1. The Golden Rule of Nutrition

Hello there! As I promised in my first post on this blog, I will be making a series that touches on some critical key concepts that we need to know in order to lose weight.

In my opinion, to be able to lose all the fat that's making you look chubby, you need to understand how our intricate bodies work and what effects foods have on us. It's going to be a long journey, but I promise it will be worth the while. 

There will be no program or diet that you can follow to lose weight. You might be a vegan or following a low-carb diet but still puzzled why the scale is not moving. That's because you're just following the advice without understanding it in the first place. This series will give you the basic tools that you need to be aware of about what's going on while you're eating and how it contributes to your weight loss. 

The Golden Rule of Nutrition

So the first thing that you need to learn is what we call the Golden Rule. Depending on how tall you are, your sex, your weight and your body fat percentage, you have got a certain Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) of calories.

Think of your body as this complex intelligent and proactive tank that uses fuel poured to it from above to stay alive. For example, let’s say that a tank requires an average amount of fuel of 2.5 litres per day. If you pour 2.5 litres everyday, the size of the tank won’t change a little. It will stay just the same.

If you pour more than enough, say 3 litres, the tank will become larger because it used what it needs and simeltaneously thinks that it might actually need the rest. So it stores it somewhere for later usage. Remember, it’s a smart tank.

And if you give it less than required, say 2 litres, it’ll try to adapt to this deficiency by shrinking as a result of burning that stored energy which made it seem big in the first place.

For every case, this tank has prepared mechanisms it executes to cope with what’s going on. Same story with your body, but on a whole another level.

See, your body requires a certain amount of energy to function at its leisure. This amount is called the Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). If you eat according to it, your body will stay the same : you won’t lose nor gain weight.  So to lose weight and become slimmer, you should cut a couple hundreds of calories from your TDEE. Nutrionists recommend that you cut 500 calories maximum to lose 0.5 kilo of fat in one week. (yup, it’s that simple)

However, there is a myth that is spread amongst laymen like cancer. When you think about “burning fat” and “losing weight”, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Singing up for the local gym and spending the next week running on a treadmill and lifting some dumbells, right? What if I told you that you can lose weight simply by sitting at home and doing nothing ?

Contrary to preconceived misconceptions,  your body is NOT burning calories only by movement. Meaning if you eat a humberger that adds up to 600 calories, you don’t have to walk 10km to burn it. 

Unbeknowst to many people, your body is ALWAYS burning large sums of calories to survive and exercise has a little to do with it, if nothing. Let me elaborate a bit more.                  

The TDEE is the sum of 3 main caloric-usage groups. These groups are :

• Basal Metabolic Rate
• Food Breakdown calories
• Physical activity

Your basal metabolism is the amount of calories required to keep your ass from decaying. It is the amount of calories your heart, lungs, liver, eyes, nervous system and the rest consume to be up and running. And this alone burns up to 60-70% of your TDEE, 30% of which is burnt by your brain alone.

The Breaking Down of Food energy expenditure is obviously the amount of calories you need to digest food and store it. If you eat in excess, your body will be storing the calories as fatty tissue and that process burns some calories (ikr, getting fat burns calories wtf). All of this and much more requires 5-10% of your TDEE.

Last but not least is the infamous Physical Activity Energy Expenditure. This one is :

Amount of calories consumed per day- (BMR + Food breakdown energy)

If your BMR is 1500, your food energy is 100, then if you eat 2500 calories, 900kcal will be allocated for movement.

As we all know, your muscles require calories to be able to contract and move in physical space. Depending on how active you are, you can burn from 500 kcal up to 1300 kcal.

In a typical TDEE calculator, you find different kinds of activity levels, usually they fall into 4 categories : sedentary, lightly active, moderately active, heavily active, and athlete. Your Basal Metabolism and Food Breakdown calories are practically constant because they have to do with your height and your lean body mass (the weight of your organs + muscles) but the physical activity one is variable. So it can go up and down depending on how active you are.

