I want to explain to you why the calories listed on a label and the calories you burn during a workout are often very misleading.
The calories within a meal are not the same as the calories your body utilizes or digests.
Processed foods are already “pre-digested” or partially broken down. Lets say you eat 500 calories of processed food and 500 calories of whole food. You will actually absorb more calories, often times a lot more calories from the processed food.
Same calories going in, but one packs more inches on the thighs.
Just by eating almond butter instead of whole almonds you’ll absorb more calories. The ground up
almonds are already partially broken down so your body will be able to digest it easier.
Also, it takes energy to digest food. Energy comes from burning calories. Processed foods take little energy to digest because they are already partially broken down. Whole foods take more energy, more calorie burning, to digest.
Less than 5% of the calories from processed carbs are burned up during the digestion process. The rest could be racing to build fat!
So let’s say you eat 1,000 (for easy math) calories of chicken meat. 200-300 of those calories will be burned up just by your body’s digestion process. 1,000 calories of pasta on the other hand will be about 1,000 calories of energy to either be burned or stored as fat. This is very simplistic and doesn’t take into account the hormonal changes that occur when you consume a plate of pasta relative to chicken. The pasta is much worse.
Cooking also helps the digestion process. You’ll absorb more calories from cooked than raw foods.
Calories affect our hormones differently
“Consuming sugar-laden “low-fat” foods may actually make you gain fat faster. Researchers at the University of Georgia found that when rats were fed a low-fat, high-sugar diet, “the efficiency of generating body fat was more than twice as high — in other words, rats consuming low-fat high-sugar diets need less than half the number of calories to generate the same amount of body fat.”
One thing I have hear from many calorie counters is how they don’t eat for half a day to save up and use their calories on a culver’s shake or something. Because it is within their daily calorie count it’s okay.
It just doesn’t work that way. The sugars and processed foods have a much different affect on your fat storing hormones. These junk “foods” promote fat storage in your body. Not to mention the fact they provide zero nutritional value.
When it comes to burning calories the number you see on your fitbit of calories burned during a workout is useless.
When you train hard, especially an intense weight lifting workout, your body will be burning extra calories for days because of that workout. The few calories you burn during the workout are basically meaningless.
I don’t worry one bit about the number of calories I burn during a workout. All I focus on and what you should focus on is effort. The harder I push myself the better my results will be. It’s that simple. Train, and train hard.
The fitbits and other trackers have been found to be wildly inaccurate. Also, this study showed that people wearing the fitness trackers lost 50% less weight than those who didn’t. So, if they are very inaccurate and people wearing them get worse results….don’t buy them!
Too many times I’ve seen people in the gym just going through the motions. I think it’s better than nothing, but could be so much more effective. That’s one of the main reasons I opened my own gym. The lack of effort in other gyms drove me crazy at times. I wanted to create an atmosphere in which others are pushing hard, thus pushing me to train harder.
When you train hard, get stronger and add more muscle your furnace goes up (metabolism goes up), and you just burn more calories all day long. On a side note. Adding more muscle doesn’t mean you get all big and bulky ladies. It means you have stronger, denser, sexy tone, higher calorie burning muscles.
A couple other tips on burning more calories throughout the day….
Standing, fidgeting, walking will all help keep your furnace up. Sitting on your ass all day punching keys, then going home and plopping on the couch to punch remote buttons will grind your metabolism to a stand still.
Simple daily choices like taking the stairs and parking further away when done consistently really add up to a lot of extra calories burned.
Just by keeping your house colder your body will have to burn more calories to keep you warm. You’ll save money on the energy bill and lose a few pounds!
There is so much more to talk about…but here is what I recommend, and what I do.
Focus on choosing healthy foods. If you need help with what foods go HERE and download my ebooks for FREE. The Innate Diet Ebook lays it out easy for you. Focus purely on eating those healthy foods. That’s it. Don’t worry about calories.
Each week you have to jump on the scale. If you are losing a pound or 2 per week that is perfect, keep it up! If you are not losing weight than you have to start limiting portion sizes a little bit. The most common screw ups I see are the high energy foods like nuts and oils. Easy on those two.
Healthy food choices + portion control + high EFFORT workouts = guaranteed success.
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