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Complex vs Fundamentals and Fat Loss Part 1

Posted By: Joshua Morgan on 01/08/2012

Complexity vs. the Fundamentals Part 1

I’ve seen it more times than I care to admit. And it makes me cringe every time I’m around the situation.  An individual decides to lose fat, get in shape, tone up, etc and they go for the gusto—go overbored on supplements, change their dietary habits based on what they read in Cosmo magazine, and get these complicated training sessions out of Flex magazine or Shape.  And, even though they start with the best of intentions, they get burned out and quit. 

The problem is people want to go all out before they have the basics down.  In specific situations, worrying about the details matters (e.g. very lean natural bodybuilders trying to get super lean).  But those individuals are not the norm.

I hit up some of this in my Nutrition 101 article.  Let’s rehash a bit and throw out some new stuff.

The Fundamentals of Fat Loss

When I set up a very basic diet, there are parameters I follow.  There’s a method to my madness and the method in order form most important to least important is as follows:

1. Create an appropriate caloric deficit/set caloric intake appropriately
2. Set protein intake
3. Set dietary fat intake
4. Everything else depends

Create an Appropriate Caloric Deficit/Set Calories

The ONLY way to force the body to call on stored energy (e.g. body fat) is to create an imbalance between intake (from food) and energy expenditure (we take in less calories than we burn so to speak).

Now, there are many different ways to create this imbalance and I think that also lends itself to confusion.  Each of the below can work to some degree and makes it look like it’s not just calories in vs. calories out.  But it still is.

For example, a traditional way is to simply reduce total food intake, that is reduce the quantity of food such that less calories are being eaten.  Certainly this works because, by definition, eating less means you’re taking in less calories than when you were eating more.

Another is to change the quality of food but this tends to introduce a subtle confound that most people seem to. Some foods are relatively harder to overeat than others.    Or, put differently, some food are easier to overeat than others.

If changing the quality of food eaten causes people to eat less, and that causes weight/fat to be lost, it’s easy to confuse the quality of the food with the total caloric expenditure.  But it’s not the quality of the food per se that is causing the weight/fat loss or gain; it’s the change in total caloric intake due to the change in food quality.  Think of it this way, if you start eating the same amount of green vegetables as you would sitting down at Taco Bell, that would be A LOT of green vegetables.  You would get full far faster, you would stay full longer, and you would take in less calories.

Protein tends to be the most filling of all the nutrients and studies show that increasing dietary protein intake tends to cause people to eat less calories.   Which is another huge confound; if increasing protein makes folks spontaneously eat less, it looks like it was adding the protein per se that did the magic.  But it wasn’t, it was the effect of increasing protein on total energy intake that caused the fat loss. Like I said, a subtle confound that people tend to miss a lot.

Another way of course is to use activity to increase energy expenditure (we exercise more so to speak).  The problem for most is that the amount of calories that can be expended by most people in exercise isn’t large enough to counteract all the calories the typical American diet contains.  Usually caloric restriction per se or a combination of cutting calories and increasing activity is going to be more realistic.  

Setting Calories

One of the most common questions asked is “how many calories should I eat to lose weight/fat/tone up?  A value that has been used for absolutely years is 10-12 calories per pound of bodyweight.  In general, 10-12 cal/lb tends to be a decent starting point for fat loss diets.  Please note that this is only a starting point and will always have to be adjusted based on real-world changes.   Some people with high activity levels may need higher calories than that, and folks with lower daily activity levels may need less.  For maintenance (not to lose or gain), the number 15 cal/lb is usually used.

 Keep in mind that this is for fat loss purposes.  We don’t want to say in a caloric deficit indefinitely.  And our body is extremely smart.  It will start to catch onto and adjust to the lowered caloric intake.  This is why refeeds are important.  I’ll hit on refeeding in part during my next article when I continue this with part 2.

Yours in Health,

Joshua Morgan

References:

Lyle McDonald