No one likes cutting their calories back, we all enjoy eating and we don’t enjoy having to restrict ourselves from how much we can eat. Yet most people now are so fixated on making huge cut backs on input without thinking of targeting their output. If I have lost you what I mean is; we lose weight by burning more calories than we eat, we gain weight by eating more calories than we burn. It really is that simple, so when you fixate on eating less all the time you struggle because all you think about is food. Restricting our calories also make us more tired as calories are energy so we move less. However if we started taking a different approach and focussing on increasing our workload to burn calories we don’t have to sacrifice eating so much. Higher calories will also mean you have more energy to be active and train harder.
For example the average woman needs 2000 calories to maintain their weight. This means they need to eat between 1500-1700 calories a day to see a good amount of weight loss. Which I know a lot of people struggle to consume this little and tend to over eat.
Where as you take a woman who trains more regularly, is more active and has built up some lean muscle she could eat around 1800-2100 and lose weight. Allowing her to be a bit more flexible with her eating and not having to worry so much.
Give or take a few you can burn between 90-120 calories for a 30 minute steady paced walk. A 30 minute jog you can burn between 298-355 calories. A 30 minute resistance workout you can burn between 90-133 calories. This may not sound like a huge amount but lets say on a Monday you train with weights for 30 minutes and run for 30. Tuesday you walk for 30 minutes, Wednesday you train with weights for 30 minutes and walk for 15, Thursday you go for a 30 minute run, Friday you train with weights for 30 minutes and run for 15 minutes, Saturday you rest Sunday you take a 30 minute walk.
You will have an extra 1240-1586 calories to eat per week for 4 hours of training out of 112 waking hours a week. Which isn’t much time out of your weekly schedule, most days are 45 minutes or less spent training and only one day is an hour. So if you were to try train 5 hours per week that could be an extra 388-475 extra calories burned.
So instead of trying to eat less why not try to exercise more it is more enjoyable and there are so many great benefits from exercising. Exercise strengthens your joints and tendons, makes you stronger, decreases stress, improves your hearts health, reduces risk of cardiovascular disease’s, reduces the risk of osteoporosis improves your fitness level, your mood, your sex life, your energy levels, helps you sleep better the list goes on and on.
Diet is a huge important factor for weight loss and theres a saying “you can’t out train a bad diet” which is true, how ever you can train hard to allow more flexibility in your diet. Calories in vs calories out matter that is the only way to lose or gain weight but focussing on calories output rather than input is more sustainable and enjoyable.
I hope you have all enjoyed this post and thank you so much for reading :)
If you have any other questions you can contact me through my facebook page The Lemon Frog Fitness Company, my Instagram @lemon_frog_fitness or email louis@lemonfrogfitness.org.