Diet - Metabolism

Each week I will talk about one of three main topics that this blog is about, meaning sports, pain or diet. So I have decided that this week I will talk a little about diet since there are so many myths and questions about it.

Let´s start with some basic stuff everyone should know about:
                           1 gram of fat contains = 9 calories
                           1 gram of  protein = 4 calories
                           1 gram of carbohydrates = 4 calories
                           1 gram of alcohol = 7 calories (empty calories)

1 pound of fat contains around 3,500 calories, for my European friends 1 kilogram = 2.2 pounds, so that means that one kilo of fat is more or less 7,700 calories.

An active man burns about 2,800 calories per day naturally, followed by active women and sedentary men at 2,200 calories and sedentary women and older adults at 1,600 calories.

Given all this information we can see that loosing ¨FAT¨ is quite hard because it contains a lot of calories. So when you hear or read about these miracle diets that say ¨lose up to 8 pounds (3,6 kilos) in one week¨ or some other promise, you have to be careful because losing weight and losing fat is not the same thing. A lot of these diets cause you to lose weight because of water loss or protein (muscle) breakdown, not just because of fat. Remember ,1 pound of fat has 3,500 calories, so if you wanted to lose 8 pounds of fat in one week that would mean that you would have to burn 28,000 calories!! That´s 4,000 calories a day!! It´s almost impossible, unless you are running a marathon every day. So remember people, there are not such things as miracle diets and if you want to lose weight the ideal would be to lose around 1-2 pounds a week.

My next post will be about the metabolic rate. You always hear people saying ¨well I´m fat because I have a slow metabolism¨ or ¨I´m skinny because I have a fast metabolism¨, but does that really exist? I will talk about it in my next post.

Presentation

Hello, my name is Pedro Carnicero and I am a physical therapist/ personal trainer from Madrid, Spain.

I have worked and lived in four different countries : USA, SPAIN, GERMANY, and BELGIUM. 

During my years of work and travel I have noticed the obsession that people have with sports, diet and pain. 

For example, every time I introduce myself to someone and I tell them what I do I always get asked either a question about how to lose weight/ how to gain more muscle, or about a pain they have. I most of the time give them an answer but to my surprise many of them say ¨well my trainer says something else¨, or ,¨ I read in such and such magazine that you have to do this and that to get bigger¨, or ¨my physical therapist says something else¨. That is when I ask to myself why the hell did they ask me in the first place if they already have the answer? But I guess that is human nature, we want as much information as possible. And that is one thing we have too much of today... INFORMATION. 

With the new technologies and Internet, today in age you can get or read about almost anything you want and that is where the problem starts. How do you know if what you are reading or getting is the truth? Well, this is the purpose of this blog: to talk about the TRUTH and dismantle the MYTHS that exist in SPORTS/ DIET AND PAIN because nowhere else are there more MYTHS than in these three subjects. All the information that will be given will be scientifically proven information about the subjects in question.