Burn Baby Burn

All this concern and focus over burning calories. Why? Calories are fuel. Your body needs fuel. You put the food in to fuel your body. No different to a car engine. Do you drive around randomly for several hours a day, redlining the engine just to burn fuel? Of course not. That would be stupid.  So why are people so fixated on burning calories? 

Oh because they make you fat. Of course. 

Heres an idea; stop eating. Stop doing everything and stop eating so there is no possible way your body would convert anything to fat tissue. 

But you want to have energy too? You want to go to the gym and build a physique? You actually want to live a life? You don’t want to die? Geeze. People want a lot! 2021 amiright? 🙄

Want to eat but don’t want to be fat but don’t want to be tired and hungry all the time. Hmmm I wonder if there was something our body has that needs food to survive? Something that we can grow more of through simply picking up weights? Hmmm. Let me think.

Oh yeah…….muscle! 

You need more muscle.  

Want to know the most efficient way of making your body use calories? Have lots of muscle. Want to know the best way of speeding up your metabolism? Have lots of muscle. 

Want to know the most inefficient way of making your body use calories? Trying to burn them through activity and running yourself into the ground.

If you’ve ever looked into how few calories are burnt through exercise you begin to realise what a waste of time and energy focusing on it is. Seriously. If I walk 5km I burn around 250 calories? So I need to waste and hour or so just to destroy 250 calories? Screw that!

If I was 90kg@15% body fat, based on my height, weight and lean mass my minimum calories are around 2240 per day. That’s just to sit in a chair and do nothing. If I train and diet myself to be 90kg@7% body fat I had to gain 7kg of muscle and lose 7kg of fat. Now my minimum calories are 2450 per day. With 7kg more lean mass I now need to eat over 200 calories more just to run the extra muscle. Is 200 calories a lot of food? Not at all. But I’d much rather my body use that 200 calories to fuel more muscle than have to walk 5km to hopefully “burn off” the same amount of calories! Doesn’t it just make more sense to have your body use the fuel for building rather than hanging on for dear life while you try and kill it?

If the goal is to be small and skinny then don’t eat. Just stop. It works for anorexics. It’ll work for you too. 

You wont even have to do anything. Just don’t eat. But don’t start crying about feeling tired all the time. Getting sick, getting injured, no sex drive, being moody, being hungry. No no. You want to be small and skinny, stop eating and deal with everything that comes with malnourishment and starvation.

If the goal is to be lean, well that requires having more muscle than fat. That does require doing a little more than nothing. Apologies to those of you still fixated on the “do nothing” part of being skinny. 

To have more muscle starts with eating more. Then you need to get stronger which means you need to lift more. But this comes back to eating more. You need to eat more so you can train hard and heavy. Once you’ve started eating more, training harder, getting stronger and building more muscle, your body will require more calories without you even doing anything because muscle needs fuel to just do muscly things.

So with more food and more muscle you’ll have more energy, less hunger, better sex drive, less mood swings, better immune system. All because you ate more and got stronger. 

Now your body is a lean, calorie using, fat burning, muscle building machine. Guzzling through food without a second thought. 

You feel better, look better and because you’re stronger, you are better than before. Goal achieved. 

Of course you could continue in the other direction: no food, no energy, no strength, no muscle, fat. Over training and counting how many steps you take per day trying to constantly burn calories. 

But thats a choice I’ll leave for you.