After being in the fitness industry for well over a decade, I have seen many people join a facility and attempt to accomplish whatever goal they set out to do.  More often than not this is losing weight.  Weight loss is the number one goal of new members joining a fitness facility, with the statistic being about 70% of members trying to accomplish it.  How many of them actually succeed is another picture entirely.  We have all seen the television shows like “The Biggest Loser” or similar shows where people lose dozens of pounds in a short time and think that we can do the same.  I’ll reveal some truths about those shows in another article, but to begin with I’m going to give you the simplest, most effective way to lose weight and keep it off for the rest of your life:

Exercise a little bit more.  Eat a little bit smarter.

That’s it.  No fad diets, no supplements and no tricks.  It really is that easy.  However, since I’m sure a lot of readers are scratching their heads right now I’ll break it down in terms of numbers that are easy to follow.

In order to lose about 30 pounds over a period of time, a person needs to burn an additional 105,000 calories.  Generally this is best accomplished by both adding exercise into the equation and also creating a caloric deficit through your diet because if you try to do only one or the other, it creates a lot more difficulty, as the math will show.  To lose this 30 pounds at the rate of 1 pound per week (taking 7 months total to take the weight off) you need to lose 3500 calories per week, or 500 per day.  In order to burn 500 calories per day exercising, the average 175 pound female or 250 pound male needs to exercise approximately 45 minutes – every day.  This isn’t realistic for most of us.  Or, you can eat 500 calories less per day and accomplish the same goal.  However, in my experience most of us aren’t eating enough calories daily anyway, so removing 500 calories from our diet daily isn’t realistic either.  I have actually had clients eat an additional 500 calories a day and begin to lose weight, because their burning mechanisms were so shut down it took that much to fire them back up again.  Also, there is more and more evidence coming through research that calorie intake isn’t the contributor to weight gain or loss that we thought it was – hormones have a huge amount to do with it.

However, if you take 250 calories per day  – which is 45 minutes 3-4 times per week – through exercise and 250 per day through your diet then all of a sudden 1 pound per week will begin to come off.  This is basic physiology, but then there is the key that most people neglect:

The exercise has to be more than you were previously doing already, and you need to have a proper baseline established for your caloric intake first and subtract from there.

Nutrition is the most important part of any weight loss equation, so the first step for any weight loss client of mine is to make sure they are eating a consistent amount of calories every day.  If someone averages 1500 calories six out of seven days during the week and then one day on the weekend goes out and eats 3000, their body will simply store that extra surplus because it’s energy demands only account for 1500 calories used per day.  If this same person ate 3000 calories daily on a regular basis, it wouldn’t be a problem because the body would use it.  Establishing a baseline amount is very important, and then sticking to it is even more so.  There are many free tools for tracking this online, and it takes about five minutes a day.  The big key here is consistency.  Once you have that baseline established and can stick to it, then you can decrease the calories per day.  Believe it or not, most people don’t eat enough.  As a general starting point, multiply your goal weight (what you want to weigh) times ten.  This will tell you the amount you will need – at that weight – just to live, breathe and walk.  Exercise adds another element to that, but in order to keep it simple you can begin there.  Just to give you an example, my daily caloric intake as a 36-year-old male at currently 176 pounds is 2600 calories a day – and I’m losing weight.  This amount would be double many of my female clients’ intakes that are trying to lose weight.

Now what about the exercise side?  It accounts for the other side of the coin, but also brings about other benefits like a healthy heart, joint strength and even looking good with less clothing on.  Again, the key here is to figure out what you are already doing, and then add in an extra 250 calories per day, or 500 every other day which is about 45 minutes of exercise.  For example, if I walk my dog at a moderate pace every morning for 30 minutes and that’s it, I need to add in another 45 minutes every other day and it will take care of that side of the coin.  I’m a huge advocate of strength training over cardio, especially for beginners, but it is important to simply find something you like, that fits in your weekly schedule and that you can burn at least 500 calories an hour doing.  But here’s where most people don’t follow through: consistency.  They will do extra exercise for a couple of days, or a week or two but never go through a long term point of change.  I’m talking about six months to a year where they add in 3-4 workouts a week.  This gives you the required calorie burn in order to actually make a significant change.

