You hear the term “Work-Life Balance” a lot in regards to how work affects your relationships and personal life, but rarely do we consider how our jobs and our lives outside of work affect our weight loss goals.
How active you are at work and outside of work plays a big role in your weight loss goal. Now there are also factors such as stress, job satisfaction, and mentally demanding vs physically demanding jobs. At the end of the day, we are trying to do one thing when it comes to weight loss.
Creating a caloric deficit. This simply means I am using more calories than I am consuming. There are two ways to do this.
- Move and work harder
- Eat fewer calories
These are not created equal. Why? It is way more time efficient to eat fewer calories then to exercise more.
Example:
It takes about 1 or 2 minutes to eat a chocolate chip muffin with 550 calories vs it will take a 170lbs person running at 4 mph for 67 minutes to use 550 calories.
What’s a better use of time? Not eating the muffin. I think we can all see and agree on that. The trick is not deciding to eat or not the muffin but how you get yourself to make better choices. That is an entirely different article in and of itself and the key to all your lifelong wants.
The point wasn’t to say that moving and exercise are useless but if you eat like every day is your birthday then no amount of exercises will help you lose weight. But know that it won’t hurt you either.
Different jobs and lifestyles will affect how much you can eat. You may have thought to yourself at one time or another, “why can that person eat so much and just lose weight when I have to starve to see any changes.”
There are a number of factors that play into how much a person needs to eat to maintain or lose weight. There is your build (how much muscle), how active is your job, and how active is your downtime outside of work.
A look at different jobs and activity levels.
Let us take a 40-year-old female who weighs 170 lbs and is 5”5’ tall and wants to lose 30 lbs in 6 months. That is 1.25 lbs a week which is a very maintainable pace.
If she primarily works a sitting job this is what her caloric breakdown would be for different activity levels ranging from doing nothing to exercising a few times a week, to exercising vigorously 3 to 4 times a week.
| Sitting Job | No Activity | Moderate Activity (2-3 workouts a week) | High Activity (5+ workouts a week) |
| Maintain Current Weight
|
1790 | 2017 | 2131 |
| Lose Weight | 1343 | 1591 | 1716 |
| Moderate Movement (Nurse, Teacher, Cook) | No Activity | Moderate Activity (2-3 workouts a week) | High Activity (5+ workouts a week) |
| Maintain Current Weight
|
2017 | 2244 | 2358 |
| Lose Weight | 1591 | 1840 | 1964 |
| High Movement
(Construction, Waitresses, Carpenter) |
No Activity | Moderate Activity (2-3 workouts a week) | High Activity (5+ workouts a week) |
| Maintain Current Weight
|
2131 | 2358 | 2586 |
| Lose Weight | 1716 | 1964 | 2213 |
What to do with this:
Realize that what you do from 9 to 5 plays a role in your weight loss journey. Activity is activity and if you are sedentary at work it will be harder to lose weight without focusing on exercise and nutrition.
Even if you describe yourself as active because you work out 5 to 6 days a week, that still doesn’t dismiss your job and what you do for 40 plus hours a week. If you look at the chart above, the sitting job, even at high activity, still can only eat around 1716 calories which is the same caloric number for the high movement job with no extra activity.
A waitress, or someone with a similarly active job, can lose weight with only changing their diet. Someone with a sitting job has to bust their butt to enjoy the same caloric amount.
That brings us to the question:
Are you eating for what your life demands of you?
I will leave you with this.
Are your eating habits matching your activity levels? On days you don’t work out, do you eat less than the days you do a workout? If you have an active job but sit a lot on the weekends do you adjust your food intake? If you sit all week but go on backpacking trips on the weekend do you adjust your food intake?
Your Fitness Sherpa,
Josh W
