The average person attempting to lose weight tends to get on the scale several times per week and sometimes several times per day.  If you don’t understand the daily fluctuations of your body weight and the errors in food, this is a sure fire way to drive yourself crazy.  While I’m not a fan of this method for most people I figured the least I could do was teach you why you shouldn’t get frustrated if you like to weigh yourself frequently.  So before you toss your scale and run out and buy a new one, a few simple adjustments will get you back on the right track.

The human body is made up of about 60-80% water.  This means that on any given day your body weight can fluctuate depending upon how  much water you are holding on to and how much food you have in your system at that time.  Since the average person eats about 3-5lbs of food a day, I guess it’s safe to say your body weight can fluctuate by at least 3-5lbs a day.  (Personally, I have a much bigger fluctuation.  My weight can fluctuate 3-8lbs in a day.)  Now I’m sure most people would be freaked out by this, but I actually enjoy watching my weight move around on a daily basis.  Maybe I’m just weird like that.

The more carbohydrates you eat, the more water your body holds.  Every gram of carbohydrate you eat your body holds approximately about 2 grams of water.  This is why people get really excited when they first cut carbohydrates out of their diet and the scale goes down.  The only thing that happened was their body began shedding some water.  This loss of water gives people the illusion of actually losing fat when in all actuality you may not have lost any body fat at all.  And let’s face it, no one wants to actually just lose weight – they want to lose fat!

So how do you lose fat?  In order to lose 1 pound of fat, you must burn approximately 3500 calories.  Forget all the exercise gadgets and gimmicks you read about claiming to help you tone up your problem areas - this can ONLY be done 1 of 3 ways.

1.  Eat Less than the number of maintenance calories you need per day

2.  Eat up to maintenance and exercise some calories off

3.  A combination of the two

If you take a closer look at the food we eat, you will notice that it is measured in grams.  When we weigh ourselves, the scale measures us in pounds.  There are approxiamtely 453 grams in 1 pound.  I’m sure you may be wondering “what does that have to do with weighing myself?”  Just hang on a second and it will all make sense soon.

There are a ton of errors to take in to account when it comes to losing weight, and the majority of them happen at the gram level.

1.  Exercise - you will never know how many calories your body burns through exercise.  Studies show we can over estimate how much we exercise by 50% or greater.  If the machine says you burned 300 calories, how do you know that number is really accurate?  And even if that number was accurate, you would still need to deduct the number of calories you would have burned anyway through your resting metabolic rate.

2.  RMR - RMR stands for “resting metabolic rate” which is the number of calories you would burn if you didn’t do much all day besides read my blog.  If you think your RMR is 1800 calories day but it’s actually only 1600 calories a day that’s a 200 calorie per day error right there which could account for about 1.5 lbs of fat loss per month.

3.  Food - unless you weigh everything you eat, there is an inherent error between what you ate and what the package says.  For example a Snickers Bar package says 55g and 280 calories, but unless you actually weigh it, how do you know that bar is actually 55g?  You don’t.  You just assume it is which is a very bad assumption.  Food manufacturers are allowed to give you more than the label says, but not less.  The bar you ate could have actually been 65 grams, thus making it about 350 calories instead of 280. If you make a few of these 40-50 calorie errors all day long, that could be the difference between losing a pound of fat or not.

When we add up all these errors you can see they end up compounding on top of each other.  Then when you go and get on the scale and you’re trying to see changes at the pound level but you’ve made errors all week long at the gram level, it’s very easy to see why the average person gets frustrated because they’re not losing weight.  If you have a ton of errors at the gram level, it will be hard to see changes at the pound level.

Marketers know these errors exist and they will continue play on your lack of knowledge if you let them.

At 3DFitness, I teach my clients to over-estimate whatever the label says by 20-30% and under-estimate however many calories they think they burned working out by 20-30%.  These error adjustments are what allow them to continue losing weight without ever getting frustrated about their lack of progress.

In order for this system to work effectively, you must “count calories”.   Other than that, you are at the mercy of the marketers and food manufacturers.

EVERYONE at my gym who follows this system loses weight.

 

Coach Blair