Most of us believe that working out aggressively and persistently is the key to weight changes. The truth is however, that weight fluctuations are almost entirely accredited to our diet choices.
How Does Diet Affect Weight?
Here’s the shocking fact for you: your weight goal depends 80% on diet choices and 20% on exercise routines. Yup, you read that right! This is why it’s important to ensure that you master your eating choices.
Diet can become a complicated topic of discussion, and there’s a reason dietitians and personal trainers are needed in the fitness world. Thankfully, however, as research develops, things can be boiled down to a simple understanding of how we can achieve our weight goals through diet.
What Are Calories?
Food calories are a unit of measurement that measures how much energy your body could gain from eating or drinking a food or drink.
If you’d like to find out how many calories are in broccoli, a simple google search of “broccoli calories” will be sufficient.
How Do Calories Affect Weight?
The calories we eat in food is the energy source for our bodies. The calories we eat get used up as energy as we exert ourselves through the day, or get stored as fat. The calories you don’t use gets stored as fat.
Deficit, Maintenance, Surplus
Deficit: Eating less calories than our bodies burn through physical exertion. Eating less calories than our maintenance calories puts our bodies in caloric deficit, leading to weight loss.
For example, for a 25-year-old male who exercises 3 times per week, weighs 75 kg and is 6 feet tall will require around 2000 calories a day to lose weight.
Maintenance: Eating as many calories as we burn through physical exertion. Surprisingly, our bodies require quite a handful of calories just to get through the days, even if we don’t do much. Everyone will require a different amount which depends on their age, activity level, height, and weight.
For example, a 25-year-old male who exercises 3 times per week, weighs 75 kg, and is 6 feet tall will require around 2400 calories a day to maintain their weight.
Surplus: Eating more calories than our bodies burn through physical exertion. Eating more than our maintenance calories ours our bodies into a caloric surplus, leading to weight gain.
For example, for a 25-year-old male who exercises 3 times per week, weighs 75 kg and is 6 feet tall will require more than 2500 calories a day to gain weight.
Are All Calories Used The Same Way?
No, not all calories are the same. Eating your surplus in whole foods will vastly affect the outcome of your diet choices.
In essence, eating 1000 calories of broccoli will not affect your body the same way as eating 1000 calories of ice cream. More on this later!
For now, focus on getting your calories through whole foods, and cut out as much processed food as possible, regardless of your weight goals!
