Weight Loss
This section of the academy is all about weight loss. For some reason weight loss has become a complicated and overwhelming concept, so my aim of this section is to simplify it for you and try to make it attainable as well. There are so many different factors which come into play here, if it was easy, being overweight wouldn’t exist. Stick with me and hopefully by the end of this section I will have given you a different perspective on weight loss.
Calorie deficit
The ‘secret’ behind every weight loss diet ever made and the single and only way to lose weight. A calorie deficit very simply is when you consume less calories than you burn. Let us say for the ease of explaining this that you burn 2000 calories day, if you consume anything under 2000 calories you will be in a calorie deficit. It is really that simple. Every fat loss diet that ever existed aims to put you into a calorie deficit, they probably just didn’t tell you.
I’m not here to tell you which diet is best for you to lose weight, that’s completely up to you. I am here to give you the tools you need to understand and implement an effective weight loss programme, without you having to pay ridiculous amounts of money to start a programme you don’t enjoy, but also don’t get told how you are losing the weight. For some reason, a calorie deficit has been made into a big secret by fitness influencers and weight loss companies. To me it feels like these influencers and companies are not telling you about a calorie deficit basically to keep you on their hook and to keep you paying them each month. I suppose it’s not good marketing for them to tell you how to lose weight otherwise you wouldn’t buy any of their products. That is the sad truth.
In better news, a calorie deficit is starting to become a better-known term and people are starting to understand it more. There is no secret to losing weight and you really don’t need to paying for a product which hails itself as the secret to fat loss. All you need is to implement a calorie deficit in a way that suits you. You may now be wondering how to implement this and how to work out how many calories you been each day so you can eat under that amount to create your calorie deficit. That brings us on to my next point.
Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE)
TDEE is a very complicated way of saying the full number of calories you burn each day. This takes into account of the amount of calories you naturally burn each day as well as the calories you burn through activity levels each day. Obviously, this is different for everybody. If you google ‘TDEE calculator’ you will find a million different calculators which will all estimate your TDEE. While these may not be the most accurate, they will be able to give you good general estimate. It might be worth using a few different calculators and creating an average or just to make sure they are roughly the same. From here you will be able to create your calorie deficit. Take your TDEE calculation and remove 10-15%. That will give you the number of calories to eat each day, creating your calorie deficit. If we go back to the previous example in the calorie deficit article, if your TDEE is 2000 calories a day you will need to consume 1800 calories a day to be in a calorie deficit.
At this point you may be thinking ‘Will, if my TDEE is 2000 calories a day and I need to eat under this amount, why don’t I just eat 1000 calories a day or 500 calories a day and then I can lose weight more quickly?’. This is a perfectly valid point but one of the most important parts of a diet or weight loss programme is maintaining it. So many people start a programme of eating 500 calories a day, starve themselves, don’t see any results and then quit the diet. A lot of research has shown that eating 10-15% under your TDEE is the most effective way of maintaining a calorie deficit. Weight loss takes time, it doesn’t happen over night and so many factors come into play which I will go into more detail about in other articles. But to sum up, calorie deficit and TDEE are two terms which have been hidden from us for too long. They are the pinnacles of weight loss and are really important to understand. I hope that gave you a better understanding of the two terms and now we can start to take those principles and talk about how to apply them into your lifestyle.
What next?
You now know what the terms calorie deficit and TDEE mean. You may now be wondering what your meant to do with these terms or numbers that you have calculated. I am not trying to tell you that you need to count every single calorie that you eat however it’s good to have a general idea of what your consuming. There are plenty of apps to help you do this, the best is probably myfitnesspal where you can type in the foods that you’ve eaten throughout the day and they calculate the amount of calories in your food. From this, you can work out whether you consumed more or less than your TDEE. If your anything like me and you eat similar foods throughout the week you’ll soon be able to remember how many calories is in your porridge in the morning or how many are in the banana you eat most days. You will then not have to worry so much about myfitnesspal or counting calories as you will have a rough estimation of what you are eating each day.
Rather than following a strict diet each day, it is important that I teach you how to become accountable for what you eat and how to achieve your goals. Through doing this you do not need to change your diet drastically. It is all a bit of trial and error and finding what works for you. There is no need to be paying money for a company to profit from telling you what to eat. The information I have just given you is what you would be paying people to do for you anyway.
That is the technical terms dealt with and most of the more serious reading. In the next articles I am going to be talking about maintaining your diet and also some of the other factors which come into play during weight loss.