Fat Management: Similar to managing a bank account

Managing your fat for Fat Loss is not much different from managing your bank account – except in this case, you wouldn’t want to do any savings.

If you earn more than you spend, you save; you start spending more than what you earn, you end up using your savings. It’s that simple - now, the calories that you consume in a day are your earning. The calories that your body burns as fuel is the spending. The fat accumulated in your body down the years is the savings.

So, to wipe out the savings, you can either earn less (consume less calories), spend more (burn more calories) or do both.

The next step is to understand your ‘spending’ and your ‘earning’. Just exactly how much is your expense, in terms of calories, per day? Unless you know what you are spending now, you wouldn’t be able to make the adjustments necessary to wipe out your savings.

Your ‘earning’ can easily be found by keeping a track of all that you eat and converting them into calories. Several calorie tables are available freely on the net to give you the calorie count of every imaginable food.

Just make sure that you record everything you eat in a typical day – morning coffee/tea, breakfast, lunch, sweets, evening snacks, tea/coffee, soft drinks, dinner, desserts, chocolates - list all of them down, find out the calorie count for each, and total them up. You can take an average day scenario for this calculation, but make sure you take the higher side – like Sunday, when you would tend to consume more.

Your ‘spending’ or your daily calorie requirement consists of three components.

1. Basal Metabolism Rate (BMR) – the calories required for powering your body’s various functions to remain alive.
2. Non-activity daily requirement – the calories required to just to go through the motions of the day, including the calories required to digest the food that you eat. (This is roughly 10% of the total calories you eat in a day).
3. Activity induced daily requirement – the calories used up by your body for various activities performed by you – this would include exercises, sports etc. You will need to figure out how many calories you burn while doing various activities.

In my next posts, I will be talking in depth about BMR, Non-activity and Activity induced requirements and also telling you how to measure them…