Tag Archives: calories

Exercising to lose weight? Here’s why it may not be the BEST strategy.

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In a classic study on weight loss, researchers discovered after six months:

  1. People who exercised 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week and did NOT change their diet lost two pounds. fit woman running
  2. People who reduced calories below their daily burn lost nearly 20 pounds.
  3. People who exercised AND reduced calories lost 23 pounds.

Why is that the case? Basic human physiology. To lose weight, your body must be forced to use its stored energy (meaning fat). This ONLY happens if you burn more calories than you consume. At my weight, 30 minutes of brisk walking burns about 150 calories. (The more you weigh, the more you burn.) If I do this 5 days a week without changing the number of calories I eat, it will take approximately 23 days to lose one pound. Here’s the math:

  • 3,500 calories are contained in one pound of body fat.  (Approximately 10% of fat tissue is water)
  • 3,500 calories per pound divided by 150 calories per day = 23.3 days.

If you’ve been gaining weight slowly over time, you may not lose anything but you may stop that creeping waistline. To lose one pound a week by just exercising, you’d have to walk for 2 hours, 7 days a week. (Yeah, you have time for that, right?) Compare this to shaving 500 calories from your diet each day. Do this and you’ll lose a pound every week. Add exercise and you’ll lose more, feel better, and get a myriad of other benefits. Bottom line, it’s time consuming to burn a considerable amount of calories through exercise.

If you don’t know how many calories your body burns, how do you know how much to eat? It turns out that most people don’t know. Surveys have shown that fewer than 2 out of 10 people don’t know how many calories they should eat to maintain their weight. And if we judge by results, most people are mismanaging their weight. (Seven out of 10 Americans are overweight or obese.) For the modern lifestyle of sedentary jobs and plentiful food, managing your weight is just like your balancing checkbook. You have to know what’s going in and out in order to avoid overdrafts and bounced checks. If you track your spending and deposit more than you spend, you save money. In the human body, when you put more in compared to what’s going out, you save calories, which turns into fat yet no one intends to become fat. For most people, it happens gradually over time. So to lose those extra pounds, reduce the calories you’re taking in, add exercise to speed up the process and to keep the weight off once you reach your goal. To find out how many calories you burn, take the Free Fitness Profile here www.dotfit.com. Tune in for next week’s blog where I share practical tips for reducing calories WITHOUT feeling hungry or deprived. Yes, it IS possible to lose weight without suffering.  YAY!

– Kat

Wanna shed some pounds? Get rid of the “dieting mentality”

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iStock_000006918985SmallWhen you read or hear the word “diet,” what comes to mind? How about pain, suffering, deprivation and misery? Does failure come to mind? Maybe “weight rebound?” So why in the world would anyone want to go on a diet? Simple – to get the results of going on a diet. The problem is diets are typically a temporary thing – you do it for a while until you can’t do it anymore and what happens?

You know the answer . . .
Most of us can’t – and won’t – suffer and deprive ourselves for the rest of our lives to get and stay at our ideal weight. But, if you can find a way to enjoy food while maintaining a healthy weight, I’ll bet you can lose the weight for a lifetime.
Here’s what it boils down to – a numbers game. No different than your checkbook – you need to know how much is coming in and how much is going out. Your body needs a certain number of calories to stay balanced. That is, to maintain your current weight. If you’re depositing more than you’re spending, what happens to your balance? It increases, just like your waistline. If you spend more than you deposit, what happens? Your balance goes into the negative and now you have to use your savings. The body does the same thing – if you spend (burn) more than what’s coming in, it will tap into your savings (fat reserves) and your waistline shrinks.
So doesn’t it make sense to know your balance? Do you know how many calories you need every day? Do you know how much is being deposited? Most people don’t yet they wonder why they “can’t” lose weight. As our founder, Neal Spruce, wisely put it – you can’t manage what you don’t know and you won’t manage what you don’t see. We’ve made it easy for you connect with your numbers with the Me program.  The food logging system and eight different lifestyle menus show you how to incorporate the foods you enjoy so you can manage your daily calorie budget.

