By Brayden Buchner (The Cascade) – Email
Listen up. Diet is simple. Diet is king. Diet is what governs your weight. It doesn’t matter how much you work out if you aren’t eating right. Are you overweight? Eat less. Are you underweight? Eat more. Granted, you should make sure you’re eating a healthy amount of healthy foods, but we’ll just be thinking about calories for a little while.
A magical number exists that tells you how much to eat. It’s your TDEE, or Total Daily Energy Expenditure. It’s measured in calories per day. If you’ve ever heard the “2000 calories a day” thing, that’s because the average adult male needs approximately 2,000 calories a day to sustain the processes they need to survive. That means that if your TDEE is 2,100 calories, and you eat 2,000 calories of food, then you’ve used 100 more calories than you’ve gained. Since energy cannot be created or destroyed, that means you’ve used 100 calories of stored energy. To simplify it, let’s assume that’s 100 calories of body fat. You’ve burned fat by literally not doing a goddamn thing. Sounds fucking golden, right?
In other words, at its base level, diet is just calories in, calories out. If you need to gain weight, eat a few hundred calories over your TDEE. If you need to lose weight, a few hundred calories less. Sure, you also need to think about protein, carbs, fats, minerals, etc., but right now, we’re talking simply about weight.
Now, what I’m not saying is starve yourself. Do not starve yourself. Seriously, eating disorders are no joke. Also, don’t take everything I’m saying to heart. I’m not a doctor. I don’t know shit for sure. Talk to your doctor about your diet and health, not some guy masquerading as a dude who knows things.
Now, what I am saying is fuck fad diets. Fuck diets in general. Diets don’t work unless you change your diet for good. Doing a juice cleanse isn’t going to do shit except make you poop more for a day. Y’know why you lost six pounds when you did a juice cleanse? You lost all your water weight. That’s it. You’ll make that back up in a few days. To lose weight you have to eat less calories consistently. That’s it. That’s all. It’s hella fuckin’ simple.
Food is delicious, I know. It’s hard not to eat an entire pizza. If you consistently make an effort to eat the number of calories your body actually uses, you’ll see an improvement to your health and body. I’m not going to tell you how much you should be eating, though. To be safe about it, that’s a conversation you should really be having with your doctor.
