Kat & Tshepi

Hello There,

Welcome back to K&T blog, how are you?

We are in the 3rd month of the year, there is just over nine months left to work on your weight loss goals and achieve them. There is still plenty of time, we hope that you still believe that you can do it, you still believe that getting fit and healthy is still within your grasp, remember that this is the year that you make it 🙂 . Knowing that your health has improved and feeling it too is one for the greatest feeling you can have, it lifts your mood, it increases your confidence, it reduces your fear of illnesses and diseases, it improves your autonomy. So keep going, its all worth it.

“Health management starts with weight management“

Have you ever wondered how much energy do you need on daily basis, how much you should be eating just to survive? how much you should be eating to lose weight? This is a type of question that comes up when you are on a weight loss journey, because for the most part it has to do with food, how big or how little to eat and what type of food to eat. A tool to help you with having a good idea of how much you should be eating on a daily basis is called a Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE). TDEE is a calculation that provides you with a good estimate of the number of calories that you burn on a daily basis, it does so by taking into consideration your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), the thermic effect of food and your physical activity level.

Basal Metabolic Rate(BMR) is the amount of calories that you burn when you are basically doing nothing the whole day, Thermic effect of food is the energy that get generated after eating to be able to digest the food, and Physical Activity is what you get up to throughout the day. These elements encompass the amount of energy you require to get through the day, knowing this amount of energy then helps you figure out the amount and type of food to consume. There is a formula to calculate TDEE but the easiest way to know your TDEE is by using a free TDEE calculator, there are plenty of them online, such as https://tdeecalculator.net/ .

Now that you know your TDEE, here is a practical example to use TDEE to guide you on the amount of food to consume , lets say your TDEE is 2000 calories, and you are faced with a lunch of Pizza, each slice of pizza is 285 calories and you consider having 2 slices (570 calories), having just 2 slices of the pizza lets you know that you have eaten over a quarter of what you need in a day. What about what you ate for breakfast and what about space for dinner? maybe 1 slice would be better?

Another example, average TDEE for men is 2500 calories and 2000 calories for women, a medium burger meal which includes a burger, fries and a soda is around 800 calories. If your menu contains mostly processed foods, you can see that the numbers will add up quickly and you will find yourself eating above your TDEE all the time, you stand a better chance if you are eating whole natural foods.

When you know your TDEE you then start to adjust the quantities of foods you eat based on their caloric content and your energy needs, keeping in mind that whatever you consume over your TDEE is most likely to be stored as Fat – Caloric Surplus, and whenever you eat below your TDEE results in weight loss – it is called a Caloric Deficit, and this is what you desire when you are trying to lose weight.

That’s it for this week, we hope knowing your TDEE will be another artillery in your battle to lose weight, get fit and healthy again. If you need to know the calories contained in food, you can look at the nutrition label at the back of food packages, or search it on the internet or use a food tracking apps like myfitnesspal or chronometer. Note: if the values at the back of the food package are given in KJ(kilojoules) you need to convert them to KCal(calories) by diving the value by 4,184 because your TDEE is in calories.

Until next week, Stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi