The Health and Fitness industry is a money making machine. Globally, fitness centers have generated $84 billion in 2015.
Gym memberships have increased by almost 20% since 2008. According to the CDC, 70.7% of all Americans are considered overweight, while 37.9% are obese. How is fitness becoming a bigger trend but a higher percentage of people are becoming overweight?
Its because we as Fitness professionals have failed you...we use our own fit bodies, doctoral degrees, and 15 minute fat burning workouts to generate as much income as possible, while the consumer suffers. That ends here.
Lets break this down to the basics, a pound of body fat is approximately 3500 calories. Which means, if you want to lose weight you need to burn more calories than what you're eating...and vise versa if you're trying to gain weight. But how do we know how many calories we're burning? Its essentially a mixture of lean body mass and activity levels.
A solid personal trainer will try to find your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). The most accurate is the Harris Benedict equation which looks like this.
Let me guess...you have no idea where to begin with this. To be honest with you about 99% of all Personal Trainers don't either. But never fear! There is a much simpler (however less accurate) solution to this!
One thing you can do is download MyFitnessPal onto your phone and plug in all your stats as well as your goal.
They will give you a gross caloric intake number to reach. More often than not, staying at their recommendation will help you reach their goal. However, asking a Fitness Professional or Dietician for a calorie and macro count is much more accurate.
Healthy body fat loss will be anywhere from 1 to 2 pounds per week. Seeing as how 3500 calories is one pound of body fat, this will equate to 500 to 1000 calorie deficit a day.
Sadly, the 15 minutes to a six pack and 30 pounds in 30 day cleanses simply don't work. If you lost that much weight you probably lost mostly water and muscle mass...which is the last thing you want to do.
To sum it all up, if you don't know how many calories your burning per day...or how many calories your consuming per day...its more than likely you're having trouble reaching your goal. Also if its not sustainable (you're going to be hearing me talk about this a lot) you will never maintain your goal.
