Your Ideal Form

Helping you on your journey to your best self!

Diet

Eating Back Exercise Calories

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Should You Eat Back Calories Burned Off from Exercise-

A question I see get asked a lot is whether or not one should “eat back” the calories burned during exercise. You’ve calculated your TDEE, and you’re eating at a deficit to lose weight*, but that exercise raises your TDEE some, so you’re now at a greater deficit. Should you eat those calories back?

This is a bit tough for me because to be perfectly honest, I just don’t get it. After doing all that work, why would you negate it all by eating it all back? There’s also a big potential pitfall with eating back your calories: overestimating how many calories you’ve burned and thus eating back more than what you just worked off. Studies show** that people regularly overestimate how many calories we burn during exercise. And it’s not our fault; cardio machines grossly overestimate how many calories you burn, and even fitness apps can just do a best guess based on national averages. So the treadmill/app tells you that you’ve burned 300 calories when it’s really 200, and you think that means you’ve earned that 250 calorie snickers bar. But in reality, you’ve undone all your hard work, and you’re now over your budget.

Studies also show we tend to be bad at estimating how many calories we eat***. In this case, we tend to underestimate the number of calories in the food we have. With more and more places putting calorie counts on menus, this is getting harder to do, but if this isn’t commonplace where you live yet, it can be easy to convince yourself that your post-workout smoothie is healthy, and therefore much lower in calories than it really is. Combined with the elliptical machine telling you that you burned more than you actually did, and it becomes really easy to eat more than your TDEE for the day.

So, what do you do if exercise leaves you woozy and you have to have something after your workout? Here are a couple of tips:

  • Aim for eating back half the calories you burned at most.
  • If working out is always leaving you feeling ravenous, try switching to lower-intensity exercise.
  • A controversial opinion is to stop exercising all together and just focus on your diet.
  • Try to think of any calories burned during exercise as merely a bonus or a turbo boost to get you to your destination faster!

 

*If you’re trying to gain muscle, you definitely want to eat back those calories, getting as much of them from protein as possible!
** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26469988
*** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1454084

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4 Reasons to Be Patient with a Plateau

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Getting Through a Weight Loss Plateau

On your journey to reach your ideal form, there may come a time when the scale just does not seem to be moving. These are plateaus, and they feel like you’re driving across Interstate 10 in Texas. You’ve been driving for 8 hours, and you’re still not out of the state. It can be tempting to just throw in the towel when it seems like you’re spinning your wheels and going nowhere fast, but if you can hang in there, I promise it will be worth it.

We’re going to define a plateau as being at the same weight for three or more weeks. One or two weeks might just be a fluke. Three, and we’re definitely in a plateau.

Here are four reasons to be patient when dealing with a plateau:

  1. A big woosh could be right around the corner at the next weigh in. Weight loss is rarely linear, and often times when the scale seems stuck, when it does start moving again, it does so in a big way.
  2. If it’s only been a week or two, there are a number of things that could be messing with the numbers on the scale: your monthly cycle, a very intense workout session, or eating big meal up to a day before you step on the scale can all increase water retention. Water is heavy, and can easily throw your weight off, so try to weigh yourself first thing in the morning, before any workouts or meals.
  3. Keep in mind that a plateau is being at the same weight for a number of weeks. Often times, when someone starts a new program, there’s a large drop in weight due to water weight loss. But that’s not sustainable. If you’re losing a half to one pound per week, you’re doing great!
  4. It’s a slow process, don’t make it slower by giving up now. Learn to enjoy the process rather than fixating on results and you’ll actually get better results.

If you’ve been at a plateau for more than six weeks, then it’s time to re-evaluate your process. If you’ve lost a significant amount of weight, you may need to recalculate your TDEE.

If you’re stuck in a plateau, now is a good time to go back and look at pictures you took at the beginning of your journey. Inspire yourself by how far you’ve come.

4 Reasons Why You Should Be Meal Prepping

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Why You Should Be Pre-Prepping Your Meals

Have you ever been stuck going nowhere fast on a busy freeway with lots of traffic and looked on with longing at people speeding by in the carpool lane? Or have you been one of the drivers in that express lane, exceedingly grateful that you weren’t one of those poor souls going nowhere in gridlock? On our journey toward our ideal selves, meal prepping is that +1 in your vehicle that lets you get into that carpool lane and really make progress. Let’s look at four reasons why meal prepping is so powerful in helping you reach your goals.

