This health coach researched the science and crunched the numbers so that you don’t have to:

Body by the numbers

Let’s get mathematical:

Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) consists of:

• Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR): 70% of daily calorie burn (basic body functions, of which the brain is the single biggest calorie-burner)
• Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT): 15% (the normal movements that occur as you go about your daily life)
• Exercise Activity: 5% (actual workouts, often overestimated)
• Thermic Effect of Food (TEF): 10% (energy needed for digestion)

Basic BMR estimate:

• Women: body weight (kg) × 0.9 × 24
• Men: body weight (kg) × 24

But yours may differ, so if you have a fitness tracker or other gadget that estimates it for you, go with that!

Note: muscle burns calories just to maintain it, making muscle mass crucial to increasing one’s BMR.

And now some notes about running a caloric deficit:

• Safe caloric deficit: no more than 500 calories/day.
• Absolute minimum daily intake: 1,200 calories (women), 1,500 calories (men) (not sustainable long-term).
• Tracking calories is useful but not always accurate.
• Extreme calorie restriction slows metabolism and can lead to binge-eating.
• Your body will adjust to calorie deficits over time, making long-term drastic deficits ineffective.

Diet for fat loss & muscle gain:

• Protein Intake: 1.5–2g per pound of body weight.
• Aim for 30g of protein per meal (supports muscle & satiety).
• Protein has a higher thermic effect (20-30%) than carbs (5-10%) & fats (2-4%), meaning more calories are burned digesting protein.
• Fats are essential for hormone health & satiety (0.5–1g per kg of body weight).
• Carbs should be complex (whole grains, vegetables, fruits, etc.).
• Avoid excessive simple carbs (sugar, white bread, white pasta, etc) to maintain stable hunger signals.
• Hydration is key for appetite control & metabolism (often mistaken for hunger).

Exercise for fat loss & muscle gain:

• Resistance training (3-5x per week) is essential for toning & metabolism.
• Cardio is NOT necessary for fat loss but good for overall health.
• NEAT (non-exercise movement) burns significant calories (walking, taking stairs, fidgeting, etc.).
• “Hot girl walks” & daily movement can significantly aid weight loss.
• Women won’t get “bulky” from weight training unless they eat like a bodybuilder (i.e. several times the daily caloric requirement).

Some closing words in addition:

Poor sleep reduces fat loss by 50% and increases hunger. High stress levels lead to fat retention and cravings for unhealthy foods. Thus, managing stress & sleep is as important as diet & exercise for body transformation!

For more on all of this (plus the sources for the science), enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

How To Lose Weight (Healthily) ← our own main feature about such; we took a less numbers-based, more principles-based, approach. Both approaches work, so go with whichever suits your personal preference more!

Take care!

Elizabeth Filips, medical student busy learning a lot of information, explains how in today’s video:

Active processing

An important thing to keep in mind is that forgetting is an active process, not passive as once believed. It has its own neurotransmitters and pathways, and as such, to improve memory, it’s essential to understand and manage forgetting.

So, how does forgetting occur? Memories are stored with cues or tags, which help retrieve information. However, overloading cues with too much information can cause “transient forgetting”—that is to say, the information is still in there somewhere; you just don’t have the filing system required to retrieve the data. This is the kind of thing that you will try hard to remember at some point in the day when you need it, fail, and then wake up at 3am with an “Aha!” because your brain finally found what you were looking for. So, to avoid that, use unique and strong cues to help improve recall (mnemonics are good for this, as are conceptual anchors).

While memory does not appear to actually be finite, there is some practical truth in the “finite storage” model insofar as learning new information can overwrite previous knowledge, iff your brain mistakes it for an update rather than addition. So for that reason, it’s good to periodically go over old information—in psychology this is called rehearsal, which may conjure theatrical images, but it can be as simple as mentally repeating a phone number, a mnemonic, or visually remembering a route one used to take to go somewhere.

Self-perception affects memory performance. Negative beliefs about one’s memory can worsen performance (so don’t say “I have a bad memory”, even to yourself, and in contrast, find more positive affirmations to make about your memory), and mental health in general plays a significant role in memory. For example, if you have ever had an extended period of depression, then chances are good you have some huge gaps in your memory for that time in your life.

A lot of what we learned in school was wrong—especially what we learned about learning. Traditional (vertical) learning is harder to retain, whereas horizontal learning (connecting topics through shared characteristics) creates stronger, interconnected memories. In short, your memories should tell contextual stories, not be isolated points of data.

Embarking on a new course of study? Yes? (If not, then why not? Pick something!)

It may be difficult at first, but experts memorize things more quickly due to built-up intuition in their field. For example a chess master can glance at a chess board for about 5 seconds and memorize the position—but only if the position is one that could reasonably arise in a game; if the pieces are just placed at random, then their memorization ability plummets to that of the average person, because their expertise has been nullified.

What this means in practical terms: building a “skeleton” framework before learning can enhance memorization through logical connections. For this reason, if embarking on a serious course of study, getting a good initial overview when you start is critical, so that you have a context for the rest of what you learn to go into. For example, let’s say you want to learn a language; if you first quickly do a very basic bare-bones course, such as from Duolingo or similar, then even though you’ll have a very small vocabulary and a modest grasp of grammar and make many mistakes and have a lot of holes in your knowledge, you now have somewhere to “fit” every new word or idea you learn. Same goes for other fields of study; for example, a doctor can be told about a new drug and remember everything about it immediately, because they understand the systems it interacts with, understand how it does what it does, and can compare it mentally to similar drugs, and they thus have a “place” in that overall system for the drug information to reside. But for someone who knows nothing about medicine, it’s just a lot of big words with no meaning. So: framework first, details later.

For more on all this, enjoy:

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Want to learn more?

You might also like to read:

How To Boost Your Memory Immediately (Without Supplements)

Take care!