How many calories should I cut to lose weight?

 

In the past it was generally suggested by doctors that if you wanted to lose one pound of weight, you had to cut about 3,500 calories by either dieting and/or through exercise. Assuming that you just wanted to cut through dieting, that meant eliminating about 500 calories from your meals everyday and one week later, you will supposedly weigh one pound less. Obviously, if you wanted to lose five pounds, it means that it will take you about five weeks to get there if you followed this religiously. Now, I used to think that I was the only one to experience this but this formula did not work for me. Like anyone who assumes that a mathematical formula can never be wrong, I blamed myself for not losing one pound each time I cut back 3,500 calories. I cursed my genes or assumed that I had a made a miscalculation about the calorie content of the food that I ate (which is very hard to know anyway when you cook something from scratch anyway) or that I might have eaten something that I could not recall.

Turns out that not only was I not the only one to experience this discrepancy, I was also right all along that this formula was flawed. Kevin Hall, a scientists who works for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) decided to investigate and found the simple explanation that the linear relationship between lower calories and weight loss simply does not exist because as the body gets fewer calories it burns less of them. Yes, as shocking as it sounds, and as counter-intuitive it seems (I wish my car would burn less gas if I put only less gas in the tank), what happens is that the body goes into a preservation mode and does not burn enough calories for normal body functions. So you are not losing the fat that should have been burned to compensate for the fewer calories. Indeed, most people feel a bit sluggish or have lower energy, but they simply tell themselves that they feel that way because they are now trying to lose weight by eating less and working out in the gym.

So what is the new formula for weight loss? Well, as anyone can appreciate weight loss in humans does not work like a car engine. It is definitely not linear. The way we burn and store calories depends a lot on our genes, age, race, and lifestyle. So the actual formula is much more complex and is used by doctors to get a rough idea but as far as you and I are concerned, there are three rules to remember:

1. Weight loss will not happen immediately after cutting back calories. It is better to think in terms of weeks, months, and actually years than days.
2. The older you get, the more you will need to cut back because the metabolism of a 40 year old is much slower than that of a teen. In other words, you will need to cut back more calories as you age.
3. For estimating how many calories you should consume, the simple formula to use is that if you cut back 500 calories a day and do it for three years without fail, you will lose about 50 pounds in three years.

I think I like the new formula because it seems to be a more accurate reflection of the reality and it tells me that permanent weight loss is going to take time and there is no such thing as dieting. To get rid of fat forever, I just need to eat differently. To permanently eliminate 500 calories on a daily basis requires significant and permanent changes in my meals. I would suggest that you think of making some discrete changes like cutting back on going out about twice or thrice a week depending on where you were eating and how much or completely giving up on desserts each night.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.