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To lose weight, you need to burn more calories. Our daily energy expenditure consists of 3 main components, BMR, physical activity, and the thermic effect of food. BMR is the amount of energy a body consumes when it's rested or when the body at a neutral state. In other words, it's the amount of energy our body needs when we are not doing anything voluntarily. When we are sleeping, our body still needs the energy to keep our organs functioning like our heart, muscles, and brain. It might surprise you, but this is what the body uses the most energy on, around 65-70% of our total calories burns on any given day. BMR is hard to change, but with healthy habits, you can definitely use this powerhouse more efficiently.
Maximum energy-consuming organs are brain and muscles. That's why when you increase lean muscles, the body will need more calories to keep up with it. In other words, it means no chances of storing extra calories. Whatever calories you put in, the body will have to burn it to keep up with leaner muscles. Whereas, fat only needs 10% energy compared to lean muscle mass. After the age of 20, we began losing muscle cells and those muscle cells get replaced with fat cells. That means as we lose muscle over the years, our energy expenditure decreases. And when energy expenditure decreases fat accumulation increases. More muscles, more calories burned, more fat, less energy needed. So more extra energy to store(fats). This might help you to understand that when we say I don't eat anything and I still put on weight. Or someone eats big meals and still doesn't put on weight. Simply because if you have more lean muscles, the body will need more calories to maintain it. Whereas, more fats mean fewer calories needed. Hence replacing fat mass with lean muscles is very essential for staying fit and healthy.
Similarly, if you give a workout to the brain it will consume more calories. It does not necessarily mean making the brain run a marathon 😃😃 .......The brain is a big calorie burner. It contributes to 25% of your BMR. We can create new neural pathways by just give some change to our brain, simple actions like brushing teeth with a different hand, driving home using different routes, or even as simple as hanging out talking to friends will stimulate the brain and increase metabolic rate. Which, indirectly, means the brain burns more calories. Brain fitness is very simple, anything like reading, writing, crossword puzzles, going to meetings, learning to play a musical instrument, playing video games, or spending the evening dancing. Challenge your brain to learn new tasks, especially things that you have never done before. This is the magic of BMR. Now that we know the role of BMR, its effect on calorie burn, and what we can do to use this powerhouse to get desired results.
Let's move on to the next component of calorie burn, that is the Thermic Effect of Food. The thermic effect of food basically means the energy we use to digest and process our food. More simply, we can say by knowing the quantity, quality, and physical state of food along with its effect we can make healthy eating habits more sustainable. How different foods impact our energy expenditure? Let's take a hypothetical case, we have two options for a snack. One box we have a cup of carrots with low fat ranch. In another box, we have a glazed donut. Let's be honest there is no comparison ....we all want the second box. Now just see the calorie math behind it. We know donuts have more calories than carrots but that's not all of it. We all know the body spends energy to digest food too. When you take that donut it is going to give your body a free sugar rush for which body doesn't have to work hard. On the other hand, if you choose carrots, the body will have to break those fibers and to digest and will have to spend more energy. So if donut had 250 calories and body used 50 calories to digest it. That means by eating a donut, your body got 200. And if Carrots box gave us 100 calories and the body spends 25-30 calories to digest it. The carrots snack gave us only 70-80 calories. Bear with me, these calorie calculations are not exact, my point here is to explain the difference and impact. Along with this calorie burn, the carrot snack took more time to digest it because it had fibers. That means until my digestive system is done with working on the carrots I will not feel hungry and we will not need to eat for a longer time. With a donut, the body will be done quickly, so we will feel hungry sooner. These are things that change the effect of the food we eat. Now you know if you don't want to put more calories in your body, what food you should choose, and how can our food choices help in our calorie calculation.
Similarly there many factors that affect the time and amount of energy the body needs to digest. Knowing this helps us to choose food wisely. The body needs more calories to digest protein, fibrous veggies, carbohydrates from healthy sources like whole wheat, we should definitely include these in our diet. A high protein meal burns around 30% of calories to digest it. Meaning having a protein-based meal of 600 calories will spend 180 calories just to digest it. That indirectly means even though you had 600 calories meal you only added 420 calories. By switching to a daily dose of water to cold water you can burn 74 extra calories every day. This how the thermic effect of food impacts our energy expenditure. Eat small but frequent meals, more lean protein, adding natural thermogenic food with cold water are some of the best healthy eating habits one can adopt. By including these small changes in our daily routine, we can increase our calorie burn and facilitate weight loss.
While we have so many things to get more calories to burn, all we focus on is a few hrs of exercise. Whereas by understanding this science of body's different ways to burn calories we can burn more calories without even stepping a foot in the gym, that too 24/7.
Will continue on the third important component of calories burn which is physical activity level, in the next blog post.
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