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Congratulations! 55lb is a big chunk of weight to not be carrying around! It's very true that for weight loss, diet is the single most important variable, but
by cheald 3y ago
Congratulations! 55lb is a big chunk of weight to not be carrying around!
It's very true that for weight loss, diet is the single most important variable, but that doesn't mean exercise doesn't matter. The kind of exercise you do matters a lot, too, particularly once you start caring about lean mass vs fat, rather than just the gross scale weight. Cardio has this image as "the way you lose weight", but I think that strength training is vastly superior, overall.
Strength training doesn't have to be ultra time-intensive or strenuous, but it has huge benefits for both health and weight loss; muscle is metabolically-active tissue, taking 6-10 kcal/day/lb to maintain, vs 2-4 kcal/day/lb for fat. This has two implications: first, in a caloric deficit, the body will preferentially catabolize unused muscle tissue over fat, since it's more expensive to maintain, and second, maintaining a greater percentage of your weight as muscle rather than fat increases your daily "just keeping the lights on" caloric expenditure. A caloric deficit with a high-protein diet and even moderate weight training will result in a significantly higher level of retained muscle mass, resulting in more net calories/day burned, even on the days you don't train. Think of it as the difference between active and passive income - the more "passive caloric burn" you can rack up, the easier it is to make progress towards those goals.
- metadat 3y agoWhat's a kcal here? It doesn't seem plausible to me that a pound of muscle only takes 10 kcal (aka 1 Calorie, with a capital "C") per day to maintain. Are you saying, for example, maintaining 20 pounds of muscle only requires consuming 200 Calories per day more of food? Edit: According to the Internet, this is actually approximately correct, 20kcal/lb/day. I must just have high metabolism, because I must consume more like 40kcal/lb/day or more to maintain muscle mass. Cheers.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MH15 3y agoWhat we call a calorie in the US many other countries call a kcal, because our “calorie” actually 1000 of the base unit. We abbreviate for whatever reason.
- vidarh 3y agoWe'll often say calorie when we mean kcal elsewhere too, in most day to say contexts.
- alwa 3y agoConfusingly, it’s a Calorie, in the sense of “the thing the nutrition label says you probably need 2000 of a day.” If I remember correctly, 1000 calories (with a lowercase “c”) makes one Calorie (with a capital C). The former is the energy to raise 1g of water through 1 degree Celsius, and the latter 1kg through the same amount of temperature change.
- Izkata 3y agoApparently the US Calorie is because that formal definition was originally 1kg of water, it came to the US and got embedded in nutrition stuff, then got changed to 1g of water: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17116702/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17116702/
- cheald 3y ago"kilogram calorie" - it's the unit that we colloquially refer to as a "calorie" in the US for nutrition purposes. That maintenance requirement is just "keeping the cells alive when you're laying in bed in a coma" - actually using those muscles obviously requires more energy than that. Maintaining muscle mass is more than just a function of calories, though - in part because it's more expensive tissue, the body will try to make up caloric deficits from muscle before fat. Building and maintaining muscle requires that you keep your body in a state of muscle synthesis, which is itself a very metabolically-expensive process. Numbers for energy/lb/day of muscle range from 6kcal-50kcal depending on who you're listening to, but the thing that everyone agrees on is that regardless of the number, muscle is multiple times more expensive than equivalent fat to maintain.
- metadat 3y agoAh, thank you @cheald so much for this explanation! This makes a lot more sense.