We live in a world where everything is more accessible than ever. We have more access to food than ever before. We have also access to food such as snacks and drinks that never existed before. The revolution of fast food has changed the game in terms of access to calories. Why am I saying all this? Now more than ever we are connecting food to emotions, relationships, customs, etc… we also do not move that much. A lot of modern jobs are related to a sedentary lifestyle.
If you have read the last blog, you would know how the Law of Thermodynamics works. If not let me remind you.
We constantly burn calories as we move and live. Therefore, we constantly intake them from food. More calories than we burn equals weight gain. Fewer calories equal weight loss.
I would argue that today's lifestyle challenges us with staying in shape, simply because we do not move that much and usually intake more than we should, without even realizing it.
This is where manipulating BMR can be a useful tool in our arsenal for fighting to gain excess weight and toxic relationships with food, result of restriction.
Let me remind you what is BMR.
It stands for Basal Metabolic Rate. What the hell??
Every organ in your body is constantly working. Your hearth is constantly working, your muscles are metabolically active tissue, which means that they are constantly working at their own rate. Every living organism needs calories or energy for fuel. 70 % of the energy we get from the food we eat is used for this constant process. BMR is the rate at which your body is going to burn that energy. Day and night.
Your body is like a car that is constantly working. Even if it is parked in the parking lot if the engine is working, it is still going to consume fuel. The difference is that car can be started after you have stopped the engine. Well with the human body, unfortunately, this is not the case.
Therefore, we constantly need energy. because we constantly burn it to live.
We also need the energy to digest the food, but that is just 10 % of all the energy we intake. The other 20 % are used for exercise, or activity such as walking, jumping, climbing stairs, sitting, and standing up, any sports, etc…
Let’s go back to the car analogy. The bigger the engine, the more it is going to consume and vice versa. So, the more muscles we have the more calories we are going to require, just to stay alive.
For argument's sake, let`s take two people. One has 50 % muscles and the other one has 70 %. They both eat 3000 calories per day. And they both have the same activity. Who is going to burn more energy on a daily basis? Correct. The one with more muscles. The car with the bigger engine is going to consume more fuel for the same distance than the car with the small one.
This hack is simply going to allow us to enjoy the same food that we have before, but we are going to be burning it faster and not putting it as storage or fats.
Now don’t get confused. The Law of thermodynamics still applies. So, if you eat more calories than you burn, you are still going to put fat. So, it is still important to know when to stop.
However, spending one hour per day on preferred physical activity is not only going to improve your physical health, shape, and energy levels but is going to allow you to be a bit freer, in terms of food.
We all know that restricting food is as bad as indulging. It builds toxic relationships with food and friends too. What is the problem of having a glass of wine with your friend, or a beer Friday night? it is not going to affect you as much if you regularly exercise as if you do not.
I am not saying that if you just exercise, everything is suddenly going to change in your interest, and you are going to eat whatever you want without consequences. If you are in constant caloric surplice you are going to put weight. If you are eating always bad quality food, your body is going to suffer. So, I am not saying that building muscles and being physically active is going to be the magic pill.
The magic pill is a hard one to swallow because it is an aggregation of a lot of other supplements. You need a healthy relationship with food, a healthy relationship with exercise, healthy relationship with yourself. And that comes with the experience and it is constantly improving. But the first step is important. And that is the awareness. The applicable knowledge is so versatile and broad. The one that you can only benefit from.
Take every information learned, apply it, access it, and take what works for you. Enjoy!