People are confused about how calories work. They don’t really know what calories are or how they relate to fat loss.
Another confusing aspect about calories is how to calculate the amount of calories you need to consume each day in order to optimally burn body fat.
Fitness gurus talk about calorie deficits to achieve weight loss. But exactly what is a calorie deficit and how much of a deficit should you shoot for?
Watch: How Calories Work
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This article is full of free weight loss tips and answers all the questions about how calories work.
Our body needs energy to be able to perform our daily tasks. Also, a certain amount of energy is also needed for the routine functions of our internal organs.
All our daily activities use a certain amount of energy from our bodies; these could be simple things like brushing our teeth or more demanding tasks like playing an intense sport.
The body obtains the energy that it needs to do these tasks from the calories we consume through the food we eat.
In a way, your body is like a car, the calories you consume are equivalent to the gas a car needs to operate. If we don’t have fuel, we don’t have the energy we need to perform simple daily tasks. On the other hand, to much fuel leads to weight gain.
Question: When we eat, what happens to the calories?
When calories are consumed, the following two things take place:
- The first is that the calories are immediately converted into energy and used to fuel the body.
- The next is that the calories are put aside for the future energy needs of the body.
When you constantly overeat, you end up with a sizable surplus of calories that have to be stored, somewhere. Your excess calories are typically stored on your hips, stomach, or thighs.
Your first goal is to resist the temptation to overeat, by doing so you will begin burning away the excess fat stored in your body.
By using some of these excess calories every day, you will begin to slowly but surely reduce your body fat, thereby achieving your desired weight loss results.
Put simply, in order to tap into the excess calories stored in the body as fat, you need to take in fewer calories than you burn as energy.
Free Weight Loss Tip: How many calories do you really need to cut from your diet?
When it comes to a calorie deficit, as important as it is, remember to not to go overboard and trigger your body’s “famine response”.
Getting drastic and cutting too many calories will slow down the rate at which your body burns fat. This is your body’s natural survival response that helps conserve energy. Consequently, you’ll burn less fat and simultaneously store more.
The approach you should use is one that involves a slight calorie deficit. A 10 to 15% reduction in your maintenance calorie intake, will stimulate fat burning but won’t trigger your body’s survival responses.
The ideal situation is to consume about 300-500 calories less than what your body needs to maintain its current weight. Making these cuts is much easier than you think.
Eliminate Unnecessary Calories From Your Diet
You’ll find that you can easily eliminate 200-400 unnecessary calories by cutting out sodas and fruit juices from your diet. Skip your daily trip to Starbucks and reduce the food portions you eat at meals.
When you eliminate calories in small chunks each day you’ll prevent muscle loss and increase fat loss better than you would if you attempted a typical restrictive “crash” diet.
You can also burn more calories by increasing your daily activity level. Move more. Walk more. Do more. Make sense? You’ll start losing the pounds if you can achieve this lifestyle change on a regular basis.
How Calories Work Conclusion
There are plenty of free weight loss tips floating around the Internet, most of them are bad, or stupid. Understanding how calories work and how to create a proper calorie deficit to start burning away your fat is the simplest but most critical piece of information you’ll ever get.
