Читать книгу The Lunch Box Diet: Eat all day, lose weight, feel great. Lose up to a stone in 4 weeks. - Simon Lovell - Страница 10

Energy intake can be seen as a budget. When you wake up, you get a basic allowance according to your energy needs for the day that you can spend without paying the price of weight gain. All day long you spend this energy budget whenever you eat. If you take some form of exercise, you earn more energy so your budget for food is larger. You can eat more without gaining weight than others who are less active. We’ll talk more about food budget and food choices when we get into the Lunch Box Diet itself, so grab a highlighter and mark up the page here.

For now, let’s go back to our equation. I’m assuming you care less about weight maintenance and a lot more about weight loss. So, in looking at our equation, you can easily see that in order to lose weight, you need to do one of two things – or both.

Reduce what goes in (lower energy intake)

Increase what goes out (burn more energy)

Eat less and burn more energy (preferred)

Seems simple, right? For the most part, it is. But how much should you cut out of your diet in order to lose weight at an optimum rate? Again I don’t want you to count but for the sake of understanding, I’ll tell you a bit more. One pound of body weight is more or less equivalent to 3,500 calories. Rather convenient considering there are seven days in a week. You can quickly see that if you reduce your energy intake by 500 calories a day or burn an additional 500 calories (about a 40-minute jog/run on the treadmill), you should theoretically lose about a pound a week.

You might be tempted to adjust this even more severely to lose weight more quickly. The fact is, in order to lose weight effectively – in other words keep the weight off – slow and steady is the key. There are guidelines to what people say is safe, but we need to remember that, depending on your current weight and the changes to your diet and exercise, weight will drop off at different rates per individual – usually the heavier you are the more initially and then less as your weight comes down closer to maintenance level. What we want to steer away from is a ridiculous calorie chop where you’re taking in a stupidly low amount of calories per day, but don’t worry, that’s not going to happen here! You won’t be able to continue a very low-calorie diet forever and once you resume eating more than carrot sticks and hot water, you’ll gain it back. It also mucks up your metabolism, which we’ll discuss later (see page 25). Fortunately with the Lunch Box Diet, it’s a sustainable plan that you can see working long term as part of your new, happy lifestyle!