Geschatte leestijd: 7 minutenThe energy balance plays a significant role in our daily lives. We eat because our bodies actually need it. Your body consumes energy, and by eating, you provide your body with this necessary energy. Just like a car needs gasoline to run.
Table of Contents
- What is the energy balance?
- Books about the energy balance
- Energy intake side: what determines how much energy I get?
- Energy expenditure side: what determines my calorie needs?
- Positive energy balance
- Negative energy balance
- Why is the energy balance so important?
- What about diet x?
- Predicting how much you gain or lose with the energy balance
What is the energy balance?
The energy balance is the amount of energy you intake daily compared to the amount of energy you expend.
If you intake as much energy as you burn, you are in ‘energy balance’. Your body weight remains stable.
Energy intake = how much energy you have eaten and drunk.
Energy expenditure = how much energy you have burned.
Energy balance: energy intake = energy expenditure.
The energy balance is highly influencable. You have control over the amount of energy you intake and how much you expend. I’ll explain how below.
Books about the energy balance
If you want to work on your own energy balance, take a look at the following handbooks by Peter Wolfhagen and Rob van Berkel
Energy intake side: what determines how much energy I get?
As I started the article, you eat for a reason; to get energy so your body can function. Food contains energy.
The amount of energy in a product is determined by burning the product. Energy is released during combustion, measured, and then expressed in kilocalories (kcal). A calorie is a unit of measurement for energy (energy is the quantity). Just as a meter is a unit of measurement for distance.
One calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water by one degree Celsius. Usually, we use the term kcal for kilocalories. This is the amount of energy needed to raise one liter of water by one degree Celsius.
The packaging of a product indicates how much energy the product contains. How much energy a product contains depends on the composition of the product. A product can contain proteins, carbohydrates, and fat, these are nutrients. Each nutrient provides energy, some more than others.
- 1 gram of protein = 4 kcal.
- 1 gram of carbohydrates = 4 kcal.
- 1 gram of fat = 9 kcal.
As you can see, fats provide more energy than proteins and carbohydrates. Products with a lot of fat therefore quickly provide a lot of energy. Your product choices determine how much energy you consume in a day. Additionally, the body handles the energy from these different sources in different ways. The same amount of calories from proteins, for example, will contribute less to weight gain than the same amount of calories from fats or carbohydrates.
Energy expenditure side: what determines my calorie needs?
How much energy you expend exactly depends on many factors. Sitting on the couch in front of the TV burns many times less energy than running a marathon. Physical activity is one of the factors determining your energy expenditure. However, physical activity constitutes a relatively small part of your energy expenditure.
Other factors that influence include:
- Your muscle mass
- Your fat mass
These factors affect your basal metabolic rate. This is the amount of energy your body consumes at rest. Your brain uses a lot of energy, but so do your muscles. You can’t enlarge your brain, but you can increase your muscle mass. More muscle mass means a higher energy expenditure at rest. However, fat mass does not consume energy (except for brown fat and beige fat).
General guidelines state that women need 2000 kcal and men need 2500 kcal daily to maintain weight. Remember that these are very rough guidelines and that the chance is very small that you need exactly 2000 or 2500 kcal. Fortunately, it is possible to estimate your daily calorie needs.
Positive energy balance
If you consume more than you expend, there is ‘leftover’ energy. You are in an energy surplus or a positive energy balance.
Positive energy balance: energy intake > energy expenditure
Suppose you eat 2500 kcal of energy, but you expend 2000 kcal.
Energy balance = 2500 – 2000 = 500. There are 500 kcal unused by your body at that moment.
Your body can convert these 500 kcal into fat so that you can use it later if you are in an energy deficit. In this situation, your body weight will increase.
Negative energy balance
Your body is in an energy deficit when you intake less energy
than you expend.
Negative energy balance (energy deficit): energy intake < energy expenditure
Instead of eating 2500 kcal, you only eat 1500 kcal and expend 2000 kcal.
Energy balance = 1500 – 2000 = -500. Your body is in a 500 kcal deficit in this situation.
To get this energy, your body will tap into your fat reserves, but possibly also muscle mass, to provide the necessary energy. By tapping into your fat reserves and possibly muscle mass, your body weight will decrease.
