RPE Fitness

I 'm sure no one really goes out with the aim to put on weight (unless you’re a sumo wrestler), it just happens over time, a pound here, a pound there, this excess fat is just a store of unused energy, approximately 3500 calories of energy stored for every lb. So for example, if you are a female at 38% body fat and your weight is 190lbs, which means you are carrying 72.2 lbs of fat around. Your goal is to be 150 lbs then you must lose 40 lbs, all of this will not be just fat, some will be water and some muscle, these will also contribute to the over all loss, but if at 150 lbs you were 30% body fat then that would then mean you are carrying 45 lbs of fat, you lost a total of 27 lbs of fat, the actual weight loss was 40lbs, but like I said there are other factors involved.

Going back to the top of the paragraph we mentioned that 1 lb of fat has the energy value of 3500 calories, so for that 27lb weight loss that means the amount of energy that would be need to be used to achieve loss this would be 94,500 calories!!

94,500 calories, that’s a huge amount of energy, so where do we begin, one school of thought is just stop eating and your body will use up the excess energy, Wrong, the opposite will happen, your body will go into a slow metabolic rate and store as much as possible and use as little as possible. You need to eat enough to keep you body at a optimum metabolic level, so back to our 190lbs female, her approximate calories burned /day is 190 x 11 which is 2090 calories, this is her calorie use without any real movement, so with a workout and being on her feet all day at work that calories usage would go up. So lets give her an office job, she gets up, gets the kids off to school, goes to work, parks near the door, sits at a desk for 8 hrs and goes home, feeds the family, sits down and watches TV until bedtime. Her extra calorie expenditure would probably be just about 200, so a total of 2290.  To achieve a 1 lb fat loss/wk she needs to use 3500 calories extra, so 500 calories/day. If she consumed 1790 cal/day then this would be achieved, add in a little exercise and a carb intake of 40% protein 40% and fats 20% and this starts to look achievable!

Don’t forget though 6 days of diligence and work can be easily undone in one evening of overindulgence.

There is a wealth of information on the internet telling you nutrition values of products, like carb, protein and fat contents, don’t just estimate quantities, know them, educate yourself and then others around you, you can teach your kids and help them become healthy adults. We all have a certain amount of fat cells when we are born, fat cells are only produced when they become saturated to the bursting point and new one is produced, they NEVER get lost. Children in there growing years are prone to making new fat cells much more easily than when they are adults, thus over weight kids have more fat cells, more potential fat storage area, this storage area never diminishes, they are now burdened with this for the rest of their lives!!