The Pareto Diet System: Part 3 – Net Caloric Deficit or Surplus

Introduction

In the third part of the Pareto diet, we are going to focus on creating a caloric surplus, or deficit. Generally if you want to loose weight you should focus on eating at a caloric deficit, and if you want to gain weight you should eat at a surplus. 

Although many nutritional experts will point out that calories are not a perfect measure of the energy derived from a food. They are a good rule of thumb, especially if like most people, you are eating a variety of foods. The differences in thermic effects, and digestion rates between different types of calories will tend to balance out.

The vast majority of people who have difficulty either gaining or loosing weight would find that issues they may think of as being innate or genetic, are actually just due to caloric consumption. This is why after compliance, I think calories are the second most important component of the pareto-diet pyramid.

Calculating Caloric Expenditure

The first step in the process of eating at a deficit or surplus, is calculating how many calories you are currently expending per day. Assuming you have a mostly sedentary lifestyle, with maybe 1 hour of physical activities per day a good rule of thumb is that you maintenance caloric intake would be:

15 x your body weight.

So for egmif you weight 160 lbs, the amount of calories per day you need in order to maintain that weight would be:

15 x 160 = 2,400 calories.

This is just a general rule you can find detailed calculations on google. But generally this is a good starting point, you can adjust this amount if you find that you are gaining or loosing too much or not enough weight. Generally I suggest 2-3 weeks before making any changes as weight can vary throughout the day (Protip: check your weight first thing in the morning every week so minimize fluctuations due to water retention etc).

Now if you want to loose weight generally, a deficit of 3,500 calories would result in 1 lb of weight loss. So if you want to loose 1 lb a week. You would eat 500 calories less than your total caloric intake every week. For the average person I would not recommend trying to loose more than 2 lbs per week as this can cause health issues.

Tracking Your Food

You can use an app like Myfitnesspal or Calorie Counter by FatSecret to track the food you are eating. Generally these apps have pretty large databases, and you can add your own food items as well.

The point with these apps is not 100% precision, you are just trying to get to a basic level of accuracy and which will allow you to get a general sense of what you are eating. 

What about burning calories and exercize?

Generally it is easier to reduct calories from diet rather than increase them from exercise. An exception would be if you take a new sport or activity that you enjoy and can practice it for an extended period of time on a daily basis. Your maintenance level of calories would change depending on your activity level. So keep this in mind, if you are trying to gain or loose weight.