It's faster to eat 300 calories than to burn 300 calories

You can eat 300 calories a lot faster than you can burn 300 calories.

I'd like to define a couple of things before getting into this illustration:

1. BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) - The amount of calories needed to keep the body functioning at rest.  There are numerous calculators you can find online including this one: http://www.bmrcalculator.org/
2. TEF (Thermic Effect of Food) - Acute increase in metabolism from the ingestion of food.
3. TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure) - This is the total amount of calories burnt on an average day, including BMR, calories burnt during exercise, work, and from TEF. (TDEE Calculator - http://iifym.com/tdee-calculator/ )
4. Satiation - The sensation of feeling satisfied or full (after a meal and between meals)

Now I want to address another idea that seems to be in vogue as of late, due to the IIFYM (If It Fits Your Macros) phenomenon.  In a vacuum, a calorie is a calorie.  If your BMR is 1600 and you lie around all day long and you eat exactly 1600 calories,  you should, in theory remain the same weight.  If you eat 1800 calories, you would gain weight, and if you would eat 1400 calories you would lose weight.  Pretty simple, right?  The problem is all foods are not created equal, in many ways, and we don't live in a vacuum.  A food that has 200 calories in it, elicits a large insulin response, and  is low in fiber is not equal to a food that has 200 calories, does not elicit a significant insulin response, and is high in fiber.  The latter food is going to provide your body with important nutrients and keep you feeling satisfied and full.  The former, will spike insulin, put the body in a fat storage mode, and create a state of hunger.  Even though I am an avid believer in allowing yourself to eat foods you enjoy, I am also a big believer in choosing nutrient dense foods that are highly filling, low in calories, and high in fiber.  These types of food not only fill you up and keep you full, they provide the body with key micro nutrients that are needed for repair, health, well-being, and longevity.  Not only that, but high fiber foods actually have less of a chance of being stored as body fat.  Furthermore, certain foods, (mainly protein), have a much greater TEF than others (carbohydrates and fats).  Eating high quality, low fat protein sources can actually increase your metabolism for a short period of time, and when fat loss is the goal, every little bit helps.  Bottom line, choosing nutrient dense, whole foods are going to help you to feel full and lose weight.  We all know, it's much easier to stick to a diet when we aren't constantly starving.  I mean, I love pop tarts, but I can smash thousands of calories in pop tarts and it doesn't do a whole lot for my satiation.  If I eat the same amount of calories in lean beef and sweet potatoes, I'm quite full, for a long time, and I've given my body some very high nutrient dense food that will help to fuel me for an extended period of time.

Next, I want to tackle BMR, and more importantly TDEE.  To make things easier, I'm going to use myself as the example.  I am a (5 foot, 7 inches) 67", 175, 35 year old male.  I have been weight training intensely for 15 years and have been a natural professional bodybuilder for 7 years.  It's safe to say that I have more muscle than the average 67", 175 pound male.  That being said, my BMR is around 1689 calories per day.  That means, if I were to lay around the house and eat 1689 calories in a day, my body would utilize 1689 calories just to complete the daily bodily functions and metabolic needs to keep my body working.  Before getting much deeper into the importance of this, I now want to touch briefly on the metabolic differences of females.  A female that is exactly the same height, weight, and age as myself has a BMR 1523.  Sorry ladies, but that is a 176 calorie difference.  Want to know what that equates to?  An oz of almonds, which is less than what an adult can easily fit in their closed hand.  If a man and a women of the same exact age, weight, size, and muscle mass lived together and ate the same exact food every single day to meet the man's BMR needs of 1689 calories, the women would gain approximately 1 pound of body fat every 19 days, which would equate to 19 pounds per year.  This is not taking into effect that your body's metabolism slows each and every year, leading to a lower BMR.  Using an illustration like this, it's quite simple to see how easily it is for someone to gain 10, 20, 50, 100 pounds in a 10-20 year span.  I point this out to illustrate that women often need to be even more conscious of what they are eating than men, which is extremely hard because the hormonal profile of women cause them to crave and need calorie spikes throughout different times of their monthly cycle.

Now, let's get back to the main point, being that it's faster to eat 300 calories than it is to burn 300 calories.  Continuing to use my BMR of 1689 as my example, I will burn 1.17 calories per minute, per day if I am sedentary the entire day.  It will thus take me 256 minutes, or almost 4.5 hours to burn 300 calories.  I can assure you that I can smash a pack of pop tarts (420 calories) easily in less than 5 minutes, and if you challenge me I'm sure I can get it down in 90 seconds or less.  Those 420 calories will take approximately 6 hours to burn if I am completely sedentary.  Exchange that pop tart for 6 oz of chicken, 200 grams of sweet potatoes, 100 grams of broccoli, and 100 grams of fruit and you have about 420 calories of food that will take you at least 10-15 minutes to eat and will fill you up for hours.  Not only that you just gave yourself high quality protein, a nice chunk of fiber, limited insulin (the fat storing hormone), and provided your body with a slew of micro nutrients that are extremely healthy.  Choosing these types of foods can help to make sure you stay full and that you not only lose fat, but improve your overall well-being while eating in a caloric deficit.

There are two things to consider here before you freak out and think, "OMG I can only eat 1600 calories per day".  One being that the above scenario is in a vacuum, and two is that this is based on BMR, not TDEE.  TDEE, or Total Daily Energy Expenditure, is your BMR, plus all the other calories you burn throughout the day.  So, if you sit and watch TV all day, your TDEE will be very close to your BMR.  If you have a desk job and come home to sit and watch TV, your TDEE will be very similar to your BMR.  If you work construction or manual labor or exercise daily, though, your TDEE will be higher than your BMR and you will be able to feed yourself with more calories because of this.  You can use the link from the beginning of the article to figure your TDEE, but again I will use mine for the purpose of this article. 

