that promote good health, prevent disease, and assist you in achieving (and maintaining) a healthy weight. This new lifestyle will inevitably result in you looking better, feeling better, and ultimately living better.
Expending your calories out
Weight control is all in the calorie math. To lose weight, you must make changes in both your food intake and exercise patterns such that you reduce your calorie intake below your energy expenditure. When calculating your ideal calorie range to achieve your goals, you need to know a little more about what make ups your energy expenditure side of this equation.
Weight loss = Weekly calories burned greater than weekly calories eaten
Your BMR is the number of calories your body uses while at rest to do the stuff that keeps you alive like breathing; circulating blood; and controlling body temperature, cell growth, brain and nerve function, and contraction of muscles. Your BMR accounts for roughly 60 percent of your daily calorie expenditure. BMR varies from person to person. Factors affecting BMR include your body weight, your height, your gender, your percent body fat and muscle mass, your body temperature, your age, your hormone levels, and your genetic predisposition. Unfortunately, you don’t have much control over your BMR.
Figure 3-1 categorizes the calorie burn side of the equation. The remaining 30 percent of TDEE is physical activity, which then gets broken down into exercise activity thermogenesis (EAT) and nonexercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). EAT accounts for about 5 percent of TDEE, whereas NEAT can contribute as much as 15 percent. You can see how you have a great deal of control over your dual activity levels, the calorie-burning furnaces: your NEAT and EAT.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 3-1: Breaking down your total daily energy expenditure.
Burning calories through exercise
The burning of calories through physical activity, combined with reducing the number of calories you eat, creates the magical calorie deficit that results in weight loss. You need to consciously make an effort to move more during your days, an action that will make a dent in your NEAT. NEAT is essentially movement you do that isn’t formal exercise, such as cleaning the house, shopping for groceries, or even just fidgeting. Take the stairs over the elevator, park farther away from the store, stay away from drive-throughs, and stand more and sit less. All these seemingly small physical efforts add up and can make a huge contribution to your calorie burn. Become a NEAT freak and boost your daily calorie burn!
With planned exercise, or your EAT, your goal should be to find an exercise that you enjoy doing, one that will burn a few hundred daily calories. The number of calories your body burns during exercise depends again on your height, weight, age, body composition, and a bunch of other factors. The calories burned, such as the number that pops up on an exercise machine, is at best a very broad (and very imprecise) estimate.
https://caloriecontrol.org/healthy-weight-tool-kit/get-moving-calculator that allows you to get into the nitty-gritty of what a realistic amount of exercise-and therefore potential calorie burn-is for you and you alone (genius idea):
Consider Kiki’s numbers. Kiki weighs 150 pounds. Plug her data into the online calculator and magically see how many calories she burns during her 30-minute dog walk at a moderate pace: 102 calories per walk. If Kiki were to walk her dog every day for 30 minutes (instead of just three times per week) she would make a considerable contribution to her weekly calorie deficit; she’d burn approximately 700 calories a week from her daily walk instead of approximately 300. The moral of the story is that exercise can make a difference in the calorie burn side of the equation. Find an exercise that you’ll do preferably every day of the week. No marathons required! Flip to Chapter 14 if you want an additional primer on the best types of exercise to accompany your intermittent fasting plan.
Doing the calculations
You can do the calculations and determine just how many daily calories you’ll need to take in and burn through exercise in order to create the calorie deficit needed (to lose weight safely). Or, if your goal is to maintain your weight, or even gain muscle mass, you can also calculate what a healthy calorie intake number would be.
The first step is to get an estimate of your daily calorie needs for maintaining your current weight. This depends on several factors:
Your age: Enter your age in years.
Your height: Enter your height in feet and inches.
Your current weight: Enter your body weight in pounds.
Your gender: Online calculators require you to input if you are a man or a woman. If you identify your gender as something other than man or woman, for the purposes of online calculations, choose the gender that most matches your body type.
Calculations of how many calories you need per day also require you to input your estimated activity level. Your activity level is generally categorized as follows:
Inactive: Never or rarely include physical activity in your day.
Somewhat active: Include light activity or moderate activity about two to three times a week.
Active: Include at least 30 minutes of moderate activity most days of the week or 20 minutes of vigorous activity at least three days a week.
Very active: Include large amounts of moderate or vigorous activity in
