Metabolism is the rate at which your body burns its calories just to keep your body alive—for the functioning of the vital organs, such as the heart, lungs, brain and the rest of the nervous system, liver, kidneys, sex organs, muscles and skin. Your body is burning calories 24-by-7, even while you’re hiding from your boss reading these articles. Basically, an average man burns about 11 calories per pound of body weight every day. If you weighed 150 lbs, then your metabolism rate is around 1650 calories.

Okay, now you know your metabolism is helping you to burn calories. What else is burning your calories other than this?

Way #1 – The Physical activity..
..still need the explanation? The more muscles you involve in your physical activity, the more calories you will burn.

Way #2 – The Thermic Effect of Food..
TEF in shorthand is the increment in energy expenditure above resting metabolic rate due to the cost of metabolizing for storage and use. The magnitude is about 10% of the caloric intake of a given time period, though the effect varies substantially for different food components. Basically, a complex food component such as protein, high fiber food, and low glycemic index carbohydrate has a much larger thermic effect, compared with dietary fat and simple sugar.

You can read more details about Thermic Effect of Food here.
I also recommend you to check more about Glycemic Index here.

Bingo! Now after reading these, I believe you already got the idea – how to incorporate your diet plan, exercise plan into your weight loss program. Exercise and pack some muscle to raise your metabolism, choose good that has larger thermic effect as your natural fat burner, and be physically more active. Thats it.

After reading how your body works in my previous post, I'm quite sure now you begin to understand why every diet plan advise you to eat 5 to 6 meals per day. The idea is all about to maintain your blood sugar tank, not to overflow, while it keeps us from hungry, which in turns slowing down our metabolism.

Think there is a blood sugar tank bandwidth, with lower limit and higher limit. When you take some food, you going to bring your blood sugar level up to higher level, and due to your physical and metabolism activity, it will gradually going down to your lower limit. And when it goes down to lower limit, you probably begin to feel hungry – time for refueling.


So what will happen if you take excessive calories in your meal? The calories derived from your meal will actually burst off your higher limit of your tank, and the excessive calories will be stored into fat cells.

You might be thinking to starve so your body can turn fat cells into your tank? Unfortunately, our body is really smart and its designed to switch into survival mode – and slowing down your metabolism. So during the survival mode, when you run out of fuel, you will probably losing some fats along with your muscles.

There is lot of diet plan been introduced out there such as Atkins diet, South Beach diet, Mediterranean diet, Abs diet etc. I didn't make specific comparison between all those, and of course they have their own good points and bad points, but I strongly believe the same principle still applies. I personally prefer the Abs Diet, written by Men’s Health editor David Zinczenko – I love the powerfoods part, and this diet is really simple - easy to follow.

You are free to choose which diet you'll going to stick to, but if you come from a place where it’s difficult to get those foods recommended by the plan, then how?? The answer is by knowing how our bodies work especially our metabolism, and then create your own diet plan.

Don't be surprise, obesity could contribute to global warming too.

I know what you’re thinking: How could obese people add to this? They are not releasing extra heat? lol..

Because thinner people eat less and are more likely to walk than rely on cars, a slimmer population would lower demand for fuel for transportation and for agriculture.

The researchers found that obese people require 18 percent more than someone with a stable BMI, just to sustain normal energy and to maintain daily activities.

Read full article here

We all know Obesity is our enemy, and the first thing we should do is to know our enemy. So, let's back to school and begin with knowing how our body works first. Or else, you are just shooting an arrow in the dark.

1, Think your body system as a car..

..the different is, the car is running on gas, but our bodies is running on blood sugar (glucose). If you ever did a blood test, there is a result showing you how much sugar concentrated in your blood, usually stated as mmol/liter.

When your running out of sugar, brain will detect it and send signal to your body system, and then hormone are released that instruct fat cells to metabolize fat and converted them to sugar form into our bloodstream.

And it also works in reverse way, which means if your bloodstream is overflowed by sugar, it will be converted to fat cells. This mechanism translates to our sugar fuel tank.. and the tank definitely has its size and normally its proportionate to our body weight.

