It’s pretty common to see metabolic calculators that give you a rough estimate of the calories you burn on a daily basis. But even a daily measurement might be too abstract to picture. So I suggest that we look at our calorie burning on an hourly basis to make it seem more real and acute.
For example I found a couple BMR calculators online and the bmr for my weight and height comes to 1920 calories per day.
This breaks down to 80 calories per hour.
If I consume a coffee that has 80 calories in it, I’ve offset one hour of my BMR. If I add a tea biscuit to that coffee (approx 300 calories in the tea biscuit) it takes me almost 4 hours to burn off the energy from that tea biscuit.
This is a simpler and more acute way of looking at eating and calorie consumption.
If you want to go out for a big dinner tonight and eat almost all of your daily calories at once, then all you have to do is calculate how many calories you burn per hour, and bank those calories (some before and some after the big meal) by not eating for the appropriate number of hours to allow you the big dinner. This is the only way to eat big dinners without gaining weight.
For example thanksgiving dinner is usually a huge amount of calories for most people. In order to avoid gaining weight after thanksgiving dinner you must allow your body to burn those calories off. The simplest way is to throw in an Eat Stop Eat style fast sometime before and sometime after the big dinner and you should end up with no weight gain at all.
If you do it right you could even lose weight over thanksgiving.
Budgeting calories is no different than budgeting money (which apparently seems to be very difficult for most people to do)
Overeating and telling yourself that you’ll burn off or work off the calories at a later date is no different than maxing out your credit card and telling yourself that you’ll pay it all off next month. It never happens.
The only way effective weight loss works is if you budget for the calories you’re going to consume and pay off your calorie debt every time you over consume.
Eat Stop Eat is the easiest way I’ve found to do this.
John
