The ONLY 3 Ways To Lose Body Fat, Part I

Forget all of the thousands of various diets, weight loss programs and exercise routines. When you decide it’s time to shed some of that unwanted body fat, there are three ways and only three ways for you to reach your goals:

1. Eat less food than your body needs (also known as dieting)
2. Keep eating the same amount of food and sweat the pounds off through exercise.
3. Eat less and exercise.

As you can probably guess, I have an opinion on which one is best. But let me go through each scenario, then at the end, I’ll present you with the pros and cons of each method. Then you decide which one’s best for you. Ready? Let’s start with…

Fat Loss Method #1: Eat Less Food Than Your Body Needs (Dieting)

Very simply, to lose weight by dieting only, you must eat fewer calories than your body needs each day. How much less do you need to eat? Well, to lose one pound of pure fat weight – NOT water or lean muscle tissue – you must consume approximately 3500 calories less than what your body needs.

And how do you know how much your body needs? Great question.

Your daily energy requirements are made up of your BMR or Basal Metabolic Rate plus your daily activity levels. If it makes it easier, think of your BMR as your Bare Minimum Requirements. In other words, if you were to lay in bed all day and not move a muscle, your BMR would be the amount of energy necessary to keep your heart beating, your lungs breathing, your kidneys functioning and so on. Add on the calories needed to support your daily activity, which includes every movement you make while awake, and you have your total daily energy requirements or TDER.

By the way, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends that the absolute minimum number of calories per day for women is 1200 and for men is 1800. (And at those levels, I wouldn’t recommend doing anything strenuous.)

Okay, with all of that out of the way, let’s take a look at how to lose fat using the “diet only” method.

Let’s say for arguments sake that you’re a sedentary 35 year old female, who is 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighs 180 pounds. You would require approximately 1800 calories each day just to maintain your current weight. (BMR=1500 + 300 calories for daily activity)

Now let’s say your goal is to lose 30 pounds. And like most people, you want to lose it quickly. So you sign up for a weight loss program promising that you’ll lose three pounds a week. Let’s take a look at the numbers…

Remember, for every pound of fat loss, you need to create a deficit of 3500 calories between what you consume and what your body needs. In this case, to lose three pounds of fat a week, you need to consume 10,500 calories less than your body needs every seven days. Put another way, every day, you need to eat 1500 calories below your TDER.

Looking back, your TDER in my example was 1800 calories. That means, to lose three pounds of fat per week, you can only eat 300 calories a day!!! Not much when you consider just one low-fat muffin has over 400 calories.

Did You Know…

The brain alone uses between 150-200 grams of glucose each and every day. That’s 600-800 calories just to run your brain.

Needless to say, you wouldn’t be able to function on just 300 calories a day.

All right, you obviously can’t expect to lose three pounds of fat a week. What about one pound?

Let’ take a look:

Eating 3500 calories less than you need each week translates to a daily deficit of 500 calories. Take your daily requirement of 1800 and subtract 500 and you get 1300. To lose 1 pound of fat per week by diet alone, you would need to eat 1300 calories a day. Much better than 300 but…

If you eat only 1300 calories per day, you’ll be eating less than your BMR of 1500 calories. Why is this important? Another excellent question. If you consume fewer calories than your BMR, you risk losing precious lean tissue (muscle).

How Dieting Can Cause Muscle Loss

While every one of us would love to look like a fitness model, the truth is, your body’s number one concern is survival. And the instinct to survive is extremely strong.

If the number of calories you consume drops below what your body needs, your body does whatever it takes to ensure it has enough energy to survive. How does it do that?

By eating itself…sort of.

The amount of energy your body needs is not negotiable. It needs what it needs. That’s it. That’s all. So if you don’t give it what it needs, it will get it wherever it can. And it’s first choice is your lean tissue, i.e. muscle.

Your body breaks down lean muscle tissue into energy it can use. By doing this, it actually helps preserve its survival in two ways. One, which we just looked at, is to take care of your body’s immediate need for energy. The other, to reduce your body’s future need for energy.

It works kind of like this…

You’ve no doubt heard about a company laying off its employees during tough economic times, right? Well, why are layoffs one of the first things a company does when it’s in financial trouble?

Layoffs occur because people are a big drain on resources: salaries…benefits…office supplies…travel all add up to a lot of money. So if you get rid of the people, you immediately reduce expenses in many other areas.

Now think of your body as that company and your muscles are the employees. Muscle is an “active” tissue which means it requires energy to survive. Stored body fat on the other hand is like the bosses nephew…content to just sit there and requires very, very little energy to exist.

By reducing the amount of muscle the body has, it lowers its requirement for energy in the future. In other words, your body has slowed its metabolism – or the rate at which it burns calories (energy).

Keep this in mind…

When you eat less than your BMR, in essence what you’re doing is starving your body. This starvation threatens your body’s survival. The longer you starve your body and the bigger the gap between what you consume and what your body needs, the more damage will be done.

So when you hear someone telling you they lost 3…4…5 pounds or more in a week, not all of the weight was from fat. Yes, some of the weight is fat, but some of the weight loss is lean tissue along with water that would normally be stored in the lean tissue.

While it seems logical that eating very little food should melt the fat right off your body, it’s not the way it works. Remember, your body’s number one priority is to live – to survive. It’s not concerned with your desire to lose twenty-five pounds in just four weeks so you look good at that wedding.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, “Wait a minute. I thought you said 1200 calories a day was the minimum recommended for women. What gives Curtis?”

The amount of 1200 calories mentioned earlier is for all women. Obviously, at 5 feet 4 inches, you would need more energy than someone who is 5 feet tall or shorter.

And you know what? All of these calculations have a margin of error. So let’s say that you can handle eating 1300 calories a day. Is there any other reason why you wouldn’t want to lose weight by diet alone?

Well, here’s the other big challenge you face, as I see it:

The above example assumes that you’ll eat 500 fewer calories each and every day…no exceptions…no slip-up…no days “off”. If you “fall of the wagon” so-to-speak; if you consume more than 1300 calories you delay the achievement of your goal.

That means no snacking. No cleaning off your kids’ plates at dinner. No candies from the candy dish. You can easily “nibble” your way through two or three hundred calories. By doing so, you double the time it will take to reach your goal.

Never mind what would happen if you lost it all together. If you have a stressful day and down a container of ice cream or you go to your best friend’s birthday dinner and let loose with dinner, dessert and martinis, you could very easily find yourself back at the beginning of your journey.

Or perhaps you already know this

Having to remain on such a strict regimen makes it difficult to stick to long-term.

If you do choose to lose weight by dieting only, you must be diligent about counting calories. You need to know how much food you consume on a daily basis. For that, I recommend using a calorie counting program.

In my experience as a fitness coach, I found that many people only lasted a couple of days with the calorie counting exercise before they just gave up on it. You must be prepared to put the time in to track your calories.

In essence, you have a calorie account that has only so much available energy in it. You must not overspend if you want to lose body fat. You need to know where every “cent” is spent. No guessing allowed.

So does dieting provide any benefits at all?

Well, if you really hate exercise, it does. You don’t have to do any. Other than that, I’m hard pressed to come up with anything. Let me know if you can think of something.

In Part II we’ll examine exercise only as a fat loss method.