Following up from last month’s article I would just like to highlight a few points that I think are interesting and/or important to know about our bodies’ stored weight.

Following up from last month’s article I would just like to highlight a few points that I think are interesting and/or important to know about our bodies’ stored weight.

Food calories.

The foods that we eat provide differing values of energy, so per gram of food you get the following:

Fat - 9 calories    Alcohol - 7 calories    Protein - 4 calories    Carbohydrate - 4 calories.

1 calorie is equal to 4.2 kilojoules and on some nutritional labels values are given in kilojoules.

It’s all water

For every unit of carbohydrate (glycogen) that your body stores, it requires at least three times that amount of water in order to store it. So if you have added 8Ibs of weight over the Christmas period I can almost guarantee that a large part of that will be stored water.

Fat loss or weight loss

It isn’t the same and unfortunately your bathroom scales don’t reflect this very well. I had a client who reduced his weight down to a healthy and fit 18 stone. He still had shirts from years before when he was an unhealthy 16 stone and they fitted him much better at 18 stone even though he was heavier. This is because he dieted (fat loss) and exercised / weight trained (bigger muscles and fitter physique). Remember that muscle weighs about 1/3 more than an equal volume of fat.

The scale of things

Don’t rely on bathroom scales to tell you the whole truth they will only tell you your total weight, not your body composition. Your clothes however don’t lie (unless they have elasticated waists) - see above

Fuel and Intensity

At all times you are burning a combination of fat and glucose. The ratio at which you burn both depends on the intensity of exercise: at rest the average person burns twice as much fat as glucose (71 calories and 36 calories per hour respectively).

As the intensity (effort) increases so too does the ratio so that at 55% maximum effort we are burning roughly equal amounts of both.

Once we get up to 75% max effort the ratio is 2:5 in favour of glucose metabolism.

But even at this level you will still burn more fat in an hour than you would on an hour’s fast walk.

Food for thought …

Andy