UnFAIR, life!

You know what's totally unfair?

A pound of fat is 3500 calories for everyone.

Yup. It's completely unfair.

Why?

If you've ever watched The Biggest Loser, you'll see the people on the show lose 5-10 lbs each week. Those are HUGE numbers, and it means they've burned 35,000 extra calories that week to lose those 10 lbs. The problem is, if you've watched that show enough, you start to think those kinds of numbers are normal. And they're NOT.

And it's totally not fair to the rest of us.

Most people will lose a decent amount of weight on the first week or two of a new diet and exercise program, and that's usually because that first week or two is when they're doing the program with the most gusto, adhering to the program faithfully, and the metabolism hasn't completely adapted yet. That, and most people are tall enough, and large enough, that their baseline daily calorie burn is fairly high.

The unfair fact of life is that larger people burn more calories than smaller people.

I hear you say "Wha?" What are you smoking, Lee? (Just so we're clear, no smoking, kids. It's bad for ya.)

Let me give you an example. A friend of mine from high school recently posted on his Facebook that he'd burned 2100 calories in 2 hours. I was impressed, so I asked him what he did. Well, he'd done some weights, some intervals, and some bodyweight exercises. Nothing too unusual. And that kind of calorie burn for someone his size isn't all that unusual either--he's 6'4" and a shade under 250 lbs.

For me, at 5' 3.75" (yes, those three-quarters of an inch are important, darn it!) and my current weight, if I did the exact same exercises with the exact same intensity, I'd be extraordinarily lucky to burn half the number of calories, and it's much more likely that I'd burn a quarter to a third of that number of calories and feel like that's *totally* awesome.

It's so unfair. Because I'm small, I'd have to work out at the same intensity for four times longer to burn the same number of calories. And 1 lb of fat is STILL 3500 calories, both for him and for me. In ONE day, he's burned the equivalent of of my eating a 500 calorie deficit and working my butt off for more than FOUR DAYS. In one day, he burned off more than half a lb!

I could just scream with the injustice of it all!

So if you have a larger frame or you're taller or have a lot of weight to lose, then you'd better be feeling lucky, punk. You burn more calories doing the same stuff I do, and you can lose weight that much easier.

This is why life is unfair. And one of the reasons why it's so hard to lose those last 10-20 lbs.

And it's also why you should celebrate every single pound of your successful fat loss.

It's so incredibly frustrating for me to work my butt off week after week paying the usual supercareful attention to what I eat (both because of the food allergies and because I'm trying to lose fat), and working out for two hours almost every day while putting my full effort into my workouts, and weigh myself only to find that I've lost one measly lb that I can reasonably assume was water weight.

You can do it. Diet and exercise. It's a way of life. It's hard work. It's worth it. Keep going, even when you're frustrated. Because after a while, those tiny 1 lb differences add up to big changes. And the need for new, smaller clothes (which is another gripe for another day).