DE-MYSTIFYING THE MECHANICS OF WEIGHT LOSS 

Carole Carson

Want to get thinner? Quite a few of us want to. No wonder magazines and books on how to lose weight, even with the most outlandish diets, make their authors rich. If you take a back-to-basics, common-sense approach, weight loss is simple. Take in fewer calories than you expend and lose weight. Conversely, to gain, take in more than your body needs and you’ll expand. To lose or gain, you must calculate intake and expenditure.

Calories Out

You can figure out your expenditure with this formula: (weight in pounds x 4.38) + (height in inches x 4.38) + 661 – (age x 4.7) = Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).

Multiply your weight in pounds by 4.38. Multiply your height in inches by 4.38. Add these two totals to 661. Now, multiply your age by 4.7. Subtract this number from the prior total to get your BMR, the number of calories you need to stay alive.

To find out how many calories you burn through activity, multiply your BMR by the number assigned to your activity level.

Activity Level	Multiplier
Sedentary	1.15
Light activity (normal, everyday tasks)	1.3
Moderate activity (exercise 3–4 times a week)	1.4
Very active (exercise 4–6 times a week)	1.6
Extremely active (exercise 6–7 times a week)	1.8

Eat more than the number you came out with, and you’ll gain weight. Eat less and you’ll lose weight. The deficit determines the speed at which you will lose weight. Although people vary, generally speaking, for every pound you lose, a deficit of 3,500 calories is needed.

If you eat 500 fewer calories a day than you need to maintain your weight, in one week, you will lose one pound. One to two pounds per week is a safe loss.

Calories In

Setting your calorie allowance, however, is only half the battle. You’ll need to know the calorie count of various foods to stay on track, and underestimating calories is common. If you’re serious about monitoring your intake, get Corinne T. Netzer’s The Complete Book of Food Counts.

Portion size is also critical. Unfortunately, given our “super-sized” trends, a distorted sense of portions is typical. For example, a serving of beef is the size of a deck of cards, or three ounces. A steak that fills your plate probably is four to five times the standard serving size.

Keeping a Food Diary

You also have to keep track of every food and liquid you consume along with the approximate serving size, sometimes called a “Food Diary.” Because your body doesn’t go on vacation, everything you eat every hour of every day must be counted.

Having saved calories carefully during the week, it’s tempting to “splurge” on the weekends. In doing so, you risk “spending” every calorie you so frugally “saved.”

Losing weight is a 24/7 project and hard work. Is it worth it? For some, yes. For others, the answer may be no, that is, until a medical emergency forces the issue.

Whatever the timing, only one person can make the decision—you. For those of us who are overweight, will we make the decision to get fit while we still are in charge of our lives?