2.Calories Out. Measuring how many calories you’ve burned in a day is not an exact science. There are many things that influence how you burn calories.
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• Exercise equipment, databases and fitness trackers guesstimate. Nearly every estimate you see for calories burned on equipment and databases can have up to a 45% margin of error. Additionally, fitness trackers can be off by as much as 30%. For example, if your fitness tracker says you burned 300 calories, you may have only burned 210 calories.
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• Your genes and environment dictate calories burned. Your genetics can definitely play a part in how effi- ciently you burn calories, but your environment may be even more im- portant. Your environment can both negatively affect your metabolism – such as toxins from your food, drink and home – and positively affect the expression of your genes – think lots of colorful plants. How you choose your environment can either mini- mize or maximize the calories you burn in a day and in your workouts.
• Sleep matters. Just one night of sleep deprivation can decrease calories burned by as much as 20%. Your quality of sleep is important when it comes to calculating calories burned.
• Hormones affect calories too. During a woman’s menstrual cycle, resting metabolic rate (how many calories you burn at rest) can vary by over 100 calories per day.
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• How you adapt to calories con- sumed can affect calories burned. Adaptive metabolism is your body adjusting to food intake. It allows you to increase metabolism in re- sponse to overeating. However, not everyone is lucky enough to adapt. In one study, people who consumed 1,000 extra calories per day for 8 weeks had varying weight gains – from as little as less than a pound to almost 10 pounds of weight gain. If you seem to gain weight easily, you may have poor adaptive metabolism.
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16 ELM® Maine - January/February 2020
• Having a history of being over- weight or obese can make things harder. Adaptive thermogenesis is what happens when your body adapts to a lower calorie input. Your body will require less calories in order to survive. This means your
muscles work more efficiently and burn less calories with exercise and daily living. If you’ve ever lost weight on a very calorie restrictive diet, your body may have adapted to be more efficient in times of “starvation” and now needs 300 fewer calories than predicted for your new body. Adaptive thermogenesis means it will be harder to maintain your cur- rent weight without continuing to severely restrict calories.
• You burn calories differently based on the macronutrient you’ve con- sumed. You may burn up to 30% protein, 10% carbohydrates and 3% of fat consumed just in the process of digesting your food. That leaves less calories to burn for the rest of your body’s functions.
On top of calorie counting, you may
decide to pick foods labeled to fit your cur- rent diet of choice. You may choose “low fat” ice cream which could be just as high if not higher in calories than regular ice cream. You may choose “low calorie” or “sugar free” products, which brings toxic artificial ingredients into the mix. You may even go the seemingly healthier route of picking “keto” drinks because, well Keto is the new trending diet and your friend lost a lot of weight doing it. All of these have one thing in common – you’re still eating processed foods. You can make any diet a bad diet when you’re consuming mostly packaged foods. There are vegan donuts, Paleo cookies and Keto shakes. These processed foods disrupt your body’s natural cues for hunger and satiety. So whether you’re counting calories or not, being on a diet filled with processed foods may not give you lasting results.
All of these things combined with the human tendency to naturally underesti- mate calories consumed and overestimate calories burned, it’s no wonder it may feel hard to reach your weight goals. Of course, this does not mean you need to obsessively avoid blended or cooked foods to absorb less calories, incessantly weigh and mea- sure everything you put in your mouth, pick a high protein and low-fat diet just to burn more calories digesting your foods, or to- tally give up because you were once, or are now, overweight. These are the antithesis of health! Food is life, it is community, and it is family. Food is meant to be enjoyed. When you focus too much on arbitrary numbers you disconnect with how your body feels and the experience food brings when you share it with others. It is the act
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