daily calories burned quota up to 3770kcal, which means that over time that figure should be more positive in the calorie budget.
So, that was my vital stats – now I want to hear about yours!
1 Comment
April 15, 2009 at 5:29 pm
If you ever want to read a reader’s feedback
, I rate this article for four from five. Decent info, but I just have to go to that damn msn to find the missed bits. Thank you, anyway!