How to use energy balance to defeat the dad bod
Energy balance is the relationship between how much energy we take in and how much energy we expend.
In other words, it’s calories in, calories out.
It’s a fundamental law, and understanding it gives us the knowledge to change our bodyweight.
But even so, there’s debate in the fitness industry about whether calories matter.
It’s your hormones, says one camp, while another screams that you don’t need to count calories, you simply need to eat high-quality food.
Truth is, it’s all of it.
Because all of it falls under calories in, calories out.
There’s a variety of factors that influence the calories in, calories out equation, but they all feed into said equation.
That’s why it’s a law.
Look at it like the picture below:
Calories in, calories out (CICO) is the big umbrella that everything else falls under.
When your hormones are suboptimal, CICO is impacted.
When your sleep is terrible, CICO is affected.
When you only eat processed foods, CICO is influenced.
All the factors everyone is yelling about do matter, but they all feed into CICO.
Which means if we can control CICO, we don’t have to worry about trying to control every little factor that comes into play (many of which are beyond our control anyways).
We can only minimally influence the calories out side of the equation.
The bar below shows the 4 buckets that make up our calories out, or Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE).
Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is how many calories your body burns at rest. It’s the energy need to simply keep you alive. It makes up roughly 70% of our TDEE.
Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) is your non-exercise movement. I do count steps in this (some don’t), but it’s also fidgeting, walking around your house, or even moving your arm to bring a fork to your mouth. It makes up about 15% of our TDEE.
Thermic Effect of Food (TEF) is the energy need to digest the food you eat. Protein has the highest TEF, at 20-30%, following by carbs (5-10%), then fat (0-3%). TEF makes up roughly 10% of our TDEE.
Last is Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (EAT). This is how many calories you burn through intentional exercise. Surprisingly, it’s the smallest bucket and only accounts for around 5% of our TDEE.
We won’t affect our BMR meaningfully. Adding muscle can do this, but every pound of muscle added is roughly 6 calories extra burned.
TEF changes slightly based on how much food we eat, but to increase it means increasing our food, and if weight loss is the goal, that’s obviously counterproductive.
We could ramp up our exercise, but trying to influence the smallest bucket is mostly a fools errand. The amount of time you’d have to invest to create significant returns wouldn’t be worth it
That leaves NEAT, which is what we can influence the most. The best way to do this is through increasing your steps (because again, we do count that as NEAT, even though in some cases it may be structured exercise).
The calories in side of the equation we do have a lot of control over.
Calories in, as you may have already guessed, is how much food we eat.
Now this we can manage, and that is why one of the fundamental skills of the Fit Father Formula is tracking your food.
We must gather as much data as possible about the only thing we can truly manipulate when it comes to CICO.
When we do that, we put ourselves in the driver’s seat to make meaningful, lasting changes.
