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o-rah and Semper Fidelis motivators, it's time to get fit. These days, you can't turn on the television without seeing some sort of gizmo or gadget to help you get fit without any sweat or nutritional knowledge. They all promise that with 10 minutes of playing, oooops, I mean working out with their product, you'll be fit in just about two to three weeks. Of course, most of us in the know, understand this is false. I'm pretty sure that most of you know this as well. There is very little success that can be made without a sound nutritional plan. Today, I'm going to give you a little info on the foods that you eat in hopes that you can apply that when you're surfing the channels and decide to purchase the next abdominal electrocution machine. Let's get busy hardchargers.
First of all we need to understand the energy nutrients and their caloric values. There are several, and they break down as follows:
PROTEIN: 1 GRAM = 4 CALORIES
CARBOHYDRATES: 1 GRAM = 4 CALORIES
FAT: 1 GRAM = 9 CALORIES
Of Course we can include alcohol, 1 gram equals roughly 7 calories. Although, I hope alcohol is not a major part of your diet.
What this tells you is that you can consume twice as many grams from carbs or protein and still not get as many calories as from fat. This is the reason why people try to recommend low fat diets. However, this is not the full story. One of the major mistakes that people make is thinking that because protein and carbohydrates have no fat, that they can consume as many grams as they like or eat as much of that type of food as they like. This is as far from the truth as we can get. This is because of that thing that we learned about earlier called the metabolism or metabolic rate (Semper Fitness archive: Darth Metabolism).
Just for a quick down and dirty, the metabolic rate is the rate at which we burn calories or simply put, the number of calories we need per day for our bodies to function. This number varies among individuals but the bottom line is that all calories consumed above and beyond those required for the basic metabolic rate must be used for energy (i.e. exercise) or those calories will probably be stored as body fat. Just as a refresher, for men, the simplest way to calculate your basic metabolic rate is to take your weight, multiply it by ten and add double your weight to it. For example, if a man weighs 150 pounds he would multiply that times ten and then add 300 to that number.
150 x 10 + 300 = 1800
weight x 10 + weight x2 = basic metabolic rate
For women, they multiply their weight by ten and then add their weight. This means that if a man that weighed 150 lbs, consumed 2200 calories during the day, he would have to burn the additional 400 calories that he consumed above and beyond his basic metabolic rate or risk storing it as body fat. This is the reason you must watch how much you're eating during the day. Next issue I'm going to explain the difference between fats, proteins and carbohydrates and elaborate on the different kinds of carbohydrates. Until then, stay pumped, stay motivated and oo-rah!
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