Guidelines for Weight Control

Twelve Tips From Twelve Hamilton Personal Trainers

1.  If energy input exceeds energy output, the excess calories are stored as body fat (it doesn’t matter if the extra food is carbohydrate, fat or protein – all foods are converted to body fat for storage in fat tissue).

2.  Regular exercise will increase energy expenditure, and has other benefits for weight control including lowering our “setpoint” (cardiovascular exercise), increasing lean body mass (weight training), increasing fat-metabolizing enzymes (cardiovascular exercise), and increasing your body’s metabolism (cardiovascular exercise and weight training).

3.  Your metabolic rate remains elevated above resting levels 30 minutes or longer after vigorous cardiovascular exercise.  This means that you continue to burn more calories for many minutes or even hours after your workout.

4.  To improve energy balance in favor of losing weight, decrease your caloric intake and choose foods that are high in complex carbohydrates (pasts, rice, potatoes, bread, cereals) and low in fat and sugar.

5.  When a healthy, sensible diet is combined with regular exercise, close to 100 percent of the long-term weight loss will be in the form of body fat.

6. The number of fat cells is largely determined prior to adulthood which stresses the importance of being physically active in our younger years, and then maintaining a high level of activity throughout your life.

7.  When adults get fatter, as a result of overeating, they are filling or enlarging existing fat cells rather than creating new ones.

8.  Increases in body fat as we grew older are largely due to a lack of regular physical exercise.

9.  Your weight loss should be gradual: no more than 1 kilogram (2lbs) per week.   This is the safe limit to reducing your fat stores.  If you lose greater than 1 kilogram per weak, you are likely losing lean body tissue (muscle), which will lower your metabolic rate and increase the likelihood that you will regain the lost weight.

10.  It is not possible to “spot reduce”: there is no evidence that fat is burned to a greater degree from the fat stores directly over the exercising muscle groups (i.e. abdominal fat is not necessarily burned when doing crunches).  The only way to burn body fat during your workout is to exercise continuously to maintain your heart rate in our target zone (i.e. 60 – 85% of your maximum heart rate).

11.  Eat at least 3 meals per day, with the majority of the calories before mid-afternoon. frequent smaller meals are better than fewer large meals.  Snacking is fine as long as they don’t increase your over-all daily caloric intake and you snack on healthy foods.

12.  For beginner to intermediate exercisers, exercise of low intensity and long duration is more effective for burning fat than exercise of high intensity and short duration.  For more advanced exercisers, higher intensity, shorter duration cardio-training can have a tremendous fat burning effect.

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Principles of Weight Control – Part Two

Body Fat vs. Body Weight

Given the negative health effects of being “over-fat” (including a greater risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, gall bladder disease and certain forms of cancer), as a society we should be more concerned with the reduction of body fat instead of body weight. In fact, the the whole issue of “weight loss” itself needs to be re-evaluated: since low calorie diets have been proven to be unhealthy while providing only short-term results, they should be replaced with positive lifestyle changes that include both healthier eating habits and regular exercise. Instead of talking about losing weight, we should concentrate our efforts on losing fat. The term “fat loss” should replace “weight loss”, and we should evaluate progress using body fat percent, a mirror or even a measuring tape rather than the out-dated weight scale.

Energy Balance: The basic principle of weight control is one of energy balance: if you eat more calories than you burn off, you will eventually gain weight. Thus, if your ENERGY INPUT (total calories expended through metabolism and exercise), the excess calories are stored as fat in adipose tissue (fat tissue):

If your ENERGY INPUT equals your ENERGY OUTPUT, your weight WON’T CHANGE.

If your ENERGY INPUT is more than your ENERGY OUTPUT, you will gain weight.

If your ENERGY OUTPUT is more than your ENERGY INPUT, you will lose weight.

There are three ways to alter the energy balance equations in favor of losing weight. Eat less (reduce caloric intake below daily energy needs), exercise more (maintain current food intake while increasing energy expenditure through additional physical exercise), and lastly, a combination of the first two (slight reductions in caloric intake and moderate increases in physical exercise. Obviously, the third strategy is the most effective way to achieve healthy, gradual weight loss.