But still, if you’re sedentary, you still require some calories for casual movements such as twitching, blinking, stretching from boredom, thinking about what Stacey said yesterday…etc, and these alone can build up to 500 calories.

So your TDEE is the amount of BMR + Breaking down of food + amounts of calories required for your activity level.

And to make the matter clearer even more, let me give you a practical example to show you how your body handles the amount of calories you give it.

Say you have an office job and your TDEE happened to be 2000 calories. This is the amount you need to maintain your current weight.

Today, you ate only 2000 calories.

Here is what happens :

• 1400 (70%) is burnt by your inner organs (ikr, that’s a lot of energy)
• 200 kcal (10%) is burnt by the processing of food
• 400 kcal (40%) is allocated for movement

If you lead a normal day in which you walk, talk , stand, and basically do those little body movements, your weight will stay the same because the 400kcal will probably be burnt on the spot. Heck, ever had backache from sitting on the chair for a long time ? That’s your dorsal muscles telling you they’ve consumed a lotta calories to contract for a long time to keep your back straight and it’s time for some rest.

Say your TDEE is 2000 calories and you only ate 1500 calories.

Here is what happens :

• 1400 kcal (70%) is burnt by the inner organs
• 200 kcal (10%) is burnt by the processing of food
• Fatty tissue is broken down and burnt for energy for movement (proactive mechanism)

You read that right. Your body is smart, almost lead by an entreuprenal spirit and wastes nothing. It handles food like a boss. If you don’t give it the right amount of calories it requires, then it compensates for that want by eating itself for energy. So when you don’t give it enough energy, it turns to the most available energy storage at hand (your fatty tissue). If you eat in a caloric deficit of 500kcal everyday, you will be able to lose 1kg (2.2lbs) of fatty tissue every week. And that is, ladies and gentlemen, the golden rule behind weight loss. This is the first thing you must learn to be able ot lose weight effectively.

Your fatty tissue is your body’s favourite inner source of energy because it has a moelcular structure that is very easy to use for energy (more on this in future articles). However, if you’re slim, i.e you don’t have fatty tissue, and still eating in a caloric deficit, then your body will eat your muscles for energy. Do that long enough, and you’ll become very slim, almost skin over skeleton and eventually die, what we call « starvation »

If you are obese, you might think, “Geez, then with this weight I can survive for a long time without food lol” and that’s damn right, to a certain extent.

Here is an extreme case:

Meet Angus Barbieri, a Scotssman who was obese, 207kg (456 lbs), and decided it was time to put it to an end (not his life but him being fat). With the advice of his doctors, he fasted for a short period of time and managed to lose some weight. After that, apparently he couldn’t care less if he died and not listening to his doctors, he went on a suicide mission. He fasted 382 days straight. When he finished, he dropped more than 100 kg (220 lbs). To read further about his case and the particularities of it, have a look at this article.

It’s a lot more complicated than it looks: when he refrained from eating, his body had to come up with energy to keep functioning, at least keeping its inner organs intact. And that energy was found in his adipose tissue (the complicated term for fatty tissue). So he was living off his fatty tissue for a very long time and hey, he did it. He didn’t exercise. He didn’t sign up for the gym. He was probably sitting at home playing his bagpipes.

So back to the examples:

Say your TDEE is 2000 kcal and you ate 2500 kcal.

• 1400 kcal (70%) will be burnt by your inner organs
• 100 kcal (10%) will burnt by food
• 900 kcal will be allocated for movement, 500 of which will be burnt for daily movement, the rest will be transformed into adipose tissue, if you don’t burn it with exercise.

If you eat +500 kcal than your TDEE for a week, you will gain 0.5kg of fat.

So what do you need to learn from this article? It's all about calories in, calories out. That's how simple it could get. Find your daily caloric allowance, hit that to maintain weight, stay under to lose, and go higher to gain. Easy peasy.

I hope that made sense.

So moral of the story is : if you eat a humburger, you don’t need to run 5 kilometers to burn it. Just sit still and make sure you stay below your TDEE and lo and behold : that burger is burnt by your inner organs. Izi.