Balloon concept - a new way to lose weight

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

In this article, you will learn how to lose weight using a new concept based on the idea of the human body as a balloon.

Fascination with diets and different meal plans goes against a key rule of weight loss: if you consume more calories than you burn, you gain weight; if you consume fewer calories than you burn, then you are losing weight.

When considering gaining or losing weight, we can compare a person to a balloon. Take a look at this diagram.

Everything that enters the body

This is everything we eat and drink. People, like bears and raccoons, are omnivores. We can eat anything as long as we feel good.

Our body is an effective mechanism for processing food, and it is quite possible to reduce its variety to the required minimum, which is enough to obtain energy. The main thing you should know about your diet is your daily calorie intake. Everything else is minor details.

Everything that is burned by the body

This is the number of calories we expend to provide ourselves with energy for all activities - from heartbeat to running marathons.

The daily calorie intake for each person depends on many different factors: body weight, physical activity, metabolic rate, and so on.

The minimum amount of calories that the body needs to maintain life can be calculated using the formula:

ideal weight (height chart) × physical activity level

The level of physical activity varies from 11 to 17. The lowest value is for those whose sports are limited by raising the remote control from the TV, and the highest value is for those who are engaged in heavy physical exercise every day.

In the tables below, the minimum required calories have already been calculated for both men and women. For example, my height is 182 cm, weight is 82 kg. To find out your height in feet, you need to multiply it by 0.03. That's 5 feet 11 inches. The physique is average. I have about 2,100 kilocalories to keep me going.

Separately about the physique. Here's a quick tip on how to check your body type. With the thumb and forefinger of one hand, grasp the wrist of the other where the bone is protruding. If it was not possible to grasp it, you are a hypersthenic, if it turned out with great difficulty, a normosthenic, if it turns out easily, you are an asthenic.

Waste

Let's not try to hide natural things. We consume a certain amount of food and liquid every day. The body tries to break down almost all of these resources into molecular components in order to saturate the cells. As a result of this process, waste remains that leave our body in all known ways.

Since our body is omnivorous, it has to be as efficient as possible. A person can use almost any product as food. However, some of them still contain substances that are not only not needed by the body, but also interfere with its work and slow it down. The sooner you get rid of them, the better.

Too much food

Fat cells are a kind of piggy banks of our body. When they absorb nutrients, they try to make new fat molecules out of them in order to store them for the future. Each fat cell is a balloon that grows larger when surplus food enters it.

Too little food

Have you decided to limit your diet? Not bad. Almost immediately, the body will begin to experience a lack of energy. As a result, the metabolism will gradually slow down. You may feel weak or chilly, which is completely normal, as the body will conserve energy. Fat cells will understand that their time has come and will begin to release energy from their reserves. When this process starts, you start to lose weight.

Control

Understanding how this system works is the first step to controlling it. Thinking of your body as a balloon will help you control it on a whole different level. Let's look at this concept as an engineering diagram.

The first step is to understand what we want to control. Obviously, the weight of our body. Incoming data - everything that enters the body in the form of food in calories per day. Outgoing data is the number of calories we burn.

Here's a simplified view of the balloon concept.

Things are getting clearer, right? Target, incoming and outgoing data is there. If the incoming data is more than the outgoing, we gain weight, if it is less, we lose it. It remains only to figure out how to determine how much we are losing weight or gaining weight.

1 kg of fat contains 9,000 kcal. Accordingly, creating a daily deficit of 500 kcal, we will lose 0.05 kg per day (50 g). Having created the same surplus, we will gain the same 50 g daily.

We often think of sugar as net calories, but think about this. 100 g of sugar contains 387 kcal, and 100 g of fat contains 900 kcal. The thing is that sugar is a carbohydrate, and 1 g of carbohydrates contains 4 kcal, while 1 g of fat contains 9 kcal.

Please reread the previous two paragraphs. They contain the key answer to the question of how to control your weight.

Again, take me as an example. My daily intake is 2,100 calories. Suppose I am over 250 calories daily. This doesn't sound very impressive, so here are some examples:

• a glass of ice cream - 220 kcal;
• donut - 225 kcal;
• beer (0.5 l) - 220 kcal.

I drink a bottle of beer every night, which seems like a little, but let's look at the long term. In a month I will gain 0.7 kg of excess weight, in a year - 8.5 kg. And all this from a surplus of 250 kcal. Not so good, right?

The pattern also works in the opposite direction. Having reduced my daily calorie intake by 250 kcal, in a year I will lose the same 8, 5 kg, without really straining.

What's more important: sports or nutrition

How to increase the number of calories you burn? There are two ways: you can increase your calorie expenditure or speed up your metabolism. Both the first and the second can be achieved through exercise. In addition to burning a certain amount of calories, sports also speed up your metabolism, allowing you to burn more calories when idle. That is, after working out for an hour in the gym, you continue to burn more calories after your workout.

A small problem is that sports increase your appetite and you can easily spend 500 kcal in the gym, and then eat 700 kcal, thereby negating the result of your workout.

Here is a small list of activities and their approximate energy consumption per hour:

• running - 600 kcal;
• walking - 300 kcal;
• swimming - 400 kcal;
• fitness - 500 kcal.

By exercising three times a week, you will burn 1,500 more calories in total. 6,000 kcal per month. What will it give? In a month, you will burn 660 g of fat. And in a year - 8 kg more than if they did not go in for sports. Only a symbiosis of nutrition and sports can give a really tangible and correct result. Neither food nor sports alone can do this.

Trace elements

Literally every month, new studies appear that open our eyes to the fact that everything we did before was wrong. "Non-GMO", "high in fiber", "fortified with zinc and iron" are all marketing bullshit.

The food we consume has two functions in our body:

• is a source of energy;
• provides us with useful trace elements.

Be careful! Almost all modern diets do more harm than good to the body. In addition to energy, the food we eat must provide the body with all the vitamins and minerals it needs. Our concept considers food only as a source of energy, allowing you to manage your weight. You have to take care of the trace elements yourself. Lifehacker has a lot of materials on this topic. For example, this one.

Outcome

Man is the most intelligent creature on Earth. At least for now. But who would call us smart when it comes to food? In this matter, we are no smarter than bears or raccoons. We can turn anything into energy or fat. The same principle of the balloon works: if too much energy enters us, we become larger; if there is not enough energy, the ball decreases in the same way as we do.

There is only one way to influence this - to control what, when and how much we eat. The whole concept comes down to elementary mathematics. Using this information correctly, you will be able to control your body.