Like I said in the last lesson, the single most important variable in determining diet success is your calorie balance. From a scientific standpoint, whether you gain weight or lose weight is determined by the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed from one type to another. Now, I don't want to turn this into a physics lesson. But when applied to dieting, the first law of thermodynamics states that your body weight is dependent only on the difference between the amount of calories that you consume versus the amount of calories that you burn, which is known as your calorie balance. Before we go into the different forms of calorie balances, let's first talk about what a calorie actually is. a calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one liter of water by one degree Celsius.

So that means a calorie is a form of energy measurement. When you eat Your food, you're consuming the energy that is stored within the food. Your body then uses this energy to produce movement and keep your organism alive. Alternatively, if not all energy is used right away, it can also be stored for later use. Some energy can be stored in the muscles and liver as glycogen, but these stores fill up pretty quickly so your body will then store any additional calories in the form of body fat. Back to calorie balance.

There are three different states of calorie balances, and you can only be in one state at a time. The first is a negative calorie balance. This of course, when someone burns more calories than he or she consumes, here, your body needs more calories to produce energy for your daily functions that it gets from your food. That means it makes up the difference by burning stored energy, meaning you will lose weight because the necessary energy will come from the breakdown of body tissue and negative calorie balance. Always results in weight loss. The second state is a neutral calorie balance.

Here a person's intake of calories is the same as the expenditure of activities and body processes. This means that all the calories you consume will be used for some form of body process and your weight will remain stable. Now, of course, calorie intakes and activities on any given day are not going to be exactly 100% the same. But over the course of weeks and months and neutral calorie balance is quite possible. If your weight hasn't changed over the last few months, your calorie balance is almost always neutral. The third and last stage is a positive calorie balance.

Here more energy is consumed through food and is being burned to produce body processes or movement. As I explained before, in this case, the extra calories are stored as either glycogen in the muscle and liver or as fat. Okay, so now that you know the story mentals behind calorie balances. Let's see how all this DRI theory can help us with actual real life dieting. What you need to understand is that your calorie balance will determine how much muscle you can gain and how much fat you can lose over any period of time. Why?

Because calories are literally the building blocks of body tissue. If you want to build more muscle, you not only need to train, but you also need to provide your body with the necessary raw materials to form muscle cells. On the other hand, if you want to burn fat, you have to make sure that not enough calories are shuttled into fat cells to keep them the same size. I explained both processes in more detail in the muscle building and fat loss formula