Show Notes

Ever wondered how your body actually uses and burns calories? Today, we pull back the curtain on this fascinating process, revealing the four main factors contributing to your total daily energy expenditure. With our practical tips on calculating your daily needs, you’ll be well-equipped to manage your weight effectively. We’ll also touch on an often overlooked part of the fitness journey – the importance of tracking your weight. Yes, it’s crucial, and we’ll show you why! Need some inspiration in the kitchen? We’ve got that covered too with a vegan recipe roundup that’s sure to get your taste buds tingling.

Referenced in episode:
MacroFactor
TDEE Calculator
MyFitnessPal

Full Podcast Transcription

VeGAINS: Hi, welcome to the VeGAINS Fitness and Nutrition podcast, episode six. I’m VeGAINS and I’m here with the awesome Protein Deficient Vegan. You want to say hi?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Hi.

VeGAINS: So last week we talked about how to track your calories. This week we’re going to talk about how to burn or use your calories. So let’s talk about how your body actually uses calories. First off, the majority of the calorie burn is going to be from something called your base metabolic rate or basal metabolic rate. You may have heard both. This is mostly determined by your biological sex, your age, your weight, your height, and your body fat percentage. This makes up the majority of the calories you burn throughout the day naturally, no matter what you do. Then next, for the actual total calories you burn throughout the day, you take that basal metabolic rate and you add on top of it your activity level, which is technically comprised of exercise activity and non-exercise activity at a high level. So exercise activity is obviously exercise. Non exercise activity is anything you kind of don’t do intentionally. One of the common examples is if you sit around and bounce your leg up and down, that’s one example. And that can actually burn quite a bit of calories throughout the day. And then the last factor of your total daily energy expenditure is just the thermic effect of food. You don’t need to think about it too much, but basically when you eat food, your body digests it, and that uses some calories.

Protein Deficient Vegan: If you want to calculate your TDEE, you can find many calculators online.

VeGAINS: So the one I like is TDEEcalculator net, but you can use pretty much any of them. So the things you’ll need for the calculator are the things we talked about before for the base metabolic rate. And on top of that, you will also need to put in your activity level.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, be honest here. Really do some soul searching.

VeGAINS: Right. So there are a couple of options for the activity level. Typically, depending on the calculator, you’ll see maybe a couple, maybe a whole lot. But generally you’re going to see sedentary, which is an office job. This doesn’t necessarily mean you literally sit in your house and don’t do anything. In fact, that could be even a lower activity level that some calculators do account for. But sedentary is typically seen as you don’t do any intentional exercise. Maybe you walk around a little during the day, maybe you go into the office for work. So you’re up and moving around throughout the day, but you’re not really doing anything intentional. So that is considered a sedentary for the activity levels on the calculator. Next up is light exercise. So if you do exercise one to two days a week, or even if you do some light walking three to four days a week, you would probably fall into this light exercise category after light exercise. As a moderate exercise category. On the calculator I referenced specifically, this is exercise three to five days a week. Or maybe you do physical work or you play sports a couple of days a week, or maybe you work in construction, something along those lines. Even if you don’t do actual exercise, that work is a little harder. So you’re getting in kind of the same activity.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay, I have a question. So I have an office job, but I do work out three to five days a week. Which one do I pick?

VeGAINS: You have an office job and you work out three to five days a week, you’re probably still going to be in the moderate exercise range.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Okay.

VeGAINS: Yeah. So I’d say if you do exercise, I would just default to picking the activity level that aligns to the amount of exercise you do.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Fair.

VeGAINS: The next one is heavy exercise. So this is going to be basically if you exercise almost every day or if you play a sport several times a week, or if you work in some kind of really hard labor job.

Protein Deficient Vegan: A real sport, not like bowling, right.

VeGAINS: Well, I guess it depends on…

Protein Deficient Vegan: Does bowling count?

VeGAINS: …how energetic are you when you’re…

Protein Deficient Vegan: How aggressive do you bowl?

VeGAINS: I’ve seen the movies about bowlers and they dance a lot, so maybe that would true.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That might count.