Join us for a free webinar on November 11 and we’ll not only give you the facts of weight loss, we’ll show you exactly how our program works. It’s time to stop dieting and enjoy the freedom of dotFIT Me.

Link to www.dotFIT.com/webinars

Eat, move, lose. Period.

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One common weight loss myth that drives us crazy here at dotFIT is the starvation mode myth.  It goes something like this: Eating a diet that is too low in calories will cause the body to go into starvation mode and not burn any calories.

People love this myth.  You know why? Because people, including me, love to eat. But here’s the fact of the matter: Severely cutting calories will cause your metabolism to adjust slightly, allowing your body to run on fewer calories, but it doesn’t prevent fat loss if you’re truly burning more calories than you’re consuming.

You’ll sometimes hear the trainers on the T.V. show The Biggest Loser alluding to this when they tell their contestants how important it is that they not eat fewer than 1200 calories a day. That’s a pretty low calorie diet, and the contestants are working out at least 5-6 hours every day. If they eat less than that they won’t “go into starvation mode,” but they won’t have the energy they need.  The same holds true for the average person trying to lose weight.

If you cut your calories too much, you become less energetic. As a result, you’re less active. That is, you do fewer daily activities, and then you burn fewer calories overall. Crash dieting with excessively low calorie intake leads to low energy levels, so you burn fewer calories all day and work out less intensely. This leads to increased hunger, which in turn increases the chances of rebound and binge eating behavior. In other words, you’re likely to move a lot less and eat more. The result? You hit a plateau which easily misinterpreted as the result of a “damaged” metabolism.

The point is not to lose weight too quickly by drastically reducing calories because that method is generally not sustainable. Mainly because it takes extreme and unrealistic changes in your diet to get results and when you drift back to your old eating habits, the weight returns.  The Biggest Loser is a reality show, but it’s not reality.  The contestants are closely monitored by a staff of medics, physicians and trainers. And if you could follow up with past contestants, you would find that most of them haven’t been able to maintain the weight loss they achieved on the show.

If you need to lose weight, eat less, move more and forget about starvation mode or slowing metabolism. Remember that a calorie out cancels a calorie in, no exceptions. Research shows that most people think they’re eating less than they actually are, so keep tabs on your calorie intake by using a food journal.

And if you really want to see how many calories you burn every day, along with your steps, minutes and type of physical activity, and how efficiently you sleep at night, check out exerspy at www.dotFIT.com/exerspy.  The research and development team at dotFIT that created exerspy and dotFIT Me is the same team that created the bodybugg® system featured on The Biggest Loser. By using exerspy and the dotFIT online program, you can see the calories you’re eating and burning, which takes the guesswork out of weight control. It’s not your metabolism that’s preventing you from losing weight – it’s NOT knowing your numbers. Take control, see your numbers and get results.

Night eating falsely blamed for weight gain

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A recently publicized study by Northwestern University claims that their research sheds new light on obesity. In this study, mice fed a high fat diet during normal sleeping time led to a greater increase in weight gain than the same diet given during normal waking hours. This, they assert, proves that obesity is more than simply calories in vs. calories out. The researchers were looking to apply this outcome to shift workers who work irregular hours and experience weight gain.

Animal studies play a role in human research, but we need to be careful in a mouse-to-human transference. The subject of meal timing and weight gain has been looked at quite a bit in human research with mixed results. Basically, I can find studies that show it matters and I can find those that show no difference. It kind of goes that way with research.

The difficult thing about human research and outcomes is the human. We are forgetful, prideful, inaccurate and at times untruthful. This makes it hard to come to definite conclusions in human research, unless you can sequester the participants for a period of time and provide the only food they will eat. Even then, you develop research that falls into the “so what” category, because no one will do actually do in real life what they did in the study.

Let’s get back to the late shift factory worker. If they have been gaining weight, then what is the solution? Don’t eat? Get a different job? Not likely. The ultimate solution for this person will be to either increase their activity, eat less, or a combination of both. So, increase calories out, decrease calories in or a combination of the two. Sounds like a calories in vs. calories out relationship to me.