1. Makes it easier to eat healthy

We humans are lazy efficient. We are always looking for the easiest way to accomplish our tasks. By prepping some healthy meals ahead of time, you take the dread away from having to cook when you get hungry. Simply heat up some food you’d made previously, and dinner is served. Slow cooker recipes allow you to dump a bunch of ingredients into a pot, set a timer, and go off to work. Come home, and dinner is done! And the recipes usually yield big portions, so you are likely to have some leftovers for lunch the next day or dinner later in the week. Prepping can also help with snacking. When I buy grapes, as soon as I get home from the store, I wash the grapes, then stand there and pick each one off the vine and into a bowl. The bowl then goes in the fridge. Whenever I feel the need for a snack, it’s super easy to just open the fridge and grab and handful and start popping them right into my mouth. If at the time I wanted to eat them I’d have to pick them, I’d likely pass for something else. Prepping makes the easy choice the healthy choice.

 

2. Built-in portion control

Another way that prepping can help you reach your goals quicker is with some pre-built portion control. Each week on Sunday, I prep my lunches for the week. Currently I’m doing salads, but in the past I’ve also done tuna with chickpeas and tomatoes, baked chicken thighs, and ground turkey with oats. Whatever the meal, I cook up a big batch, then divide it up into containers and put them in the fridge. In the morning before work, I just need to grab a container to take with me for lunch. By doling it all out beforehand, I know exactly how much I’m eating each day.

 

3. Saves time

Meal prepping sounds like a lot of work, but believe me, it saves so much time.  Take 10-15 minutes to plan out what your meals for the week will be, and write out your grocery list. If you tend to be a bit particular, like I am, you can even put the list in order based on the route you take through the store. It makes shopping trips so much faster. Also, while it does take some time to prep my lunches for the week, it would take longer in total to make a salad each morning than to make all of them at once. Plus, I get to sleep in an extra five minutes. Slow cooker meals are the ultimate in time savers. The prep work for the recipes is usually fairly minimal; mostly it’s just dumping all the ingredients into a pot and setting the timer.

 

4. Saves money

Planning and prepping your meals in advance saves money. You will waste less food when you only buy what you’re going to cook. And since you only bought enough for the one week, you avoid the issue of having too many options and having food go bad because you never got around to cooking it. Using my grapes example again, I eat them all up because they’re easy to eat, so they don’t go bad, and I haven’t wasted my money.

 

Just like any other trip, our journey toward our best selves requires planning to get us to our destination. And meal planning is a tactic that will help get you into the fast lane.

 

What’s your favorite slow-cooker recipe? Let me know in the comments!

Losing Weight for an Event

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Losing Weight for an Event

I have some events coming up in the next few months. A vacation in Hawaii, Thanksgiving in Florida, Christmas in Ohio and Michigan, and then our wedding and honeymoon next May. Each of these events brings with it its own motivations for looking and feeling my best.

The Swimsuit

For the trip to Hawaii, I don’t want to feel self conscious in a swimsuit. Vacations are meant to be fun and relaxing, not spent worrying over “thunder thighs” or “belly pooch”. And while I’m not going to obsess over how I look, if taking some time beforehand to work on what I can means I can enjoy my vacation comfortably and without worry, then it’s time well spent.

The Family

Thanksgiving will be spent with my very large extended family. Dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins who have no reservations telling me that my butt is huge, or that I shouldn’t eat that pie because I’ll get fat. It’s just the way my family is. I don’t want to give them any fodder for comments if I can avoid it.

The Vanity

Christmas brings more family time, but this time, it is my fiancés fam. They are awesome people, and non-judgmental compared to my own family, but still. One always wishes to look her best before the future in-laws!

The Wedding

This is the Big One. No bride wants to merely look “good” at her wedding. She wants to be stunning, radiant, magnificent, a downright angelic goddess. I want my fiancé to take one look at me coming down that aisle and nearly faint at the vision he beholds. I want to look back at the photos and not have any regrets about how I looked in any of them.

