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The Weight Formula

Unless there is a hormonal malfunction in your body, you will gain weight if you eat more calories than your body uses; and you will loose weight if you eat less calories than your body uses.

The calories that your body need are fundamentally influenced by the work that your body does. This work is of two types:

• work your body does when you are at rest, such as breathing, digestion, maintenance of body temperature and brain functioning.
• work your body does when you engage in physical intensive activities such as playing, working, etc.

These work look the same for each individual, but they are not. Therefore people burn different amount of energy (calories) for what looks like the same amount of work. For this reason, the calorie requirement for each person varies and a single calorie prescription cannot be given to all.

Your body sources energy for these work using a set of chemical reactions converting food, muscles and fats to energy. This process is called metabolism.

Next we will look at these two forms of work, or energy demand.

Minimum Work

As explained earlier, this is the basic work your body engages in to sustain your life — such as breathing, digestion, maintenance of body temperature and brain functioning. The energy required for this work is called the base metabolic rate (BMR).

BMR is not constant among individuals; meaning that each individual requires different amount of energy to carry out basic processes. The significant of BMR is this: those with higher BMRs will burn more energy at all times (at rest and even while doing work) than those with lower BMRs. Therefore, your base metabolic rate will throw some light into how much calories a human body need.

However, the calculation of base metabolic rate is extremely difficult as it requires many factors lining up and the presence of sophisticated instruments. A better way to judge it is from the body type of a person, which although isn't accurate, gives you an idea.

Body types

In the 1940s, psychologist William Sheldon classified human body into three types: ectomorphs, mesomorphs and endomorphs¹. Here is a comparison of the body types and their traits. Most people are a mixture of two body types: true ectomorphs, mesomorphs or endomorphs are rare.

What you mus remember about body types is this:

• Ectomorphs have high metabolism and therefore are hard gainers and easy loosers of weight. Their BMR is high and therefore, they require higher calories to mainrain their current weight.
• Endomorophs, on the other hand, have extremely low metabolism and therefore are easy gainers or hard loosers of weight. Their BMR is low and therefore, they require lesser calories to maintain their current weight.

Additional Work

The influence of additional work on your calorie requirement is simpler: whether mental work or physical, the more intensive the work is, the more calories the body requires. But, calculating the exact calorie requirement for the work you do is practically impossible — that's more of a physics problem than a medical problem. However, there are recommended calorie requirements based on statistical studies such as the below proposed by ICMR-NIN².

If you are have a great deal of fats and muscles, and are looking forward to loose weight, you may control your calorie intake when hungry. Or, you can be smarter by consuming the right kind of calories such as proteins instead of sugars, and satisfy your hunger. On the other hand, if you are maintaining your weight, eat as per your hunger; or more if you are looking to gain your weight.

Calorie Trackers

It seems improper to finish this section without covering the calorie trackers seen today. Their use is quite abundant, which pushes us to tell you not to trust these calorie trackers.

A 'calories consumed' tracker tracks your calories by factoring the food you eat and matching it with a calorie database. The problem is that the potatoes you eat need not have the exact calories as the potatoes used to create the database. Many factors affect the caloric value of a food such as how it was farmed, the age of food, how it was cooked, how the other ingredients used in the dish were produced, etc. Most of these factors aren't entirely in your own hands. So the calories your health trackers says you consumed may not be same as the calories you actually consumed.

A 'calories burned' tracker on your treadmill or smartwatch tells cannot precisely track the exact amount of calories you burned because each individual burns different amount of calories for the same work (the base metabolic rate is different). Unless the tracker performs a biological test on you to calculate the rate of energy you burn, their numbers are mere averages and approximates.

That isn't to say that such trackers are useless. Because they are a game of averages and approximates, their data float around the true numbers in general circumstances. We are only reminding you to take data from health trackers with a pinch of salt.

So, What Next?

It is extremely expensive to figure out even the approximate value of how many calories you consumed and how many you burned; let alone the exact numbers. Those in body building competitions, high performance sports and other such domains can afford the conditions to get those numbers.

But you — who leads another lifestyle and have no access to such equipments — must not exercise with the goal of burning exactly x calories or eat with the goal of consuming exactly y calories. Instead, be smart and use your body's response to deduce how much to burn and how much to eat. Call it a result oriented approach. After all, results are what you are looking for. So make your judgements based on results. To do that,

• Listen to your body and understand its reactions. Are you really putting on weight or loosing it after doing an action or eating a food? Forget what others say; what does your body say? What is the level of fatigue you experience? Is it really fatigue or is simply a feeling of sleepiness. What does your body vitals say? Are they healthy?
• To understand these, you must track what can be tracked without ambiguity; such as your body weight, blood health (sugar, cholesterol, etc.) and body size. Body weight and size can be tracked weekly while blood can be tested occasionally.

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