VeGAINS: Yeah. If you have a really really hardcore celebration dance

Protein Deficient Vegan: Ping pong?

VeGAINS: Ping pong seems like it would be really hard, actually.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Lawn darts.

VeGAINS: Okay. No, yeah, I think anything where you’re drinking a beer as part of the competition probably doesn’t fit into that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: No cornhole.

VeGAINS: Yeah, no cornhole. And then the top activity level on most of the calculators is going to be like an actual athlete. So this is typically if you’re doing like two exercises a day, basically, you’re going to know if you fit into this category. Right. One thing to keep in mind is it doesn’t matter too much if you pick the wrong category off the bat because the calculators are going to be kind of a starting ballpark figure anyway. You’re going to have to adapt it to your body. These numbers for the calculators come from big studies with a bunch of people. They don’t always align to every individual that’s going to use it. So next we’re going to talk about. What do you actually do with this information? Now, you kind of understand how it works. You can understand how to use the calculator, but how do you actually go and use this to your advantage? So one thing to understand is that the total daily energy expenditure or the TDEE we were talking about, what that actually means is if you were to eat the same amount of calories as your TDEE, that will put you at what we call maintenance calories, which means you won’t gain or lose weight. You’ll stay at the same weight if you eat that level of calories. If you eat a little less than those calories, that’s what we call a deficit and you’ll lose weight. If you eat more, you’re in a caloric surplus and you’ll gain weight. So, I mean, controlling your weight at a high level is really just as simple as finding out what your actual maintenance is and eating more or less calories than that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s math, and math is fun.

VeGAINS: I agree. So what you can do here is you want to decide if your goal is weight loss, weight gain or maintaining weight. And as you kind of go through your life and your fitness journey, whatever that may be, you’ll probably have all these goals at different points in time. So just focus on which one is the highest priority for you right now. If you want to gain weight, we recommend starting with 500 calories over your TDEE. That’ll be a very slight surplus

Protein Deficient Vegan: Per day.

VeGAINS: Per day. If you want to lose weight, same on the other side. 500 calories less than your TDEE. And then if you want to maintain weight, obviously you can eat exactly your TDEE. So, total to lose or gain a pound is going to be about 3500 calories.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Which is like a bag of a chips.

VeGAINS: Yeah. How many is it?

Protein Deficient Vegan: I think it’s like a bag of chips, probably.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: The good ones. The good chips, not the healthy chips, the good shit guys.

VeGAINS: Yeah. So you can gain a pound if you eat a bag of chips, if you’re really struggling to gain weight.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. That is our advice for you. No, don’t do that.

VeGAINS: Definitely don’t do that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So, lucky for us, 500 divides into 3500, 7 times. So you can just use the 500 calorie less or more a day because.

VeGAINS: There are seven days in a week.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, there are seven days in a week.

VeGAINS: I can also do math.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That’s wild. I didn’t know that about you. He’s been hiding this from me.

VeGAINS: Yeah. So we want to always try to maintain as much muscle as possible. So we don’t want to really want to lose or gain more than about a pound a week. That enables us to maintain muscle if we’re losing weight and not gain any extra fat if we’re trying to gain weight. You shouldn’t also ever really go below 1500 calories a day, total. Sometimes the calculator will kind of guide you to maybe a deficit that has you eating less than 1500 calories a day. But I think in those situations, you would really want to try to maybe just increase your exercise. The problem is, if you go too far below 1500 calories a day, you can start running into nutrient deficiencies and really low energy and hard recoveries and a lot of other issues.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Like hanger

VeGAINS: Also, hanger is a very real problem.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It is.

