Practical Application of the Calorie Model

Let’s take a look at the diet of Aparna, a sedentary, 28 year old, 5 foot 3 inch tall, 55 kg Indian IT Professional and figure out the total amount of calories she’s eating in a day.

BREAKFAST

One plate of Upma
A small cup of tea with sugar
Some peanut chutney

LUNCH

2 Rotis
1 serving of rice
1 Katori of Aloo Gobhi Sabzi
1 Katori of Dal

EVENING SNACK

One plate of Poha
A small cup of coffee with sugar

DINNER

2 Rotis
1 Katori of chicken curry
1 katori of dahi
And 1 glass of milk with sugar before sleeping

If you google search for these items and add up the Calories for this day, you’ll find that the total is around 1650 Cal. Pretty good in my opinion; considering that Aparna’s Maintenance Calories according to what the calculator attached to the previous article tells us is around 1650 Cal too.

Suppose Aparna looks at herself in the mirror and decides she needs to lose a little flab — say, around 3 kg.

How fast should she lose??

My recommendation for ANYONE would be never to try and lose more than 1% of your body-weight in a week. For most practical purposes, even half of that rate would do the job.

None of us wants to go for a professional bodybuilding show and get ripped 1 month from now. And even if we wanted that, it’s too late. Bodybuilders know this fact well — a slow and steady fat loss phase is going to preserve the most amount of Lean Mass (everything other than fat in your body) that you have. Lean Mass is an extremely valuable asset for any person — not just for being athletic and looking well shaped, but also because lean mass contributes a lot to one’s BMR: and we know losing our metabolism is probably not a good thing.

Back to the original problem — 1% of 55 kg is around 0.5 kg. Aparna is smart. She decides to lose 0.3 kg of fat every week and thus her 3 kg loss will take about 10 weeks. What should she do? As we discussed previously, she needs to accumulate a caloric deficit over time. She does the math in her head as follows:

• Accumulate 300 g fat worth of Deficit every week
• 1 g of fat is 7.7 Cal so 300 g would be about 2310 Cal
• Therefore, accumulate ( 2310/7 = ) 330 Cal of Deficit everyday

This can be done using one of three techniques:

Eat Less, Add Activity OR Do a Combination of Both

1. Purely eating less — remove the tea, coffee and one Roti + drink half glass of milk at night instead of full.
   This makes the daily intake ~1320 Cal.
2. Purely working out — some cardiovascular activity (like swimming/jogging) for about 45 min.
   This keeps daily intake at ~1650 Cal while increasing Maintenance to ~1980 Cal
3. A possible Combination — Remove just the tea and coffee and do the activity for about 15–20 min.
   Maintenance is ~1760 Cal while intake is at about ~1430 Cal

My personal recommendation would be for Aparna to follow either method ‘2’ OR ‘3’ for 4–5 days in a week; take rest from the activity and do ‘1’ for the remaining 2–3 days.

NOTE:

By adding activity, you are effectively changing the Maintenance Calories and by eating less, you are reducing the calorie intake. Either would work: in fact, she could do ANY of those 3 options every day for her 10 week period and still achieve her goal of 3 kg fat loss.

NOTE AGAIN:

In Aparna’s example, the desired fat loss was small — 3 kg. If Jay, a 100 kg man, wants to come down to about 75 kg, it is recommended that he breaks the 20+ kg loss into smaller parts (four 6 kg losses maybe?). After completion of each part, he should recompute his Maintenance Calories using the Body Calculator . This is because his Maintenance is expected to come down as he keeps losing chunks of his body-weight.

If you are someone who is going to have a planned fat cut, you should know this:

DO NOT TRUST YOUR WEIGHING SCALE!

Let me explain. The weighing machine measures your total Body weight and there are several contributing components to this total:

1. Skeleton
2. Organs and Blood
3. Muscle
4. Fat
5. Glycogen, Blood glucose and Water

The last component mentioned here is a far more volatile quantity than the fourth — meaning, the variability you will observe in your body-weight will be heavily due to 5 and less due to 4. As long as you have sincerely accumulated your deficit, your fat loss will naturally happen. Adherence is key. Do not get disturbed by daily readings of your weighing machine.

Please do not confuse bloating with fat gain. You look at the mirror today after that huge party from last night. You look… off. Have you gained too much fat? Let’s see — assuming you had a 1000 Cal surplus yesterday (this is a lot of food!), you’ve theoretically gained only about 130 g of fat. Assuming that this amount of fat is spread throughout the body, it is simply not possible that this small amount of fat is what makes you look terrible.

I feel terrible when people say this kind of stuff at parties:

He: 'Oh man, I’ve eaten like a pig. I should burn it all out by doing extra cardio tomorrow…'

Me:

You want to burn 1000 Cal on the treadmill? That’s TWO HOURS of running!! How about: stop worrying and start distributing the load to, say, 15 days. All you need to do is eat 70 Cal less than whatever your original plan was for 15 days (70 x 15 = 1050) — Voila! How simple it is to get back on track!

Your average intake over years and years is what matters.

If you’ve grown fat slowly over several years, there’s zero doubt that you’ve eaten more than your Maintenance on an average. A simple example will show you how powerful very small decisions could be.

Consider two brothers Anand and Arvind. They have very similar proportions except Arvind is taller than Anand by 1-2 inches. Their activity levels/types are very identical. But, they have forgotten that due to height differences, Arvind’s Maintenance is higher than Anand’s by 100 Cal.
So they consume the exact same number of calories everyday.
Consider that 100 Cal difference over a period of 1 year — that’s a difference of 36,500 Cal in accumulated surplus. Each kg of body-fat is equivalent to 7700 Cal and so 36,500 Cal is equivalent to almost 5 kg of fat.
So, if they started off at the same body weight, Anand would be heavier than Arvind by 5 kg after 1 yr! And he could have avoided all that fat gain by removing just one Roti from his diet everyday!

One more important thing to note would be the fact that fat loss (or fat gain) takes time to appear. When I go on a fat loss phase, the weighing scale may start showing drops immediately but, actual visible/measured leanness comes with a lag of about 2 weeks. The takeaway here is: stick to your plan even if you don’t SEE results so quickly! It will work over time.

If it’s this simple, why aren’t people in full control of how fat they are?

• No tracking at all | Underestimating the amount of food eaten
  If you do not track and have a hard time losing fat, you are seriously underestimating the amount you are eating. There IS no other explanation. If you are one such person, you better start tracking right away (at least for a few days)..
• Too many cheat days | Festivals | Parties
  When we look at the graph of the calorie intake of some people, it seems like they normally eat well within the limits. But there would be some phases where they eat way out of proportion and way too often. These frequent spikes contribute a lot to the average intake and thus nullifies the effect of all the Deficit they had accumulated over time.
  For example, if a person has planned a cut with about 250 Cal deficit and goes for one cheat day in between where he has a surplus of 1000 Cal, it sets him back by 5 days (1 day lost directly and deficit of 4 days nullified by the surplus). Too many such setbacks could demotivate ANYONE.
• Stray Calories
  There is another category of people who do have a rough estimate of how much they eat i.e. they have tracked their intake sometime in their lives. It seems to them that they are doing everything according to plan but the numbers say that they are not losing any fat at all. This could be because of the seemingly 'small' snacks that they take in between their planned meals — most commonly sweets. There’s nothing inherently wrong with consuming sugary stuff (as we shall see in future) but the fact that they are unaccounted for adds up over time.

In Part 3 of this Fat Loss series, we’ll go through slightly advanced concepts and also address some commonly asked questions

Link to next part