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What Actually Counts? Calorie Counting for Weight/Fat Loss.

There is a common misconception about the catalyst for shredding unwanted fat from ones said body composition. It is widely perceived that cardio assists the best in weight and fat loss. This is the wrong approach. While cardio, is essential to the overall process of developing a great fitness regime, it is not the sole catalyst for weight/fat loss. Cardio simply improves your cardiovascular capacity or your overall anaerobic capacity.

Optimistically, you want to involve some structure of weight training in your regime to help assist with your specific diet, however weight training isn't completely necessary. In order to loss weight/fat from total body composition, the only necessity is an alter in your diet to a process what's called Caloric Maintenance.

Where to start?

Firstly, you want to find out your relative caloric maintenance. You can figure this out by referring to any online calorie calculator. (I'll link one here) Your caloric maintenance refers to the calories your body needs to maintain current weight. Once you figure out your maintenance, you ideally want to eat about 250-500 calories below that caloric maintenance. This process is known as Caloric Deficit or eating below your caloric maintenance. Ideally, the rate you want to aim for is about 1.0 lb. per week. Usually, that correlates to the recommended caloric deficit of about 250-500 calories.

Do I need Weight Train in Addition to Caloric Deficit?

As stated before, it is not necessary to weight train if your only goal is to drop weight/fat from your body composition. You can alter your diet to a caloric maintenance with any form of fitness activity or no fitness activity at all and still see pretty good results. Obviously, for maximized results you're going to want to alter your total energy expenditure ultimately to match your diet and regimen.

Weight training with a "progressive overload" focus is probably the most optimized method for most people whether you are a beginner or advanced. Weight training causes you to build more muscle ultimately changing the composition of your total energy expenditure, and subsequently accelerating the process in which you drop weight/fat. For your information, there is no special diet that forces the body to drop weight or fat. If there was a special diet, that someone tried and garnered exceptional results, then it was the fact that the specific said diet had them consuming calories under their recommended calorie maintenance.

To conclude, understand that diet plays an enormous role in the altering of body composition. If you want to accelerate that process, then participating in some sort of weight training is ideal. If after reading this post you still need additional help with calorie counting, refer to us @ Outwork Sports Performance with any questions or concerns you may have and our trainers will be happy to assist.

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