TDEE takes into account your age, height, weight, and your activity level.  My TDEE (exercising 6 times per week) is 2544, this is a much more manageable number (again, a women with the exact measurements would be lower, her TDEE would be 2294).  I'm a big eater, and 2500 calories is actually quite a nice bit of food.  So we have these numbers now (BMR/TDEE) and we have some idea of how to lose weight (if my TDEE is 2544 I need to eat less than 2544 to lose weight), eat fewer calories than 2544.  Real quick, one pound of fat is about equal to 3500 calories, so if I have a TDEE of 2544 from exercising 6 times per week and I want to lose 1 pound per week, I will have to eat about 2044 calories per day (that is a 500 calorie deficit X 7 days in a week = 3500 calories).  If I want to lose 2 pounds per week, I'd have to drop another 500 calories (1544) per day from my diet.  So from here we can figure out how many calories we need to eat each day to lose the amount of weight we want to lose per week.  Please remember, this is a rough estimation, and everyone is different, it is why personal trainers, health and diet coaches, and nutritionists are extremely beneficial to those that have health and fitness goals. 

I know I'm long winded and I've been circling round and round and not touching much on this whole thing of "I can eat 300 calories faster than I can burn them", but the information above was important.  Now, I want to talk exercise.  Most of the people I see in the gym are slogging around mindlessly peddling a bike or walking on the treadmill or doing db curls and leg extensions.  Sorry folks these activities are doing nothing for your calorie burn.  I've logged my heart rate and used the METs formula to track calorie burn of an intense weight training workout (75-85% of my 1RM for lifts like dead lift, squat, shoulder press, BB Row, bench press, etc...) and in a 60 minute workout with 2 minutes of rest between sets at this intensity, I burn about 350 calories.  I am telling you this because if you are coming into the gym and doing db curls, leg extensions, the butt blaster, lateral raises, and triceps extensions for 30 minutes, you are probably burning about 100 calories, and that's high balling it.  To really get a good burn you need to be doing multi joint, compound exercises at a weight and rep range where you are near failure on each and every set.  Furthermore, just today I ran 3.5 miles in 30 minutes, that burnt 421 calories.  Not too shabby, not great.  If you are walking at 3 mile an hour for 30 minutes on a treadmill, you are burning about 120-180 calories depending on your weight.  For me, a 30 minute walk at 3 MPH would equal about 150 calories burnt in that 30 minutes (I dont care that the treadmill says you burnt 225, it's wrong, cardio machines lie, never believe their caloric expenditure propaganda).  So, if I slog through the weight room and slog on the treadmill for an hour total, I will burn 250 calories in that hour.  If I would have sat on my but for that hour, I would have burnt 70 calories.  So in the time I spent going through the motions at the gym, I burnt an initial 180 calories.  In 1 weeks time, that is 1260 calories (that's if I do this 7 days per week).  It would take me 3 weeks to lose one pound of body fat.  Not to mention, if you are like 99% of the American population, you will go out to eat at least once this week with friends or family and that entree you order at your favorite restaurant will more than likely have at least 1200 calories in it, and that is minus the cocktail or 2 you have along with it.  What we don't think about when we exercise and "burn" calories, is that we'd be burning calories anyway if we were at rest.  The 100 or 200 or 500 calories we burn are the grand total.  If I burn 70 calories per hour at rest, I have to subtract those 70 calories from my total exercise burn to get the "real" exercise calorie deficit. 

This isn't to discourage you.  This is to arm you with some of the facts, and allow you to understand why you are or are not losing fat when indeed that is your goal.  Keep in mind, if I was doing typical yard work at my weight, I'd burn about 400 calories per hour.  If I were vigorously cleaning my house for an hour I'd burn about 360 calories.  I'm quite certain my wife would much rather me spend an hour doing those 2 things than slogging around at the gym, where I'm actually burning less calories than that. 

Remember, the slogging equals about 1260 calories per week, that's 7 hours of work for 1260 calories.  If I can eat a pack of pop tarts in 5 minutes that means I could eat about 84 packs (168 pastries) of pop tarts in 7 hours.  That would equal about 35,280 calories, or 10 pounds of fat.  Every time you think about eating something that you know you shouldn't have think about how hard it is to burn those calories off.  Just as an easy visual, using my body type (67", 175#, 35 yrs old) , these are some figures of the amount of calories in foods and the number of miles I'd have to walk to burn off those calories.

Walking 1 Mile (@ 3.5 MPH) Burns 95 Calories (use the walk/calorie counter - http://walking.about.com/library/cal/uccalc1.htm)

• 25  Grapes = 100 Calories (1 mile)
• 1 oz of almonds/cashews/peanuts = 170 calories (almost 2 miles)
• 2 TBSP Natural Peanut Butter = 210 Calories (2.5 miles)
• 1 slice Marco's Pepperoni Pizza = 290 Calories (Over 3 Miles)
• 1 Whole Egg = 70 calories (3/4 of a mile)
• McDonalds Plain Hamburger = 300 Calories (Over 3 miles)
• Medium Wendy's French Fries = 410 Calories (4.5 miles)
• 1 oz potato chips = 160 calories (1.75 Miles)
• 1/2 Cup (dry) Oatmeal = 150 calories (More than 1.5 miles)
• Snickers Bar = 250 Calories (Almost 3 miles)
• 1 Medium Banana = 110 Calories (1.25 Miles)
• 6" Chicken Sub at Subway (no cheese) = 320 Calories (3.5 Miles)

If you are looking for more foods and their calorie content check my 2 favorite calorie and macro nutrient tracking apps on your smart phone, MyFitnessPal and Fat Secret!

Remember if you have any questions, feel free to message me on facebook or email me at battersbox@yahoo.com