I was just reading this interesting article on Fitness Black Book about ‘skinny fat’ people. It’s about people who look reasonably trim, but who have additional weight around the body… they’re carrying excess, so they’re not quite as ripped or lean as their outward appearance leads on.
I’d certainly classify myself in that group. I’ve been with my body long enough to understand what I can wear to hide what I don’t want to showcase. And it’s worked pretty well so far!
But – this article says something that I found really interesting – and intuitively, it makes a lot of sense.
What it said was that when losing weight, we should create a deficit outside of exercise. So let me think of Lost It – my iPhone App. In calculating my calorie intake for the day, it adds the number of calories I’ve burned through exercise… so my daily budget is 1,700 cals – if I burn another 700 cals at the gym, that means Lost It is allowing me to eat 2,400 cals a day.
What this article is saying is that that logic is the standard logic. Eat more, spend more time at the gym burning it off. It says that that logic is incorrect. That the gym and resistance training is additional to the calorie count… ie. if my goal is 1,700 a day, that’s what I should stick at: 1,700 cals.
This is interesting, and seeing it presented in this way, it makes a lot of sense to me. This week’s been a little bit different – because of the increase in cardio, I’m well under my cal limit for the day. So that’s fine. But – we’ll see how much I’ve lost in 7 days tomorrow. And depending on the success of that, I may change the way I count calories from Mon onwards (given that this weekend is up the cabin with all sorts of goodies).