Crazy women’s-magazine food plans
This afternoon I paged through the latest Oxygen magazine—or maybe it was Oxygen’s annual glutes special—and found sample menus for such a diet. Keep in mind that Oxygen promotes intense physical activity—both weights and cardio. Keep in mind that these far-too restrictive diets are often said to be the food plans followed by female fitness athletes.
That is simply impossible unless the women in question are anorexic.
These women work out with weights four, five, or six days a week. They spend 30 to 90 minutes doing cardio every day. If this reported exercise volume is accurate, they cannot possibly subsist on 1,300 to 1,600 calories a day when dropping fat for a competition.
Do the math. Anyone doing that much exercise is burning major calories each day from the activity alone. The 1,300 calories might not even cover her basal metabolic need. She couldn’t possibly sustain muscle mass or energy on such a regimen.
Here are the figures generated with the Katch-McArdle formula, which takes into account lean body mass.
Let’s say our female bodybuilder or fitness competitor weighs 130 pounds, with 18 percent bodyfat and close to 107 pounds of lean mass. She wants to lose fat for a competition, to get to, say 8 percent bodyfat.
Katch-McArdle indicates that her basal metabolic rate—the number of calories she’d need if she spent all day sleeping—is 1,417. If she is ”extremely active“ (hard daily exercise), her daily maintenance calorie level is 2,693. If she is merely “very active” (hard exercise six or seven days a week), she needs 2,445.
A safe level of calorie reduction for this woman is less than 30 percent below maintenance, with 30 percent considered “very aggressive.” If she tries to live on 1,300 calories a day and requires 2,445, she’s entered into a deficit of close to 90 percent.
OK, so the conclusion is that some women’s magazines are all wet when it comes to safe and healthy weight loss. I just don’t comprehend why they would benefit from such foolishness. I feel sorry for readers who actually try to follow such plans and fail because they’re impossible.
Here’s a little plug for Tom Venuto, whose members-only Burn the Fat Inner Circle website has a Katch-McArdle calculator and many more useful tools.
I blogged about the Katch-McArdle formula some time ago and gave the complete formula. You’ll just have to use your own calculator.
