The most popular rule of weight loss is completely wrong
Bummer, I was about to crank up my exercise program to get to my weight goal by mid september but it now appears I will have to either review my exercise plan or my weight loss goal for even burning 3.500 calories per week is not going to get me there, check out the excerpt of the article that debunks the calorie myth:
There’s a popular rule you’ve probably heard before about losing weight: for every 3,500 calories you shed from your diet, you’ll lose a pound. But just because everyone, including nutritionists with graduate degrees, keep repeating this doesn’t make it true.
In fact, it’s a total myth.
“I see dietitians using it all the time, making recommendations based off of it,” said Kevin Hall, who is a researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. “Unfortunately it’s completely wrong.”
The adage dates back to the 1950s, when medical researcher Max Wishnofsky measured how much energy a pound of fat tissue represents, and found that it was 3,500 kilocalories, otherwise known as calories. Theoretically, he had calculated how many calories a person had to burn—or forego—in order to lose a pound of fat. But Wishnofsky made a couple spurious assumptions.
First, he assumed that when you lose weight you only lose fat tissue. “That isn’t true,” said Hall. “It’s a relatively minor error, because a lot of it is fat tissue, but it still isn’t true.”
The much bigger mistake Wishnofsky made was misunderstanding how our bodies react to weight loss. As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. “It literally starts happening on the first day,” said Hall. “And it continues to mount as you lose weight.”…
