The food is a substance that we consume to provide nutritional support, to get energy for various body functions. Our body spends energy even at rest for various functions like respiration, to maintain blood supply by heart to different organs, various metabolic and hormonal process etc.
BMR
This resting energy expenditure also called BMR (basal metabolic rate) is the energy, which your body requires at rest for proper functioning. BMR reduces with age & hypothyroidism. Females have slightly lower BMR than males.BMR is closely related to the muscle mass, hence a person doing strength training and maintaining muscle mass has better BMR than a person with less muscles.
TEE
Total Energy Expenditure is a sum of ones BMR and activity level. One who is more active in day to day life has a high TEE than a sedentary person. There are many other calculators and apps available online to find it out. To start losing fat you need to eat below your maintenance calories. A person who eats above this value gains muscles or fat depending on foodstuffs he eats. This is the basic rule of body transformation.
In today’s world, we link obesity to certain food, inactivity, genetics, without knowing the basics about what and how we eat.
Calorie is a unit of energy. Every food material has some calorie value.Carbohydrate and protein have 4 kcal /gram and Fat has 9 kcal/ gram. It is the excess calories which lead to weight gain and eating fewer calories leads to weight loss. We will discuss it further.
STRUCTURED EATING
Just eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full is called “Grazing”. I am sure most of the people follow this eating protocol. Most workout vigorously and expect to lose weight. They go on dieting e.g eating salads, giving up rice, avoiding sweets, take various weight loss tablets and what not.
Losing weight, precisely loosing fat, requires eating food in structured way, by properly calculating carbohydrates, proteins, and fats content of the food and making a diet plan accordingly along with proper exercise(strength training preferably ). Everybody wants quantified results. Most of us set our expectations in termof numbers, someone wants to lose 5 kg , 10 kgs , 20 kgs. So, we need to approach our diet in a quantified manner. Just randomly going on calorie deficit will make you lose weight initially, but, it will all come back, once you start eating again. Most of so called dieticians don’t give the proper breakdown of calories and macronutrient (carbohydrate, protein and fat).
In my personal experience, they have preformed templates, with fixed timings and food material, and they just tick the box in front of it. Diet planning is a dynamic concept. One should know about their carbohydrate, protein and fat intake and total calories to be consumed for 24 hours.
To summarise, structured eating is planning your diet, as per your goal, like fat loss , muscle gains , optimum sport performance , maintenance of current weight, after proper selection of calories, with proper macronutrients distribution. You have to measure food while preparing it.
