Have you ever said the statement above?

Do you think by going to the gym 4-7 times per week is going to be the reason you lose weight?

If you’ve answered yes to the above question you may want to read on.

Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE)

Now most of you reading this may have never heard of this term before, what it basically means is the total amount of calories you burn per day.

As you can see above it is split up into four sections;

BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) – 70% of calories burned

These are the calories that you burn just from being alive day to day, your body has to work to function and burns calories via this.

N.E.A.T (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) – 15% of calories burned

These are calories that you burn from activities day to day that aren’t planned exercise, examples include; walking to the bus stop, cleaning the house, walking to the toilet in the office etc….. you get the point.

E.A.T (Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) – 5% of calories burned

As you can see this is the opposite to N.E.A.T, these are any calories burned from any planned exercise such as the gym, playing a sport, planning a walk etc.

T.E.F (Thermic Effect of Food) – 10% of calories burned

The thermic effect basically means how many calories you burn during the digestion process of food, the body has to use energy to digest the food hence the output of calories.

So, as you can see from the above explanations on average you only actually burn 5% of calories via exercise.

Now this can vary from individual to individual but overall, it’s pretty spot on. So, to actually base all of your success of losing weight on the gym seems like a bad idea doesn’t it?

TAKEHOME

So, what you guys can take home from this is in order to lose weight/fat you need to focus on a few things and not just one.

Our advice would be to make sure you’re as active as you can be day to day when you’re in the office/working from home, try and become that person who naturally has to get up every so often in between work to stretch legs/go to the toilet/wash the pots.

Making this a habit over time increases your N.E.A.T and will contribute a lot more than you think to your total calorie burn.

Next bit of advice is to have a higher protein diet, you can burn up to 30% of your daily protein intake via the thermic effect (100g per day would mean nearly 100 cals burned via eating protein).

Finally, still do your gym/exercise routine as you normally would but don’t solely focus on this as your main avenue to lose weight.

Oh, also the most important part of all of this is to make sure you eat less than your TDEE (calorie deficit).

Task

Now if you read my final statement then and thought ‘HOW THE HELL DO I KNOW IF I’M IN A CALORIE DEFICIT’ then what you need to do is follow the link below which will lead you to a calorie calculator which will give you a rough guide to how many calories you need to eat in order to lose weight.

https://www.calculator.net/calorie-calculator.html

Once you have this number to go off you can then start your journey to hopefully getting to the place you want to be in!

If you feel like you need further help with this then please do not hesitate to drop us an email (info@rikfitdc.com) or DM us on IG (@rikfitdc), we’ll be more than happy to help.

We are here to BREAK THE CYCLE!

Hope you have a great day,

Ben Mannion
Head Coach
RikFit Dynamic Coaching
07727919966