Wednesday, July 23, 2008

calories and metabolism -> the basics

The amount of energy you use is measured in kcal (calorie). The food and drinks you ingest contains carbs, fats and proteins that will react with oxygen to produce energy which is measured in calories.

So how many calories do we roughly burn in a a day ?
check this website to calculate your daily calorie needs.


In order to lose fat, you have to increase your daily calorie expenditure that is equivalent to increasing your metabolism. There are 3 ways to increase your metabolism:

1) exercise
2) be more active ( increase your non exercise physical activity )
3) gain more muscle ( muscle tissue use up more calorie than fat )

Remember the previous equation I gave you ?
Let's make it simpler

fat gain + muscle gain = calories from food - calories burned
So all we need is to make sure we burn more calories than we ingest ?
Now if we use more calories than we ingest, according to the equation we can lose either muscle or fat or both. Sounds confusing enough? you might say that it's fine, we will lose both fat and muscles, but what if I tell you there are secret techniques that will enable you to minimise muscle loss, and maximize fat gain.



Why do we need muscles to lose fat ?
Girls hate muscles, no they fear it. Muscles make them ugly, they say. Yet they are missing the secret of losing more fat faster and permanently.

Your muscle tissue use up more calorie than fat tissue. So more muscle means more calorie burned daily, and some of these calories come from your fat( we can maximize the calories burned from fat) . Your muscle is like an auto calorie burner, it is advantageous to have it.

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