VeGAINS: So I know one pound up or down a week doesn’t sound like a lot, but, I mean, really slow and steady is the way you want to do this. You’ve got your whole life to Hit your fitness goals and live a long, happy life. So there’s no reason to rush it by a couple of extra months and risk doing it in a way that makes you gain extra fat or lose a bunch of muscle or just generally feel like crap

VeGAINS: or yoyo-ing

VeGAINS: Yeah. Yoyo-ing is actually really bad for your health and your heart and your skin and everything else.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. For instance, not like anyone I’ve known me has ever done this. But you’re like, I’m going to do P90X and I’m going to go so hard and I’m going to eat like 1400 calories a day and do P90X every day. And then eventually you get to day, I don’t know, let’s say 63. That’s your breaking point. And then you just eat Cheetos.

VeGAINS: Yeah. And you probably didn’t recover that entire 63 days.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t think so. Yeah. So don’t do that.

VeGAINS: Right. So it’s way more sustainable to just do a small calorie adjustment like this. You end up with a better end result because you’re more muscle and you feel better, you end up with less loose skin. If you’re trying to lose weight, losing weight slowly is one of the few ways to kind of help reduce loose skin in the end result. And then it’s also better for your heart. Gaining or losing a lot of weight really quickly can be a big strain on the heart.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And you know what they say, you’ve got to listen to your heart when it’s calling for you. There’s nothing else you can do

VeGAINS: Do they say that?

Protein Deficient Vegan: It’s a song.

VeGAINS: Okay, so now we know kind of what the body does with the calories. We know how to pick the amount of calories you want to try to eat. So how do you actually track this and put this into action? So first things first, you will see calories burned on fitness trackers and exercise equipment and some stuff like that. And that tends to be kind of one of the first things you want to think about when you start thinking about calories, because you’re like, oh, I got on the elliptical today and it says I burned 600 calories. So those are usually pretty wildly inaccurate. Even on the high tech fitness watches and stuff you wear, they’re not very good. So you can use those as like, trending your effort. So if it says you burn 500 calories one day doing a 30 minutes run, and then the next day you did another 30 minutes run, you only burned 200 calories. You can kind of know maybe you didn’t run as hard, but I definitely wouldn’t use any of those calorie outputs for anything related to deciding how much you’re going to eat. It’s just not accurate enough for that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, also, if you happen to have your fitness tracker hooked up to MyFitness pal and maybe some of the other food trackers, I’m not sure. There is a setting where it’s going to try to give you back the calories that you quote unquote burned for exercise. You definitely want to turn this feature off because it will mess you all up.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: You might end up gaining weight.

VeGAINS: Yeah. Another calorie tracking app that might be good and is especially good for a beginner. Just getting into the idea of calories and all this TDEE stuff is called MacroFactor, basically what it’s going to do. So we told you that the TDEE calculators are just kind of a ballpark and needs to be adjusted for your body. Well, MacroFactor kind of does that automatically. They have an automatic diet coach. So basically what happens here is you weigh yourself a couple of times a week as you go through your process. You put in your calories every day and then it basically automatically calculates for your body and your exact real results what you need your surplus or deficit to be to continue to gain or lose weight. So this is actually one of the most accurate ways to do it. It is kind of a little tedious because you have to weigh in consistently and you have to put in your calories every day or the calculation has a little bit of a hard time but those are things you should really be doing anyway, especially in the beginning. So I think it is really good for understanding what your true TDEE is. And then you can go from there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Is that one free?

VeGAINS: No, it is not free.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Sad.

VeGAINS: Yeah. I don’t think it’s very expensive, but it’s definitely not free. So also, another tip on this with the MacroFactor thing, it makes it automatic. But even if you’re not using MacroFactor, you do want to be weighing in pretty often. So we recommend weighing in at least probably two to three times a week. I like to weigh in every day. Another important thing is to do it at a consistent time. The most consistent time you can probably do it is in the morning, first thing after you go to the bathroom. That way you weigh about the same as far as water fluctuations and things like that from day to day.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And do it before you take a shower because if you’re a girl, it will add weight because you’ll hold water in your hair and you want that extra 0.5 pounds.

VeGAINS: I never thought of that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

VeGAINS: Interesting point.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Really important.