Why do I care enough to write a blog about this? Because every time something like this comes out, it gives people an excuse for weight gain and declining health. It isn’t my fault, I work the late shift; it’s my genetics; my parents were overweight; I eat too many carbs; I have a slow metabolism. There is, to date, no instance of weight gain that cannot be traced to an excess amount of calories consumed IN RELATION to calories expended. Where this gets lost is that even subtle changes in activity or food intake patterns can affect energy levels and appetite. I make this distinction here because at the moment these influences are just that — a feeling: a desire to eat sweets, to snack, a craving or a lack of energy and enthusiasm to move or workout or even a spurt of energy to move more.

What follows determines the impact of the feeling. That is why we stress the need for cognitive awareness: being aware of what you are eating and doing and what impact that has on your energy balance. If you can track that you are eating more calories than you want or need, then you can take action. You can simply reduce portions, not eat certain foods or make substitutions that take a smaller chunk out of your daily calorie allotment. Measuring your activity level can motivate one to purposely be more active, using the calories burned as a score for the day. Periodic weighing can get your attention when weight begins to creep up, not when it has blindsided you with a huge increase.

Ultimately, you are in control of your weight, within reason of course. It is you that eats the food and makes the food choices. Ultimately it is you who makes the decision to move more or less. Allowing for genetics and other factors beyond your control confuses the issue and takes control from you. To date I have never seen a single person whofailed to lose weight when they consistently altered their calories in vs. their calories out to do so. The choices are yours and completely in your control.

Why exerspy?

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When you wear something that kind of looks like an MP3 player on your arm all the time, minus the headphones, you get asked the same question a lot.

“What is that?”

And invariably when I tell people what it is – a device that monitors your calories burned, steps, physical activity and sleep efficiency for the purpose of weight control – the response is always the same:

“But you don’t need to lose weight.”

You know what I want to say?  “EXACTLY! Wearing this little thing on my arm makes me aware of how many calories I burn so I know how many calories I can eat in a day without gaining weight.”

~

Like most people, I have a busy life. I commute 60 miles a day for work, I have responsibilities at home, and I don’t always have time to work out, or sometimes I just don’t want to. Using the exerspy doesn’t make up for exercising, but it gives me wiggle room. It keeps me informed and helps me make smart decisions about food – something that I didn’t learn from my parents or in school. The fact of the matter is that life – and weight control – is much harder without exerspy.

Before I had access to my calorie burn data, I struggled with my weight.  When I finished grad school, I got my first job and woke up 6 months later to find my pants too tight.  The weight gain seemed sudden and inexplicable. I went to the gym 4-5 days a week and did my best to eat healthy foods.  I didn’t know what else to do so I started skipping meals, thinking it would help me lose a few pounds, but all I got was frustrated and really, really hungry.

What had changed was my life.  I no longer walked to class two or three times a day or bounced up and down the stairs of my house to do this or that while writing papers.  Instead, I was stuck at a desk for hours and hours, only burning about 1600 calories a day and getting fat.  I had no idea what was really going on, and I started feeling like a victim of my own body.

A few years later I found bodybugg, which was created by the same team that now makes the exerspy. It changed everything.

The best thing about using a device like exerspy is how empowered you feel once you understand the relationship between calories in and calories out.  You realize you have complete control. It’s right there on the screen in front of you when you upload and log what you ate for the day – you burned X calories, and you ate X calories. The difference between the two is ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW to control your weight. Before exerspy, I didn’t know the difference between those two numbers or what it meant.

With access to this kind of info about your body, metabolism is no longer a factor, nor are carbs or late night eating or genetics or any other weight myth you’ve ever heard.  Diets don’t work because they require you to make drastic changes that you can’t maintain throughout the ups and downs of life.  With exerspy and dotFIT Me, your lifestyle is your fitness plan.  You eat what you want, you move when you want, and you make adjustments.  I don’t know about you but that’s a plan I can live with.