Body Fat Basics

There’s a lot of confusion about losing body fat—many people think that if you just work out hard you’ll see the fat melt away. The truth is that exercise is only a side issue—to lose fat you need to concentrate on your nutrition.

There are three simple rules about body fat:
1) If you eat more calories than your body burns every day you will gain body fat (and weight).
2) If you eat the same amount of calories as your body burns everyday your body will stay the same.
3) If you eat fewer calories than your body burns everyday you will lose body fat (and weight).
This is true whether you eat doughnuts or rice cakes.

So you’ve got two pieces to this equation: how many calories you eat and how many calories your body burns.

Your Body:
You burn calories everyday, even if you sit on the couch all day and watch Jerry Springer and Oprah (do not consider this an endorsement of sitting all day and watching Jerry Springer and Oprah). The calories you burn while doing nothing is your Basal Metabolic Rate (here’s a link to find your BMR). After you find that you need to make an estimate of how many calories you burn on top of that—link to find estimated calories burned.

Your Food:
So now you know about how many calories you burn compare that with how many calories you take in. Do an audit of what you eat for a week to get an idea of this: write down or take a cell phone picture of everything you eat—then put it in a calorie calculator and then see the above rules as to where you should expect your body fat to go.

To get the healthy body you need, nutrition is should be your highest concern. Training falls in with this but is truly a distant second place.