VeGAINS: Yeah. So weigh yourself every day. Make sure you can take the average throughout the week. Instead of just looking at each day individually, take the average of your weight throughout the week and then watch that over a couple of weeks. And if you were targeting to gain a pound a week, you can look over a two week average and see, was I averaging a pound a week? Do I need to increase calories? Do I need to decrease calories? And then you can just kind of keep doing that on a continuous basis. And then also remember, as you gain or lose weight, your caloric needs and your TDEE will actually change. So if you go and lose 50 pounds, your TDEE is going to be lower than it was when you first started. So you’re going to have to adjust your calories anyway.

Protein Deficient Vegan: So I think what you’re saying is the lesson here is use TDEE as your starting guesstimation.

VeGAINS: Right.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And then you’re going to modify that based on what you’re actually tracking for your weight each week.

VeGAINS: Right? Yeah. We see a lot of people go and use the calculator and they’ll say, this is my deficit. And then they’ll try it for like six weeks.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Don’t do that.

VeGAINS: I’m not losing weight. This is my deficit. Well, what’s actually happening there is you’re not really in a deficit. The calculator was maybe just more off for you and you never really went back and adjusted that for yourself.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So check and verify it.

VeGAINS: So that’s really all you need to do to put some of this stuff into action. And then next week we’ll talk more about, like, macronutrients and maybe some other nutrition type things.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

VeGAINS: Okay. So now we want to jump into the recipe roundup, which is always pretty exciting because we get to remember all the delicious food we ate while we were trying to make these for you.

Protein Deficient Vegan: All the good times.

VeGAINS: Yeah. All right. You want to talk about the first one here?

Protein Deficient Vegan: We made loaded sweet potato fries. They were really good, I thought.

VeGAINS: Yeah, I thought so, too.

Protein Deficient Vegan: It had as a tofu cheese sauce, which is actually quite delicious.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And we even ate it on tortilla chips. That was pretty exciting.

VeGAINS: Yeah. I’ve had loaded fries a lot. I think this might have been the first time I had loaded sweet potato fries. And it was actually really good.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it adds, like, a little extra sweetness because I guess they’re sweet potatoes.

VeGAINS: That does make sense.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

VeGAINS: Next we made a peanut butter chocolate protein cheesecake.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, my God, this was so good.

VeGAINS: Yeah. I think we should just make these every week, actually.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I think we should make them multiple times a week. I think, actually, this is all I’m going to eat for the rest of my life.

VeGAINS: Yeah. 41% protein. So you probably could eat it the rest of your life and hit your protein goals just off this cheesecake.

Protein Deficient Vegan: If you’re going to make anything we’re talking about, it needs to be this.

VeGAINS: Yeah, it’s pretty intense. In a good way.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it’s really good.

VeGAINS: Also, another cheesecake pie. We had a peppermint chocolate cheesecake.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I really like that one. You don’t like peppermint and chocolate? But I thought it tasted fantastic.

VeGAINS: It was definitely very pepperminty. I can appreciate the mintiness.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yes.

VeGAINS: That one is 36% protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

VeGAINS: Next we had some gingerbread cookies, 29% protein cookies. Hard to go wrong there.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, we used TVP again because it’s magic. Works great. And these were really chewy.

VeGAINS: Yeah, they were.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Which I know you like that

VeGAINS: They were soft.

VeGAINS: We also had some stuffed mushrooms. These were super good. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any stuffed mushrooms. I kind of forgot what they were like, but I’m still pretty sure this is the best version of it that I’ve ever had.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, they’re really easy to make, too. Basically, you just put TVP and a little bit of super finely chopped mushrooms and some flax egg and some spices, and then you shove them in the mushroom, and then you cook them for, like, 20 minutes and they’re perfect.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, and like a little bit of vegan parm.

VeGAINS: Yeah, and they’re bite sized.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, they’re so good.

VeGAINS: Yeah. I didn’t know there was a cut mushroom in the mushroom.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it has the moisture. That’s how it gets moisture. Oh, speaking of moisture with TVP, just so everyone knows, when we’re baking with TVP, we are not rehydrating the TVP. These are super easy recipes. You just mix in dry TVP.

