Weight Loss, A Delicate Balance
You’ve heard all of the jargon. Take a pill. Eat all the bacon and lard you want. Wear this belt, powered by a car battery. Use our recliner–like crunch machine for only five minutes a day. Do any one of these and you’ll be thin and fit for life. I don’t think so.
Let’s take a scientific look at the process of weight loss. The first thing you need to realize is that in order to lose weight there is one simple thing that needs to be accomplished: You need to eat fewer calories than you burn. The trick here is that if you eat fewer calories, which makes it even more difficult to lose weight. In order to combat this you have to find a way to keep your metabolism elevated. Only a select few in America have discovered this secret and as a consequence we are now facing a serious obesity epidemic. Well I cannot take it anymore, so I’m to disclose the secret to weight loss and healthy living to you right here right now: EXERCISE. I’m not talking about the usual jogging or other aerobic exercise. I’m talking about resistance training also known as weight lifting. Adding two 45 minute resistance training sessions a week can significantly raise your metabolism and thus help you burn more calories throughout the day and even when you are sleeping. Research has shown that resistance training can elevate a person’s metabolism for up to two days following the exercise session.
Now you know how to accomplish your goal, but what are the specifics? Let’s take a moment and think about burning a log. The fire produced during burning is the energy from the conversion of the mass of the log into energy (heat and light). In the end a large amount of energy has been produced and the mass of the log has been decreased. The same thing happens in your body. Your body burns fuel to produce energy and gets smaller as more energy is produced. We call this process Thermogenesis. Instead of a log, however, you burn calories.
So how much energy do you have to burn to lose weight safely? Most people can safely lose one to two pounds a week. In the body, one pound is approximately equal to 3500 calories. Therefore in order to lose one pound a week we divide 3500 Calories by seven days and see that we need to burn 500 calories more a day than we ingest. This is where the delicate balance comes into play. If we drop our caloric intake too dramatically our metabolism drops and we cut of our nose to spite our face. For this reason, the best, most effective, long term way to lose weight and keep it off is by taking in a couple hundred less calories a day than you are currently ingesting and adding exercise that burns a few hundred calories a day. A sample exercise prescription would be jogging for 30 minutes three times a week and performing a resistance training workout twice a week for 45 minutes. This coupled with a reasonable diet, is the only way to go for truly sustainable and healthy results.
For any questions or advice feel free to contact me at 248–669–9818 or via email at ian@ILIFTinc.com.
–Ian Lauer, CSCS