that you had hoped for. Or, perhaps, you’re just interested in calories.
This chapter is a tool to help you grasp the concept of weight loss and the role calories play in losing and gaining weight. If one of your intermittent fasting goals is to lose weight and body fat, then the following illustrates why intermittent fasting works.
Examining How Your Intermittent Fasting Plan Is Going
People who try intermittent fasting and fail, lament that it doesn’t work. The overwhelming reason why intermittent fasting doesn’t give results for these people is because they use their fasting windows as a license to eat anything and everything they want. Bottom line: They eat too many calories during their eating windows, an action that will prevent weight loss and perhaps even promote weight gain. If you find yourself in the same situation, then press your panic button and do the calorie calculations in this chapter to see what and where you’re overeating and/or underexercising. What I can tell you from my years of experience helping people lose weight is that 99.9 percent of people underestimate the amount of food they eat.
Never fear! I don’t advise counting your calories each day, each week, or each month. I do encourage you to do the occasional calorie calculations to make yourself more aware of what you’re eating. Knowing this information can help you make better choices around food and meal selection during your eating windows as well as help you reach your weight and fat loss goals.
The next few sections take you on a whirlwind science exploration tour — the laws of physics (simplified). The goal is to clarify the misinformation that you may have been bombarded with regarding the basis for all things weight related (both weight gain and weight loss).
Explaining calorie surplus and deficit
Search for “calories and weight loss” online, and you’ll find: “Not all calories are equivalent. “A calorie may not be a calorie.” “A calorie is of course a calorie.” As you can see, a lot of information is out there about the role calories play in weight loss.
LOOKING TO PHYSICS TO EXPLAIN CALORIES
In an effort to clarify the calorie science, this calls for a refresher on Sir Isaac Newton’s laws of physics to help you understand calorie deficit. Newton’s first law of thermodynamics (in physics) is the law of conservation of energy. This states that energy can’t be created or destroyed in a closed system. Translation: If the calories in the foods you consume (even those foods you may consider to be clean) are more than the calories you burn (your resting metabolic rate and all your activity in a day), you’re creating a daily calorie surplus and you’re going to gain weight (fat). Simple. What about the other way around? If you eat fewer calories than you expend and create a daily calorie deficit, you’ll lose weight.
Calorie surplus: You eat more calories than you expend and create a daily calorie surplus, you gain weight.
Calorie deficit: You eat fewer calories than you expend and create a daily calorie deficit, you lose weight.
All diets — regardless of macronutrient (carbs, fat, and protein) percentage (low-carb, low-fat, Paleo, vegan, Mediterranean, or even intermittent fasting plans) — work through creating a calorie deficit. If you don’t create a calorie deficit, you don’t lose weight. If you create too great a calorie deficit, you lose muscle mass and your metabolic rate drops (yikes!).
It’s a balancing act, create the deficit, just not too much. Anyone who argues against the fundamental role of energy balance in weight regulation — against calories in versus calories out — is practicing an exercise in futility.
Even though it’s a fact that calories in versus calories out is the law, it’s equally true that the number of calories required to lose weight or maintain weight or gain weight differs from person to person. That’s because the calories required for each person vary widely and are influenced by numerous factors not under a person’s control such as genetics.
What’s also true is not all calories are created equally. There is a difference in the number of calories your body requires to burn and digest each of the three macronutrients: protein, carbs, and fat —scientifically termed the thermic effect of food. Protein has the highest thermic effect of the three macronutrients, but the increase in metabolic rate from eating protein (and therefore its contribution to weight loss) is negligible. The great thing about eating protein when intermittent fasting is that protein is the most filling of the macronutrients. Eating protein helps curb your appetite — a welcome addition to any weight-loss plan.
Studying Calories 101
When you cut down on your intake of one macronutrient (whether it’s carbs or fat — both popular fad diet strategies), or you restrict yourself from eating for 16 hours in a particular day (such as the 16:8 intermittent fasting plan), your total calories consumed for that day will be lower than what you would have eaten on a typical day in your pre-fasting life. This action creates a calorie deficit — the all-important basis for weight loss.
Science has two forms of calories:
Calorie with a small c as in calorie: The scientific description of a calorie is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. This calorie isn’t the same one most people think of when discussing food, so I don’t discuss it any further.
Calorie with a big C as in Calorie: In nutritionist language it’s called a kilocalorie or kcal for short. Nutritionists use these terms to refer to calories in food or to calories burned during exercise. The scientific definition of kilocalories is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree Celsius. You use this calorie when reading the food labels in the supermarket. Note: Books about weight loss and weight gain refer to this type of calorie.
Balancing your equation
The energy balance equation illustrates how weight loss and gain relate to calories. In order to maintain your current weight, you need to consume approximately the same number of calories as you burn:
Calories in = Calories out
In