Count calories to lose weight

Many times people complicate the matter of losing weight. The simple truth is that you burn more calories than calories consumed. Fad diets, pills, and products shown on television are often marketed to provide quick results. While they may show some results at first, their long-term use can be detrimental to your health. The best solution is to make some simple changes to your daily lifestyle and not worry about instant success. Give a solid plan time to work and the results will soon follow.

For every pound of body fat you need about 3,500 calories to burn. This is 3,500 calories more than the calories you already burn daily. It would be ridiculous to try to burn that many in one day; it would take about 7 hours of jogging to do it. The sensible approach is to take it in small steps. Walking for 1 hour at a moderate pace will burn about 350 calories; high impact aerobics for 45 minutes will burn 450 calories. Just using these examples, you can calculate that you will lose 26 pounds in a year if you only walk 1 hour for 10 days in every 2 week period.

There are several websites online that are dedicated to calorie calculators. A simple search with the “calorie calculator” phase will be the best place to start. The following method requires the use of these calculators to collect the necessary data.

There are four basic steps to the calorie counting method of losing weight.

1. Calculate your basal metabolic rate, BMR. This is a number that represents the number of calories you need each day to perform everyday functions. Digesting food and breathing are just a few examples of functions that burn calories in the process of daily life.
2. Calculate your calories burned. You will need to keep track of every activity you do throughout the day. Sleeping, walking, sitting at a desk, jogging, and besides being dead, everything else counts. You’ll also need to keep track of how long each activity was done. All functions will burn a certain amount of calories, sleeping for 8 hours will burn about 500 calories, sitting in a recliner watching TV for 1 hour will burn about 80 calories.
3. Calculate the number of calories consumed. Keep track of every item you eat or drink. All items will have a calorie count, so it is important to know the amount consumed as well. For meals cooked from a recipe, use the ingredient list along with the serving size to determine the calories for the dish. Try to be as precise as possible.
4. Do the math. The formula is; BMR + Calories Burned – Calories consumed. So as an example, if your BMR is 1700, your activity burned 700 calories, and you ate 3000 calories, you would calculate 1700 + 700-3000. In this example, you would be gaining weight because you consumed 600 more calories than you burned. If you substitute 2000 calories for the amount consumed, 400 calories will be burned and then consumed, which means you will lose weight.

By implementing the calorie counting plan, you will easily become familiar with how much food to eat and how much physical activity to do. After a couple of months or so, many people will have adjusted to the point where detailed follow-up is no longer required, they will have adjusted to the process and to a new lifestyle.