The majority of our nutrition coaching clients have an overall goal to be healthier and to lose some body fat.  Let's talk about why it's so hard sometimes.

Today we are going to dig in to some of the specifics of fat loss.

What exactly is happening when we lose weight?  Why does it happen?  How come it happens differently for everyone?  How come formulas don’t always work for calculating how much to eat to lose fat? Why is it so easy to regain fat after the diet ends?  By the time you finish reading this you’ll have the answers to these questions and you’ll be better prepared should you set off on your own fat loss journey. 

What is energy balance?

What does our body do with all of the calories we eat?

Where do our calories go?

What can we control?

Why isn’t calories out enough?

All of these questions are answered as we explain everything you’ve wanted to know an more about energy balance!

We know that calories are our energy source.  

The main factor in weight gain or loss is calories in vs calories out (it’s really that simple).

If you want to maintain your body weight you need to eat around the same number of calories that you are burning.  

If you want to gain muscle you need to be eating more calories than you are burning.

If you want to lose fat, you need to be eating less calories than you are burning.

Even though we know all of these things we still may not know how much and what to eat!

Let’s talk about sugar.

The average American can easily consume over 200g of sugar a day. Thats about 150g over the recommended daily dose for a healthy, exercising person. A sedentary and inactive person should actually consume even less. Have you ever looked at your sugar intake in a day? It can be eye opening and worth the effort. Use an app like MyFitnessPal to look up foods that you consume throughout the entire day and keep track of the total grams of sugar. You’ll not only get the number of grams that you ate but from this list you can also identify which foods contain the most sugar should you need to work on eliminating or substituting certain foods.

What happens when we eat too much sugar?

The main issue here is fat storage but not FROM the sugar but BECAUSE OF the sugar.

Here’s why:

Moving makes you body and your brain function better.

You know what moving also helps? Your metabolism!

If you’re over 25… your metabolic power is decreasing by about 3-5% every decade. The main reason for this is the loss of lean body mass. Bone and muscle are so metabolically active that a drop is your metabolism could largely be due to a drop in your lean body mass as you age.

We don’t want that to happen!

If you keep, or even improve, your lean body mass from the age of 25 to 35 to 45… guess what your metabolism doesn’t do as much of… drop!