The Plan

I’ll be leaving for Hawaii in a little over a week (eek!). That’s really not much time to get my body into what I personally consider “bikini ready” for myself. So I started a long time ago. I got my nutrition dialed in, and was able to lose weight at a slow but steady pace of one pound per week until I got to my goal, and then I just had to maintain. I started in mid-April, and reached my goal by the end of June. So it took some time.

The Pitfalls

If you have an event coming up that you would like to lose some weight for such as a vacation or reunion, here are some roadblocks to watch out for in your journey.

Unrealistic expectations. Despite what “this one weird trick that doctors hate” might tell you, you’re not going to lose 20 pounds in two weeks. If you are incredibly disciplined, you may be able to lose 2 pounds per week, but you’re likely to be hangry the whole time, so it isn’t sustainable for long.

Not planning far enough ahead. If your event is next week, there is not much you can do at this point. Check your calendar now to see what’s coming down the pipeline later on that you can be ready for. Be realistic about what you can achieve in that time. Aim for losing one pound per week, and be sure to drink plenty of water. And don’t wait to start! Start early to give yourself a buffer if you have a bad week.

Going back to old habits. Having a short term goal like looking your best for a vacation or party is great. But making it part of a longer term goal and a permanent lifestyle change is even better. After the event is over, don’t throw away all your hard work by going back to your old habits. Stick with it, and when the next event rolls around, you won’t have to lose those pounds all over again.

 

What events do you have down the road that you want to look your best for?

Why Simply “Eating Less” Won’t Help You Lose Weight

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Eating _Less_

A big portion of weight loss advice gets boiled down to: “Eat less, move more.” Let’s tackle that first part: just eat “less”. That’s not very specific though, is it? How much less are you supposed to eat? And less than WHAT exactly? Less than before? Less than a breadbasket?

People generally go wrong with eating “less” in one of two ways. In one camp, we have those who cut way, way, WAY back, and start eating very little. Inevitably this leads to them being hungry all the time, and eventually they give in to their hunger and eat the entire kitchen. Then they feel awful about it, and give up, thinking they’ll never be able to lose weight.

On the flip side are those who know they should take things gradually, so they cut back a little based on their previous eating habits. Often, however, they aren’t relying on hard data. It could well be that previously, their eating regimen had them gaining weight at a slow creep of five pounds a year. Now they’ve cut back a tiny bit, so they’re only gaining at two pounds a year. While this is a step in the right direction, when they step on the scale and don’t see a change, they get frustrated, decide that eating less is of no use since the numbers aren’t going down anyway, and give up, thinking they’ll never be able to lose weight.

While eating “less” is generally accepted as true, one important piece that is missing is just how much less to eat. Eating the right amount will keep you on a steady pace to reach your goals. It is also important to eat enough, so you aren’t left “starving” and frustrated and wanting to quit.

So, exactly how much “less” should you eat so that you hit the sweet spot of not eating like a bird while still seeing results? For that, we’ll need to do some math. We need to determine, based on your current height and weight, how many calories your body burns just keeping you alive. Pumping blood, digesting food, breathing… all that stuff our brain handles for us without us having to think about it. Then we’ll multiply that by a factor of how active you are. That is how many calories total your body burns each day or your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). I won’t make you actually do all the math; you can use any number of online TDEE calculators to come up with your number. Take in fewer calories, and your body makes up the difference by burning some excess fat. Take in more, and your body stores the extra as fat. The generally accepted equation is that one pound of fat is around 3500 calories. So to lose one pound a week, we can divide that by seven, and you come up with needing to eat 500 calories below your TDEE each day to hit that one pound a week goal. If you are currently eating well above your TDEE, cut back slowly. Don’t make the mistake in the example above of cutting back too quickly without getting used to it!

Keep in mind that despite all the SCIENCE! and MATH! that goes into this, your TDEE calculation is still an estimate. If you are not seeing results after a few weeks, and you are certain you are tracking your intake correctly, you may need to adjust how many calories you are taking in.

Have you tried eating some arbitrary amount of “less” before? How did it work out for you? Let me know in the comments!