By Pat Sheils, B.S. Health and Human Performance

Well look at that.. 2021 just started and we are almost 20% of the way through the year. Did you just check the calendar? Do the math? If you did, then you might have also had a panic moment of wondering how you are doing on your New Year’s Resolutions. 

For many people, a new year is the time to become a completely new person. “New year, New Me” has been a tradition in the same way that we have the Kentucky Derby, the Masters, and Chick-Fil-A being closed on Sunday. Another time honored tradition is people failing on their New Year weight loss goals. This comes from many different reasons, but a main one I see time and time again is that people get stuck with not seeing progress and not understanding why they aren’t getting anywhere, so that’s what we are going to tackle today.

So… what can you do? Well, let’s start with understanding why the lack of meals is getting in the way. Your body uses food to fuel all of the actions you do in a day, this is something we all know. The process of converting food into fuel is what we call Metabolism. The official definition is: the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life. Basically you need to eat to live and do all the stuff you want to do. And what do you want to do? You want to gain weight, lose weight, build muscle, increase your cardio output. The list goes on and on and on. Yet the average person eating twice a day. 

Our metabolism is the most important part of any body-change fitness journey, but the fact of the matter is that people have killed off their metabolisms over years of under eating. Most of this is because the average person doesn’t know how much they should be eating on a daily basis. This is where I’m going to help you with some common questions that you may have and have had. For the sake of this, we will assume that most people reading this are going to be working out 2-3 times per week. 

How many calories should I be eating per day? (To maintain weight)

• For the average woman: 1800-1900 calories
• For the average man: 2500-2600 calories.

This is important to know because we need to start with what you need to fuel with on a daily basis. We all know that to gain weight, we eat more. To lose weight, we eat less. Touching back on what we talked about earlier, raise your hand if you think this is more calories than you are eating right now? Did you raise your hand? Are you lying about not raising your hand? Either way, this is more calories than most people will eat in sometimes two days. And yet… why is no one losing weight? This is because your body adjusted itself to fit the amount of calories that you are taking in, and therefore it is now functioning off of that amount, and not the one above. 

I want to lose weight, so how do I do that?

To put it simply? Eat an average of 500 calories less per day than what you eat now. That’s it. Simple. 

But not that simple. Now, we need to address where you are actually eating. I have worked with hundreds of people on this, and here is the average starting point for peoples calories. 

Men – 1700-1800 calories

Women – 800-1000 calories

Yikes. Now, here is why that is bad. The bare minimum calories needed for survival is 1800 for men and 1200 for women. Yes, that’s right. Most people are running on survival mode and don’t even know it. Now you see why people are barely eating, and it is because their body is used to running and stretching one meal out for 12 hours. 

How do I fix this? 

Alright. So what we need to do is the opposite of what you are thinking. Those of you in the weight loss camp need to start eating more. Yes, eat more. Embrace the inner glutton in you and have that extra serving! Do something to give your body more energy!

Many of us are running on fumes. Imagine that you are on a cross country drive and you started it by giving yourself a quarter tank and threw up a Hail Mary hoping to reach your goal in a couple hours. 

So what’s the best way to start this? Start by eating 3 times a day. Get your 3 big meals first, and then you can start to worry about the in between meals. Work on building your daily intake up to where you need to be and you might be surprised to see that number on the scale go down. When you are back to your optimal functioning, you’ll be able to start doing some of the diet techniques you have read about, but most importantly you will see that you can finally lose weight when you eat less. 

If you want to know exactly how much you should be eating in a day, check out this online BMR calculator so that way you can check for yourself if you are where you need to be or not. 

https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html?ctype=standard&cage=25&csex=m&cheightfeet=5&cheightinch=10&cpound=240&cheightmeter=180&ckg=60&cmop=0&coutunit=c&cformula=m&cfatpct=20&x=107&y=23