Weight Control
Have you battled with weight control before? It’s likely that most all of us have fought this dragon at some point. Especially as we progress beyond our early years and our lives become more full of responsibilities. I know I certainly have.
What are the first principles of body weight control? And how do we manipulate the variables to accomplish a desirable change in body weight.
I fully admit that when I started trying to control my body weight, I did not think in these terms. It’s only in hindsight that I can see clearly what I was trying to accomplish all along.
What Controls Body Weight?
Weight control as a concept is very simple. However, simple is not the same as easily accomplished of course. There are an endless number of diets which all attempt to solve for one thing, energy balance. Also known as calories in vs calories out.
As a general rule, if we ingest more calories than we expend, we gain weight. And conversely, if we expend more calories than we ingest, we lose weight.
There are indeed complicating factors not least of which is our bodies tend to respond quite differently when it comes to expending energy. Some people’s bodies when faced with a calorie surplus will automatically increase NEAT, Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis.
Which is a long-winded way of saying bodies will increase energy expenditure without us having to consciously do anything. We may fidget more or do other seemingly trivial things that end up burning more calories throughout the day.
However, some people’s bodies do not respond in this way. Their bodies seemingly hold on to excess calories and want to store them as fat for a rainy day.
From an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense as a strategy to survive when food sources become scarce. Though in our current age of caloric abundance, this feature has now become a bug.
This does not mean that people with poor NEAT responses are doomed to gain weight uncontrollably. It just means that it’s going to be a little more challenging than those whose NEAT response is advantageous for weight loss.
How to Manipulate Body Weight?
There are two sides to this equation. Calories in vs calories out. It so happens that manipulating one side of the equation is much more efficient than manipulating the other when it comes to body weight.
Calories in is the clear winner here.
For example, one Costco Chocolate Muffin is roughly 700 calories. Walking briskly on a treadmill for one hour might burn 300 calories depending on age, weight, and several other things. It’s obvious that it would be much easier to not eat the muffin rather than eat the muffin and then walk on the treadmill for 2 hours and 20 minutes to offset it.
Let’s say you walk on the treadmill for one hour per day for a week. At roughly 300 calories burned per walking session you will have burned 2100 calories in a week. Eating only 3 of the Costco Chocolate Muffins in that same week you will have effectively nullified 7 hours of exercise.
A horrible trade off of time and effort! Ideally of course, we don’t eat the muffins AND do the walking too, but it’s a good illustration of how easily one side of the energy balance equation can disproportionately dominate the other.
A Durable Solution
In order to take control of my body weight, I started counting my calories. Learning this skill was the single biggest factor to my losing 50 pounds and keeping it off permanently.
Counting calories will help accomplish a couple of key objectives. First, it will help us align calorie consumption to a more healthy body weight. Second, it will develop our subconscious mind to recognize when we’re deviating from a healthy calorie intake.
Basically, it’s a way for us to replace our often faulty appetites with a better system. As time goes on, this system becomes ingrained habit and further mitigates the physiological and psychological pull of our appetite signals. This results in a diminished need for sheer willpower to combat the faulty signals.
What About All the Diets?
Keto, Paleo, Atkins, Mediterranean, and more. The number of diets is never-ending. But which one is the best? Well, I don’t honestly know.
What I am fairly confident in is that all effective diets must ultimately solve the basic calories in vs calories out equation. The named diets are merely child implementations of this parent class.
What this means is that you can create your own child implementation, which is every bit as effective for weight loss as the litany of named diets. It also means that if you implement one of these named diets and do not mind the energy balance equation, the diet will not work.
That’s my biggest criticism of the named diets. That is, they tend to obfuscate the critical importance of the energy balance equation.
That’s why I found counting calories and constructing my own diet easier. I could pick the foods I already liked and manage the portions to satisfy my caloric requirements. Once I started counting my calories, it also became quickly apparent what foods and drinks were too calorically dense and should be removed or drastically reduced from my diet.
In short, I just found this approach gave me more control and certainty that my efforts would pay off. I could monitor my calorie intake for a couple weeks and see if I lost weight or gained weight. Then adjust accordingly going forward.
The Remote Workers’ Advantage
Remote workers are empowered to control our health to a greater degree. And not just our mental nutrition, our physical health as well.
When you work from home, you can choose to eat any diet you want. You can eat the most healthy, nutritious diet imaginable or you can eat deep-fried candy bars every day.
This also means that we eliminate some common temptations in office life. Such as the endless candy dishes, cheap soda, or weekly donuts. We also avoid the frequent restaurant visits with coworkers. While these are certainly enjoyable on a social level, they make it very difficult to control calorie intake.
Instead we can more easily plan our meals, snacks, and drinks. We shift our calorie intake decisions to the point when we do our grocery shopping. We’re far more likely to make good decisions at this point in time rather than when we’re in-office and perhaps stressed out. Which makes it far too easy to reach for the donuts or candy.
To reiterate, the benefits of remote work extend to our physical well-being as well. It makes it easier to manage our calorie intake and make good, healthy decisions on a day to day basis.
Summary
Weight control is mostly determined by calories in vs calories out. All effective weight loss diets solve this equation behind their marketing veneer.
Controlling calories ingested is critical for efficient weight loss. Exercise is great as a supporting activity and for a myriad of other health reasons. But if you want to see the scale go down, you need to manage the inputs.
Counting calories is a reliable way to manage those inputs. Learning this skill is incredibly empowering and can pay dividends for the rest of your life. It can allow you to lose or gain weight virtually at will.
Remote work allows us to take greater control of our physical health. It’s much easier to implement a diet when we’re in control of our environment.