Obviously there are finer details, but this is a good place to start.  Get consistent, make a change on a regular basis in both your nutrition and exercise programs, and the weight will start to come off.  It really is just that simple.  Why complicate something that isn’t?

The human body is an amazing thing.  I’m in awe of it on a daily basis and how it allows us to move with enough chemical reactions to overload a large computer many times over – each minute, continuously for our entire life.  Just to take stock, you have over 640 muscles and roughly 230 joints (depending who you ask).  Your one foot alone contains 26 bones and 33 joints.  Your spine contains 31 pairs of nerves, each terminating in a huge amount of innervations in order to relay information all over the body, not only to the muscles, but to all of your organs as well.  So every time you take a step, there is a lot of stuff going on.  Obviously I’m not going to write about everything that makes us move, because textbooks have been written on that subject so covering it with a blog article is a bit ambitious.  What I would like to talk about is the concept of joint movement and how the levers and pulleys work in order to move your body from place to place.

Movement begins with a thought that “I’d like to take a step”.  I’ll use this as an example because walking is something we do without thinking about it.  A sympathetic nervous system response is initiated by our hormonal system, specifically something called a catecholamine, which are derived from the amino acid tyrosine.  The ones that are involved in smooth muscle contraction are called noradrenaline and adrenaline.  These hormones bind with receptors and initiate a contraction of smooth muscle.  Now, there is a lot more that goes into it than that but the point I’m trying to get across is that our hormonal system is actually what controls the basic mechanisms of movement.  There are some serious hormones that come into play while the body is trying to function, but let’s leave this discussion at that level and move on.

By initiating a contraction of smooth muscle, the brain fires a message down the spinal cord to the nerves that control contraction of the muscle in question (the foot in our example).  There are 31 pairs of spinal nerves, each coming out of a level of vertebrae from the dorsal (back or posterior) and ventral (front or anterior) roots.  The dorsal roots carry messages towards the brain and spinal cord, and the ventral ones carry them away, towards things like muscles and glands.  These efferent nerves carry the signal down to the somatic motor neurons which cause the muscles in question to fire and contract.  The interface between the motor neuron and the muscle fiber is called the neuromuscular junction and is crossed by neurotransmitters, much like an electrical pulse crosses a current line.  The most common neurotransmitter when it comes to muscle contraction is called acetylcholine.  There is a long process of contraction, which again I won’t get into in full detail here, but it is usually in response to the type of force that is being required and if you are taking a step, there is a concentric contraction and the muscles shorten up, prompting the joints to move.

Just in order to lift your foot, your body has to relay information all the way down your leg and into your back.  When your body moves a joint, it affects every muscle that crosses over that joint, who have to contract concentrically as an agonist, or eccentrically as an antagonist.  When one contracts, the other relaxes and then vice versa in order to return the muscle back to the start position.  So just as an example of major joints, to take a step you need to contract your hip, knee, ankle and many joints in the foot, never mind the smaller joints in your lower back in order to stabilize your pelvis.  There are 12 muscles alone that cross the knee and are involved in knee flexion and extension, so you can imagine how much is involved just by moving this way.  Some muscles, like the rectus femoris, cross over two joints and help out a bit more.  So imagine a rubber band pulling on a rod and moving it from one angle to another.  One concept that a lot of people don’t understand is that muscles don’t move – they shorten and lengthen, but it is in the joints that the movement actually happens.  By moving the end of one joint closer to another, all skeletal movement is created.  Many things depending on what type of force is required to be generated can alter this.  For example, taking a step forward is one thing.  Taking a step up on a stair that is elevated requires not only a different amount of force generated by the joints, but also a completely different sequence of muscle contraction.

So why am I breaking this down for you?  What I’m really trying to do is get across to you what an astounding cycle of events needs to occur in order to take a simple step.  From the beginning of thought to just walking in sequence, we often take for granted all of the things that need to happen to do something very simple.  In life we take many things for granted, and one thing I try to get across to all of my clients is don’t take your health, ability to move properly and how you live day to day for granted.  With just one small alteration of this sequence – you will have trouble walking.  The good news is that your body is constantly learning and turning over old cells and replacing them.  It is constantly improving if you give it the tools to do so.  We move all of the time without thinking about it.  My goal is to get you to think about it.  Only through that will you be able to really figure out how you should move properly.  If you have any questions feel free to contact me.