The One Rule

ONE RULE FOR LOSING WEIGHT

If a physicist were to write a book about weight loss , the book would be one sentence long - burn more calories than you consume . This basic rule is all that is needed to be followed to lose weight . If this is not achieved , it is physically impossible drop a digit on the scale . All the methods that are called the weight loss methods each one of them work towards the goal reduced calorie consumption . So here are some common methods and how they 

work -

1. Eating salads - salads usually consist of green leafy vegetables which offer great volume to calorie ratios for anyone on a weight loss diet looking to decrease the total number of calories consumed . A single medium sized pizza slice contains upwards of 250 calories whereas you would have to consume a literal bucket full of spinach to come anywhere near to those calorie counts . salads simply give you the opportunity to fill yourself up without consuming a whole lot of calories and at the same time provings large amounts of fibre and essential vitamins . Eating lots of salads simply works for weight loss as the person ends up taking in less calories for the same amount or volume of food .

2.            Time restricted Eating - having an eating window for the day is really beneficial for losing weight and also provides lots of other health benefits . The major one being that simply restring the eating window of the day to a few hours restricts the total amount of calories a person can consume . If the goal was to eat only in a certain time period of a few hours 4-6 ideally , only a certain amount of food could be consumed and hence lesser calories versus eating throughout the entire day from early morning to all the way till bedtime . Eating all day and staying full all the time as research suggests is unhealthy and is even found to cause decreases in mental clarity and diminishing of mental ability . Other than that time restricted eating puts the body in a state of fasting everyday where the resources that were to be spent digesting unhealthy amounts of foods would be allocated to repair and maintenance of other bodily functions, especially the immune system . Again time restrictive eating - a win win situation .

3.            Eating more protein and fats - Protein and fats are more calorie dense foods which require significantly greater amounts of time to be broken down by the digestive system , this results in the feeling of fullness lasts longer and hence decreasing the number of times a person has the urge to eat during the day . If you eat  more proteins and fats you stay satiated for longer periods of time hence resulting in a total decrease in calorie consumption . Protein is the body building food that is required to repair and increase muscle mass and healthy fats are absolutely essential for the functioning of the brain and all hormone based activities in the body . hard to see this one as anything other than an absolute win .

4.            Eating more Fats and less Carbs - in the fats vs carbs competition fats have been sweeping the floor since the last few years with an army of scientific studies coming out indicating carbs to be the leading reason for most diseased and naming these inflammation causing agents to be the major reasons for everything from obesity to diabetes to mental health problems all the way to cancer . Focusing on the weight loss aspect , in order to choose our favoured energy source we would have to look at how weight loss occurs . to lose weight you have to lose mass , or burn off the fat . The burning off of fat occurs when the stored fats in the body ( all of that chubby chub chub) are used as an energy source . the fat burns releasing energy that we use to move around and function . This shows that the ultimate goal should be to get to a place where the body starts using fats as an energy source BUT this process only starts when most of the glycogen (stored carbs ) sources are depleted . Carbs are responsible for proving fast acting dynamic source of energy which are relatively fast and easy to burn and the body prefers them to fats . Hence by eating a lot of carbs we are enabling the body to continue to burn off carbs which over burning Fat . 

The ideal situation for burning fat would be to stay in a state where the body is actively burning fat as an energy source , a state of ketosis . So limit the number of carbs consumed and eat more fats hence the body comes to the state of burning fats and burns off fat stored in the body when the recently eaten amount of fats are used . This is how the body uses energy sources , first it will act to burn of the carbs consumed (glucose) and then move to burning stored carbohydrates (glycogen) and then finally stored fats which is a different metabolic process and takes a while to kick in . hence always eating fats as a primary energy source results in a smoother transition to burning recently eaten fats to the stored fats versus first burning off the carbs then switching over to burning stored fats .

You can be benefited from this logic without making an absolutist case about the dominance of the keto diet over all other . Simply reducing the amount of carbs and increasing the amount of fats taken will work wonders and get you most of the way to the benefits of a full blown keto regime . simply by reducing , not eliminating , carbs you will reduce the time the  body takes to kick into fat burning mode radically as compared to in a diet consisting of huge skittle covered donuts .   

Case against carbs fortified

Important knowledge that might not be common . All carbohydrates are sugars . All of them . bread ? flour ? rice ? potatoes ? all these forms of carbohydrates are broken down by the body into sugars . the complex the carb the longer it takes to break it down into simpler sugars however it converts to sugar nonetheless . Simple sugars like well sugar are very easily broken down and digested , which is a good thing if you are looking for a quick surge of available energy but it causes a dire unwanted effect which is to spike insulin levels in the body . More the carbs / sugar greater amounts of insulin are produced in the body and the body starts to develop insulin insensitivity . hence the now insensitive body needs more and more insulin to produce the same effects and this insulin insensitivity is called diabetes . Getting a spike in insulin levels by eating carbs has another effect . The spike drops as fast too .(This is the crash one feels after the sugar rush)  and the drop in insane levels is an indication for the need for food aka hunger . eating more carbs cause an insulin spike which when dies down creates a feeling of more hunger and cravings for more sugar . Hence eating carb rich meals make you crash and seek more food shortly after hence making calorie control harder for the individual . hence not a good advice to eat carb rich meals if trying to control total calorie intake . eating fat and protein rich foods will result in the feeling of satiation lasting longer due to more stable insulin levels and less hunger pangs and cravings throughout the day .