Also read the article: Losing belly fat, how quickly can you lose belly fat as a man or woman?
Why is the energy balance so important?
The energy balance is so important because it is always accurate.
If you’ve had physics in high school, you may have heard of the first law of thermodynamics, a natural law – A natural law is a principle that applies everywhere in the universe under all circumstances and has never been refuted by anyone – This law states that energy can never be lost and cannot arise from nothing. Energy can be converted into, for example, heat or kinetic energy. As long as no one can refute this natural law, it is best to work with this given.
What does this have to do with the energy balance?
Well, if you intake 100 kilocalories then your body must do something with it. These 100 kcal cannot just disappear. Depending on the state of your body, you store these 100 kcal in the form of fat, in the form of glycogen (muscle energy), in the form of muscle mass, or it is consumed in the form of heat. Fat and glycogen can then be broken down again, releasing energy. This energy can be used for movement but also to keep your body warm.
Read more: Counting Calories
What about diet x?
Read this carefully: every diet can work, as long as you ensure that you are in an energy deficit.
Whether you follow a low-carb, low-fat, high-carb, high-fat, a detox diet, or a special diet at McDonald’s. The very first step is to make sure you eat less than your energy expenditure. An energy surplus is an energy surplus, regardless of which nutrient or food it is created from. No food is inherently fattening.
There are countless examples of people losing weight on a cookie diet, ice cream diet, or McDonald’s diet.
With this wisdom in mind, many diets are designed. Many diets restrict the product choices someone can make. Tell someone they can only eat lettuce and this person will definitely lose weight. After all, lettuce contains almost no calories. Try eating 2000 kcal of lettuce, you won’t succeed.
This is exactly how the low-carb diet works. Carbohydrate-rich products are often very tasty, so you quickly consume too many calories and gain weight. By forbidding yourself carbohydrate-rich products, you limit your product choices enormously. Your product choice will be limited to products with a low energy density, so you will feel full quickly but consume few calories. So, you eat more easily below your energy needs and therefore lose weight. Not because carbohydrates make you fat.
It sounds logical, it is logical.
If you understand the energy balance, you also understand why someone doesn’t lose or gain weight. In fact, you can even predict to some extent how much someone will gain or lose weight. Regardless of which diet this person follows.
I’ll explain how you can predict this below.
Predicting how much you gain or lose with the energy balance
Before we start calculating, I want to mention that the calculations I show here are very rough estimates. In practice, it will never turn out exactly as calculated here. This is because there are still many factors that influence the energy balance that I deliberately do not take into account for the readability of this article. Whether an extra calorie will be converted into fat or muscle mass or is converted into movement or heat can depend on various circumstances such as the genes of the person in question, the type of food eaten, and the circumstances in which this happened. Not every calorie in the diet needs to be absorbed by the body, and if they are absorbed, they can be responded to in different ways.
The first thing you need to know is that one kilogram of body fat provides about 7777 kcal. So, you need to be in an energy deficit of 7777 kcal to lose 1 kg of fat. Suppose you maintain a daily energy deficit of 500 kcal, then you will lose about 1 kg of fat in 15 days. 7777 / 500 = 15 days.
Another example.
You want to lose three kilograms. Three kilograms of body fat equals 3 * 7777 = 23000 kcal. You want to lose these 3 kilos in 56 days (8 weeks). For this, you need a daily energy deficit of 23000/56 = 400 kcal. Your calorie needs are 2800 kcal. To achieve your goal, you will now need to eat 2800 – 400 = 2400 kcal daily
.
The above calculations sound very nice on paper. In practice, things can quickly turn out differently than you calculated. This is because you do not live in a controlled environment.
You do not eat exactly the same every day, your heart rate does not make exactly the same number of beats in a day, you breathe more on one day than on another, maybe you wiggle more on your chair one day than another day. All factors that vary from day to day.
It is also true that if you lose weight, you eventually need to ingest less energy to continue losing weight. After all, you have less mass that needs to be supplied with energy. If you lose weight initially on 3000 kcal, it could very well be that after 2 months you lose only a little weight on 2000 kcal.
In practice, it will look like this: making estimates based on formulas -> testing -> adjusting -> testing -> adjusting. This way you keep going until you reach your desired weight.