2, Don't forget the Law of conservation of energy..

..states that energy can not be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another, e.g. friction turns kinetic energy into thermal energy.

The food you eat, will become a food energy that soon will be converted to different form of energy.

Any under utilized food energy will be converted to potential energy - which is stored as fat cells!

3, Metabolism cause you burn calories 24/7..

..even at your resting state, just as a car still burning gas even on idling state. Oopss, did I mentioned the car again?

Basically,even there is no physical activity, your body still using the energy for the functioning of the vital organs, such as the heart, lungs, brain and the rest of the nervous system, liver, kidneys, sex organs, muscles and skin. For men, caloric expenditure due to metabolism is averagely, say about 1500kcal.

A good handicap for us, I guess. So if you are thinking to lose weight, your strategy is to play with your metabolism and how to rev up you metabolism.

Its been couples of months since I started my weight loss program, I'm getting familiar with my swiss-ball and dumbell workout. One day, I was working in my office when my long time no see friend ping me on my MSN just to have some chat.

Carl was asking my opinion on what Levi’s jean to purchase, and then I started browsing for good jeans in the Levi’s website and recommended him a low hip kinda jeans.

“Poor you, this jean do not suit you,” he said. “Why not?” I replied..

“Oh, is that your built just not fit them” and laughing at me. “Duh, sorry I’ve had to tell you this – I’m now 74kg! And that is 14kg lighter than I was when we were at KSM (our previous company)”

After telling him how I changed my diet with regular workout, finally we met on weekend in the morning. Well, seeing is believing.. He is kinda inspired about the changed I've gone through, and by adapting some principle of my workout, he started to revised his own workout plan in order to drop more fat.

Well, actually Carl has been a runner for years and own a commercial gym membership, famous gym in town. But still he has problem losing any more fat. He kinda stuck at 18%, while I at the same time at about 17.5% from my original >30% within 5~6 months.

Things did not run smoothly and not always on my side after all. I've been suffering a serious knee pain for more than a month. Until one day I decided to meet my doctor.

An early 50s man is just an outpatient doctor, but I was lucky because the doctor is a runner too. He has experiences participating in many half marathon competition locally.

And his precious advices really cure my pain – R.I.C.E method, strengthen the Quad muscle using body squat exercise, including high quality of protein into diet for recovery and Fish oil as supplement. And within 2 weeks, I recovered from my knee pain.

I got my motivation again. Thanks Doc!

On May 2007, I bought a couple of running shorts and a pair of running shoes. And that was my first running shoe ever in 29 years. What a shame. Its a pair from New Balance – a new father need a balance brand. Hahaha.

This time I really promised to myself, I'm going to get back in shape and start running every weekend. I did my own research how to do good running from the Internet, invested on lot of Health magazines, and started to cook my own dinner. I make sure not to skip my breakfast, limited my carb intake and at the same time try to get high quality protein in my diet.

The first month I lost about 3kg. I was quite satisfied by the result but another problem begin to happened – its my knee! It seems my knee hates to take the impact from running by an overweight person like me. And also I doubted my running technique.

I was 85++ kg at the moment when I started running. My knee really de-motivated me. I stopped and hope I could recover immediately...

The word "debu" here is come from Japanese. Debu means fat, plump, or chubby and its not nice word to say to other than your friends.


Therefore, debu papa means a chubby or an overweighed father. Lol, guess what? I was a "debu papa" until May 2007. And it’s been one year since I started my healthy diet and regular exercise.


Now I maintain my ideal weight around 69kg. Not bad for a 5 ft 8 inch person like me.

Well, I am not debu papa anymore... I started to blog my journey of weight loss and dedicated this blog to those, who are a father out there, and do not know how to do with their weight problem.

Stop making any reason for not having time to workout. I will share my weight loss tips here, we can exchange information related to weight loss and overall fitness and achieve our fitness goals.

Transformation from debu papa to Fit papa. :)