In this article we will see how many calories to burn to lose one pound.

It is thought that to lose a pound of body weight you have to cut roughly 7000 calories, either by reducing food or by consuming more energy with physical activity. It’s true? Not really .
Let’s try to understand why.

Why don’t we get as thin as we want?

Many, many people write to me on time to ask me the same question and, although my answer is always the same, this answer throws them a bit into confusion.
The question they ask me is: why am I on a diet but have not lost weight as much as I wanted? In fact, in most cases, these people do not say they have not lost weight at all, but they say that compared to what they expected to lose in terms of weight, they have lost much less. And this logically discourages them.

Let’s assume that these people followed the diet exactly as intended: that they weighed each ingredient, followed the diet menu point by point without cheating.

Cheating in this case means

• Do not weigh the foods, but go by eye.

• Relying in good faith on rough calorie calculations to determine how much they are eating;

• Outrage.

• Eating foods on which they cannot be sure of the calories contained, because they are prepared by others or are ready-made.

For example, a hamburger bun can travel around 400 to 800 calories: it depends on the weight of the meat (100 grams versus 200 or even 280 grams) and sauces (mayonnaise vs mustard).
A pizza with about 900 to 1110 calories if margherita: it depends on the dough, if of 250 or 300 grams or on how much mozzarella or how much oil you put in.
The brioche at the bar varies according to weight: a simple one travels on 250 calories, larger and more stuffed can reach more than double. And so on.

• Believing that you have consumed more calories with physical activity than actual ones.

If they haven’t done any of these five things, we can be pretty sure they’ve been following the diet properly. Still, they expected to lose 3-4 pounds in a month, but have lost one or two.

Is there something wrong with them at the metabolic level? They also ask me.
And the answer is usually no.

So why didn’t they lose at least 3 pounds in a month by cutting 500 calories a day?
Because, as I said at the beginning, they are wrong to consider how many calories to cut to lose a kilo of weight.
As a result, they lose weight, but much less than what they typically would like to lose.

It is not the calories that are the problem, but how the metabolism works

This is explained by the fact that the body does not respond in mathematical terms to weight loss as we suppose: it responds in terms of adaptation. The rule that to lose a kilo of weight you have to cut 7000 calories dates back to the 1950s! In the meantime, however, science has moved on and discovered a lot about metabolism.
Our metabolism is based, like everything in nature, on a principle of economics .

It provides for a balance between internal and external processes, that is, between expenditure and revenue. The body tries to make ends meet, and doesn’t care if you think that for every 7,000 calories you cut, it has to lose a pound. The metabolism responds to every daily change by adapting itself.

This thing has not escaped scientists.

For about fifteen years, we have been working on more complex caloric models, through algorithms that, based on metabolic responses, predict real weight loss. The problem is that ordinary people know nothing about these new models, and thus continue to believe that if you cut 500 calories a day, you will lose half a kilo in 7 days. One of these calorie models led to the fine-tuning of the Body Weight Planner.
If you go to the “For experts” part, you notice that the longer we diet, the fewer calories we burn.

How many calories to burn to lose a pound?

According to scientist Kevin Hall, for example, if we are used to diets, or if we go on a diet for a year, to lose one pound of weight we will need to burn twice as much: about 14,000 calories to lose one pound of weight. To be optimistic, he says, because there are also subjective variables at stake.

Anyone who starts a diet and already loses little weight is probably not on their first diet.
He has done so many.
And this “always dieting” has the same effect as having followed the same diet for a whole year.
If, on the other hand, an overweight person has never been on a diet in his life, by the middle of the first year he will lose roughly what common sense suggests, or a kilo for about 7000 calories cut.

This is also the reason why, in a heterosexual couple who goes on a diet, the man of the couple loses more weight than the woman: it is very likely that for him that is the first, or at least the second diet in many years. While for the wife or girlfriend that will perhaps be the hundredth diet. This causes their metabolisms to respond differently.

In conclusion, it would be good to avoid relying only on formulas and calories to lose weight.
Better to focus on better eating habits, increase physical activity and give yourself a more reasonable and anxiety-free time to lose weight. Maybe varying from time to time the type of physical activity and eating strategy ( from the healthy plate diet to the 80/20 diet , for example).