The Last Ten Pounds: Ask the Coach

Hey Coach: I am desperately trying to lose ten pounds. I’m not obese, and I do like to exercise. I also eat pretty well. I just want to drop some weight, for athletic advantage and—I admit it—just to look better. Tell me what to do! Debunk the myths: let me know what will waste my time, and then give me some general guidelines and some little-known tips for peeling off those stubborn last ten pounds.

Scott Saifer responds: First, it’s great that you only have ten pounds to go (and I’m assuming you have a realistic view of how light your body can and should become). Congratulations on getting so close. The final ten pounds are, of course, the hardest … but they can be lost without doing anything unhealthy.

By now pretty much everyone knows that losing weight is a matter of calories in and calories out. If you eat fewer calories than you expend, you’ll lose weight. Eat less, exercise more, and you’ll end up skinny. Unfortunately for you and many others, this makes weight loss sound much simpler than it really is. If you try to eat less, you get hungry—so it can take inhuman willpower to continue to eat less. If you exercise more, you can get hungry as well, at least from most types of exercise. It turns out that the calories-in/calories-out idea is correct, but only the beginning of the story. Here is some information on what kind of calories you take in, and what types of exercise you use to expend your calories out.

The full explanation of calories out is relatively simple: your body uses two primary forms of fuel, in different ratios, depending on the type of exercise. The two types are fat and carbohydrate. (You also always use a small amount of protein). When you use fat as fuel during exercise, you don’t necessarily need to replace it, so that can count as weight lost. When you use carbohydrate as fuel during exercise, it must be replaced before the next session of exercise, or the next session will not go well.