What Other People Eat for Weight Loss Doesn’t Matter
I recently received a question about precontest diets. Someone had read a post on a blog explaining what a bodybuilder supposedly ate for their pre-contest diet. The total calorie count sounded very high (far too high to still effectively lose weight without some serious drug intervention).
How do you know if what you're reading is true?
Instead of questioning the validity of the claimed calories reported this person simply assumed they were telling the truth and started speculating at mechanisms (drug use or overall muscles mass etc) as being the reason this bodybuilder could eat so much as still lose bodyfat.
This is a major problem with digital media. You have no proof that what you’re reading is true or partly true or a down right fabrication.
You’ve got to use some common sense and reason when you’re evaluating the validity of a claim. This is easier said than done because most people don’t even know what is reasonable anymore because of all the hyped up misinformation that is circulating around.
So the simplest answer is to test things out on yourself and forget what other people are eating. If you want to lose weight it makes good scientific sense that you need to eat less calories than you’re burning.
There are many metabolic rate calculators online that can estimate what your daily calories needs are…leave out the activity factor as they typically grossly overestimate the calories burned from activity.
Once you have a baseline estimate of your BMR start eating slightly below BMR (200-300 calories) and add in some exercise every day (200-300 calories worth…about 1 hour per day) This should cause you to lose at least 1 pound of fat per week as well as some water weight (total loss will likely be around 2-3lbs in the beginning)
This is how you test the amount of calories YOU need to lose weight.
Forget about what other people say they eat because most people can’t remember, will selectively leave things out, or could simply be misleading you (intentional or otherwise). In the end there is an amount of calories you can eat that will definitely cause weight loss for you. If you want to lose weight it’s your job to find that amount.
I don’t suggest that you follow anything I say blindly either. Test it out to prove it to yourself (but I know it will work cuz I’m not lying to you and I’ve done the research to know how this stuff works…but hey, the rule still applies to me too).
John
P.S. If you want to find out why it’s so hard to measure calories in food go here and listen to the podcast or read the transcrips: NUTRITION RESEARCH: PROBLEMS MEASURING CALORIES
4 Responses to “What Other People Eat for Weight Loss Doesn’t Matter”
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September 15th, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Given a slew of information, even if they all contradict each other so obviously only one is right, people also tend to just pick whichever one is most convenient to them. In other words, they’ll believe what they want to believe.
September 15th, 2010 at 2:14 pm
Youll find the opposite of this in womens magazines.
Some of the ‘sample’ diets and ‘diets of the stars’… I would be starving to death on the number of calories in those sample plans. Then women think there is something wrong with *them* when they cant stick to the ‘sample plan’.
September 15th, 2010 at 2:35 pm
ERV, how many calories are we talking about?
September 15th, 2010 at 8:06 pm
Abbie,
We’re talking thousands above BMR, the specific item I was informed about was in the neighborhood of 4000 cals/day.