VeGAINS: Yeah, we’ve gotten that question a few times.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah.

VeGAINS: Which makes sense because I think people just aren’t used to baking with TVP in general. So this is a lot of new territory.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Everyone’s used to adding the water. We do not add the water to the TVP on the baked goods. Yeah.

VeGAINS: Cool. Next we had some fake bacon bit scalloped potatoes.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Dude, those were fucking good.

VeGAINS: Yeah, these were the fancy ones right where you stand them up.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So that didn’t really go super well. Standing up potatoes on their edge, that’s not super fun. So probably won’t do that again. They tasted great, though.

VeGAINS: Yeah, they were great. 30% protein. Also garlic mushroom Alfredo, 35% protein.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That was good.

VeGAINS: If you like pasta, this one is definitely a good way to go. Really high protein pasta.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Super easy to make.

VeGAINS: We’ve also got three other recipes that aren’t quite posted yet. They’re still work in progress, but they will be up the way before the next podcast. So we’re just going to talk about them here. We got a bacon mac and cheese.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yes. That was so good. I took it for lunch a couple of days.

VeGAINS: What do we use for the bacon on that?

Protein Deficient Vegan: It was TVP and actually I was eating it at work and this one guy was like, wow, bacon mac and cheese. That’s awesome. And I was like, it’s vegan. And he was like.

VeGAINS: It’S still awesome, right?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, got him.

VeGAINS: Yeah. It’s always weird in those situations because you want to be like, try it, but also you don’t want to give them part of your lunch or anything weird.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I can’t give up my lunch.

VeGAINS: Yeah, I don’t know. Just give them the recipe.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I need that food. They don’t bring any vegan food to training.

VeGAINS: Also, another one coming up is a really awesome crab rangoon.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Oh, it’s so good.

VeGAINS: Yeah.

Protein Deficient Vegan: I don’t understand it.

VeGAINS: I was really surprised at how much this actually tasted like crab rangoon. I wasn’t expecting that. And it was really, really awesome.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah. So it’s a cold dip, but it’s mostly made out of tofu and I think it came out to like 50% protein. Yeah, it’s a lot of protein, but it’s really good. It’s like the perfect balance of a bunch of flavors. I think it tastes like crab rangoon, but obviously I haven’t had crab rangoon since I was twelve, so this is a faint memory.

VeGAINS: Yeah, it’s definitely got that signature flavor. I’m not exactly sure how you did that.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Worcestershire sauce or Worcestershire.

VeGAINS: I think it depends on where you are. Worcestershire.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Call it wooshy.

VeGAINS: Wooshy? Wooshy sauce?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Yeah, it’s got wooshy sauce, guys, and green onions.

VeGAINS: All right. And the last one we got coming up is a holiday cheese dip.

Protein Deficient Vegan: That one’s really good, too. Yeah, that one was. So it’s a tofu cream cheese with craisins, sunflower seeds and green onions. And it mixes together and is kind of perfect. You just eat it on crackers?

VeGAINS: Yeah, it’s really good. The green onion really gives it a really nice flavor.

Protein Deficient Vegan: And it gets even better just sitting in the fridge. I felt like it was even better on day two, three if it lasts that long, because you’ll eat it, right? Yeah.

VeGAINS: All right, I think that’s it for this week. Next week, like I said, we’ll be coming back with some more of the fundamental series, talking about macronutrients, probably some micronutrients. Talk a little bit about fiber and probably some other nutrition things just to get you started out. So good luck with the TDEE calculations and trying to figure out what you want to do with your calories.

Protein Deficient Vegan: Let us know if you have questions.

VeGAINS: As always, hit us up if you have any questions. You can email or go to the website and leave a comment, or go to our social medias and leave a comment or even send a direct message. All that stuff works and you can see links for all of the places you can find us in the show notes. So I think that’s it. You want to say bye?

Protein Deficient Vegan: Bye!

VeGAINS: Bye, everybody!

Vegan that likes to pick up heavy things and put them down again.
USAW Level 1 Coach
NASM CPT

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