ragged blog

This was written some time ago in a plain text document, so it’s not well formatted, but I will come back to it and clean it up one day. Please enjoy it though.

I am fully aware that there are things that are not encountered for in this article, however I should remind you of the significance of Orders of Magnitude.

We’ll jump right in with some science, but this is not hard, so please read through it. You don’t need to understand, but by the end you might want to, so please indulge:

F = m * a
Force equals mass multiplied by acceleration.
F in Newton’s
mass in kg
acceleration in metres per second per second

Wd = F * d
Work done equals Force multiplied by distance
Work done in Joules
Force in Newton’s
distance in metres

A gram of fat contains: 9 kCalories. That’s 9000 Calories.
In Joules, lets ask Google: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=9+Calories+in+Joules

So, that’s 37 656 Joules.

Now, lets re-arrange and see how much work we have to do to burn a gram of fat…

Say, we have a 1kg weight. We can lift it about a metre and a second is about how long it takes us.

So mass is 1kg
a is 1kg in gravity accelerating up at 1ms. A total of roughly 11m/s/s
The force is thus 1*11. Easy.

Work done, the interesting part, and the one people on diets should be interested in.

Force we have worked out is 11 Newton’s per rep.
The distance is one metre. So lets work it out, force * distance equals 11 Joules!
So our one rep takes a whole 11 Joules.

Wow, that’s how many calories? Google again tells us: 0.0026290631 kilo-calories.
Keep packing those sandwiches, they aren’t really what’s killing you; I’m not being ironic or funny.

This means that if we wanted to burn this gram of fat we have to do how many reps?
Well, thats 3423 or so. And we have lost a gram. woopedidoo as the young ones say.

You see the reality is, the only part of your body that can burn enough energy is the part that can move the most mass at the fastest rate. This is your legs. Not your liver in a starvation cycle, or your TV or monitor glare; your legs moving your body. At the time when you are largest this works the best but is also hardest, this is because you weight more than is easy for your body to deal with. There is no sense getting upset unless you want to do something about it. If you eat around 1800 kcal a day, you will sustain your life, I in no way recommend eating less than this, even if you are trying to lose weight. If you are trying to lose weight though, seriously DO NOT EAT MORE THAN 2000 kcal unless you have a medical reason to do so. It’s counter productive. Yes that means no sweets, less than half a loaf a day and smaller bowls of cereal. You can eat really well, while I am loosing weight (still at present) I am eating better than I ever previously have in my life, including Mommas great home cooked meals. Be realistic at every point, and don’t forget about it if you snack or eat out of time. It’s normally those sugar craving snacks, that even if you have something other than chocolate it’s probably full of calories (bread…). Exercise can make the only real difference to your bodyweight, and your legs are the strongest muscle with which to do it, they have the biggest volume, the largest mass, and the greatest energy burning capacity, end of story. There is nothing that can burn fat faster, I implore all to realise this before starting another futile ‘magic diet’. The diet does not burn fat. The liver tries to use it, but look without exercise it’s absolutely absurd:

You still do very little exercise and you intake in the most extreme case no energy. You are quite overweight and want to lose 10kg or maybe more or less. Either way, without any exercise your liver uses your fat reserves to sustain your energy. This put considerable strain on your liver and other bodily functions suffer as a consequence (thus the reason I would never recommend such a diet). Without those other bodily functions you are simply unable to burn energy efficiently and you will actually find yourself using up less fat reserves than just a brisk walk.

You will spend the day without having approached the 3423 reps of a light weight and burned LESS THAN ONE GRAM OF FAT. Congratulations, that diet’s working out well for you then. See you next week for the collective grams weight loss group. Sadly these things even exist.

I hope you realise that you must move many kg (like your body) through many (m) like a hill or road, changing acceleration (run stop run stop run stop; or jump jump jump), and using the biggest energy burners to do it (or all of them, star jumps, or burpee’s) Burpee’s are good as they fit well in a number of categories and distribute the exercise around your body more. A description for the unknowing: “Basically a press-up followed by a squat thrust followed by a star jump. This counts as one burpee.”. They are extremely hard work and one of my favourites for an in home hard exercise. See if you can do them continually for 15 minutes. Just 15 minutes.

Do these for an hour a day, and eat 2000 calories, you will lose weight. If you can do 100 or so reps a day (session 3 times a day or more, but in shorter stints until you can do allot in one session), for a year or so, your body will be well on its way to a very fit state. Take no disheartened for the reality that it will take a year, you have learnt how much energy is in fat. You can confirm these values plenty of places. There has been no consideration of efficiency of the body and the external factors involved, if you do 100 burpee’s a day you will be loosing kilogrammes in very short spaces of time. For many people 100 burpee’s is an awful lot of work, but this means you should do as many as you can as often as you can spare the time. If you really feel tired, then take a break; there is no need to injure yourself. Ensure only that you come back to it, as if you don’t nothing will do the exercise for you. Reducing your food diversity or trying to cut out fats from your diet will only change the modes in your incredibly dynamic body. The body can happily adapt to all kinds of intakes, and this can be proven by bums who are able to live for years in relatively good health on diets of scraps and alcohol. If anyone who ever reads this foolishly believe that their body is broken, then I suggest you take your brain in for inspection too, as a friends grandmother said so bluntly at a Christmas dinner table, there are no fat people starving in Ethiopia. Look at them, not a fat one among them, who is telling me there isn’t a link. I am not denying that diet doesn’t help, but these people survive on next to nothing, and you eat too much if compared with your exercise level. If you eat less to compensate you are just putting stress on your body to produce things you wont give it. Do yourself a favour, do as many burpee’s as you can then get a chocolate bar, eat one piece, enjoy it and then throw the bar away. You earned that bit, but you have to do more burpee’s tonight to make up for the fact that you ate something unnecessary. Eat proper food, don’t worry about fat content, or oil type (although get something nice and flavoursome). Eat the right amount of the right thing (that’s around 1800 kCalories a day) and do some damn exercise. There are many things required for proper repair and growth during exercise, the combination of a diet with hard exercise is also counter productive. Many people describe how they immediately start gaining weight after their miracle diet and light exercise routine stops, even if they still do their light exercise. This is because your body could not process things properly, not it can you are putting on weight again. The reason is again, as above, because you consume more energy than you output. Reducing your energy input to a level of harming your body, quite clearly does not work. Do more exercise, this is the only way to burn energy in large amounts. Period.