23 Feb Get off the Diet Train
Dieting, known as reducing your caloric intake to levels that prohibit your body from having enough fuel to do body things, and forcing it to use, in theory, stored fuel sources like excess fats and proteins, is not a long term weight management plan.
How to find your daily caloric requirements
- First, covert your weight in pounds to kilograms: Pounds/2.2046
- Next, convert your height in inches to centimeters: inches*2.54
- Plug the numbers in to the equation
- women: 447 + (9.25*weight in kg) + (3.10*height in cm) – (4.33*age in years)
- Men: 65 + (13.40*weight in kg) + (4.96*height in cm) – (5.82*age in years)
This number represents the least amount of calories your body needs to live if it were to lay on the couch and not move every day. Of course, when we start adding physical activity to the equation, the body needs additional calories to fuel those activities. For example, someone who works sitting at a desk all day will not need alot of calories beyond their BMR; likewise, someone who does earns a living as a competitive athlete will need double, almost triple their BMR to meet the bodies needs. This table assigns a numerical value to physical activity levels so that we can measure how many extra calories the body needs:
| Physical Activity Level (PAL) | Max | example | |
| Extremely inactive | 1 | 1.4 | Bedridden |
| Sedentary | 1.4 | 1.69 | office/desk job |
| Moderately Active | 1.7 | 1.99 | construction worker/runner (1 hour/day) |
| Vigorously active | 2 | 2.4 | Swimming 2 hours/day |
| Extremely active | 2.41 | 2.5 | Competitive athlete |
The BMR gets multiplied by the PAL, which is the amount of calories required if you plan on moving away from Netflix in the next 24 hours.
The biggest reason dieting in it’s modern form doesn’t work as a long term weight management plan is that it isn’t sustainable. Eventually your body is going to get sick or injured because it lacks appropriate nutrients and fuel to do it’s thing. And you are going to be hungry. And irritable. So then you when you cave in and eat food, you’ll end up eating foods that aren’t very good for you because your body will start craving foods that are calorie dense (a lot of calories without a lot of nutrients); that’s your bodies way of telling you it needs more food!
Another reason that calorie restriction is unrealistic long term is due to the fact that your body wants to be efficient, and trying to convert stored nutrients such as fat, into an immediate energy source, isn’t very efficient. We’ll discuss this more in depth when we cover macro-nutrients in the coming weeks.
Next week, I’ll explain the concept of macro nutrients (carbohydrates, proteins and fats) and how the daily amount of calories should be split up between them, depending on your goals! Stay tuned!
Eat well.
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