Some other rules to consider - 

Gain more muscle mass -

Fats may come and go but muscles are there to stay ; and prevent you from gaining weight by increasing your resting calorie expenditure 

The end goal of any body composition change regime should be guided towards gaining more muscle mass . Gaining more muscle makes you stronger , more confident and definitely increases in the aesthetic appearance of your body . However the advantages of gaining muscle outnumber these basic claims . Muscle mass is harder to maintain , calorically . what this means is that it requires more calories to simply maintain a certain amount of muscle on the body vs the same amount of fats . If you have more muscle on your body you automatically end up expending more calories on a daily basis . To summarize with empirical evidence- 10 pounds of muscle would burn 50 calories in a day spent at rest, while 10 pounds of fat would burn 20 calories .More muscle requires more energy to move it around and hence your daily calorie expenditure increases . This translates to the person being able to eat more without gaining fat mass .

Also it is very hard to lose any gained muscle mass . Muscles are made out of proteins . They are a part of your body rather than fats which are basically stored goods . To lose muscle the body has to start breaking down protein which only happens in extreme cases of starvation or with old age but for the most part the muscles you gain are there to stay . So simply increasing your muscle mass would be a great strategy as muscle doesn't go away completely even if you stop working out or are unable to whereas a couple weeks off your diet without exercise will lead you into the tracks of gaining unhealthy fat weight really fast .Muscles result in a faster metabolism and higher resting energy consumption hence are the best control for weight gain for the long run . Other than constantly dieting , substantially increasing muscle mass is the only definitive way to make sure the fat/unhealthy weight doesn't come back .

Hold your horses -

The calorie balance works at the scale of longer time periods than simply days . the number of pounds you shed off at the end of a week would depend on the calorie deficit achieved at the end of the entire week . An example to illustrate - a person eats 200 calories less than required to maintain current weight every day for 5 days . Achieved a deficit of 1000 calories but then goes on to eat an extra pizza  and ice cream on the 6th day which roughly amount to an extra  1000 calories . no weight loss can be expected as the overall consumption and expenditure of calories is balanced out . So dieting one day or a few days and then going all out the third day is not a successful strategy as the calorie balance needs to be encountered for time periods of days or weeks . Not to say there’s no value in a single isolated day of the diet but the idea of dieting for a few days and going full out cheating on the succeeding day wouldn't work . might help keep a balance but not really the goal here . So cheat days or meals need to be carefully articulated and accounted for . My goal here is not to devalue the concept of a cheat meal as in some circumstances of prolonged dieting they may be necessary to wake up and boost a slowing metabolism , and also your gonna want to try out the delicacies of the world and the subjective human experience is what we all are here for in some sense . Just don't go too overboard with the amount and frequency of ‘cheat’ days or meals .

PSEUDO EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE -

total calorie number - calories consumed vs burned (Almost no exceptions) . almost no exceptions because in some meticulously thought out and executed plans a person could eat more calories than burned and change the body composition that is to add muscle mass and reduce fat and appear to be losing weight (that's because muscle is more dense than fat ) . Here the person is no doubt getting healthier and fit and appears to be shrinking down in size but the actual weight of the person would still be increasing or remain the same as he packs on muscle at roughly the same rate as he dispenses off with the fat . I say ‘he’ because a case can be made about how this would work more efficiently for males than females because of the genetic propensity of packing and producing muscles in way faster rates in men than women as a result of higher testosterone levels . Anyways this once again proving how there are actually no exceptions to basic physical rule even if the overall goal could still be achieved by some other strategies .

Fun facts -

You could wonder how fat is eliminated from the body in the first place ? Where does all the fat go ? and the answer might not be very obvious . First off the fat is stored in fat cells . cells specifically designed to harbour huge amounts of fats . they enlarge and shrink depending upon the amount of fat entering and leaving the cell . It's the shrinkage of fat cells that constitute fat loss . you don't get rid of the fat cells but rather the fat stored inside the fat cells . The fat leaves the cells and is then excreted out of the body through the regular excretory processes mainly through urine and some amounts by respiration and sweat and so forth . This adds in heavily to the essential beneficiary nature of water towards this whole project of losing weight . Fats is excreted out in the urine so it would be very hard for the body to remove and excrete fat out if water is consumed in insufficient quantities . Pee more to lose more weight , more like Pee more to lose weight effectively .

This one is more trivial than the previous but we deal in kilo calories than simply calories . a calorie is a unit of energy which is very small . When we say something contains 100 calories in the general semantic way what we actually mean is that it contains 100 kcals . which is 100*1000 = 100000 calories . So actually it is scientifically inaccurate to say it contains 100 calories as it actually contains a hundred thousand of those suckers . it’s just in day to day language that we have dubbed kilocalories to be called simply calories . ( Read the nutrition facts of any food product on the backside of the packaging . it says Kcals not cals ) . Very trivial fact but fun nonetheless maybe idk you be the judge of that .