Tag: Calorie Count

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Weight Loss Exercise

How To Figure Out How Many Calories You Consume Each Day


Although most people know that understanding how many calories we consume is essential to losing weight, it can be pretty hard to figure out what that number is (especially if you eat out a lot). Unfortunately, however, ignorance will not work. Many foods contain more calories than you’d expect. If you’re not keeping an eye on how many you eat every day, your weight loss efforts could be in vain.

So what can you do to ensure you get a good estimate of what you are consuming on a daily basis?

Option 1: Sign Up To A Calorie Tracking Service

There are a huge number of online calorie tracking services, as well as smartphone apps, that make it easy for you to register what you eat every day. These websites and apps can easily be found with a simple search online, though note that some do come with a monthly fee.

You may be wondering how exactly these sites work. Basically, they have a built in food database that already has the calorie count of most foods programmed into it. Some were added by the program creators, others may have been added by normal users like you.

All you have to do is sign up for the site, go to the food tracking page, and enter the food you have eaten into the correct search bar. Be specific by entering the exact brand if you can. Once you’ve done that, you can see entries in the food database that match your search, and you can select the closest match and add that your calorie count.

Option 2: Track It Yourself (With Some Help!)

If you don’t have constant access to the internet, or prefer not to use these services, then another thing you can do is purchase a nutrition book that has a list of different foods and their calorie counts, and use this book as a guide to keep a written food diary at home, where you manually count your calories by assigning the values provided in the purchased book for the corresponding foods to the food entries and adding up their total at the end of the day. This way is more tedious, but for less tech-savvy people, this is enough to work.

There are also some digital kitchen scales available that will work out nutritional data for you. You’ll still need to enter a code based on the scale’s manual, but it’s far quicker than working it out yourself. These scales are very accurate and useful for people with specific health conditions, too.

Tracking your calories is a wonderful way to tackle dieting, as it offers you a way to eat whatever you want in a balanced way, while teaching you portion control and nutritional estimation. There’s no need to cut out any particular food out of your diet; just eat what you want but stay within the allocated number of calories for the day.


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How To Create Weight Loss Goals You Can Really Stick To


How many of us have created a weight loss or fitness goal that we gave up on just a few weeks, or even days, later? Most of us create weight loss goals that are not realistic, and give up when we don’t see the results we want.

Here are some things you should know when you are trying to lose weight:

First of all, it’s important to know healthy weight loss means losing up to two pounds a week, give or take. This is likely the amount that your body will be losing on a weekly basis.

There are diets that may promise you a loss of ten pounds a week or something along those lines, but those are diets that will mostly rid you of water weight, and sometimes muscle. Why muscle? When your calorie count is too low, your body will feed on muscle first before it will feed on fat. So, don’t ever go on a very low-calorie diet unless supervised by a doctor.

There are many ways you can lose weight, but the best would probably be by combining a low-calorie diet with exercise. This way, you don’t have to eat too little, and at the same time you will be getting fitter.

How To Set Healthy Goals

Setting healthy goals is simple. Before you start, think about your lifestyle now. What is it that you can cut out that will reduce your calorie count? Are there foods that you are not yet willing to stop eating? Also, can you incorporate exercise into your daily routine? How much are you willing to reduce when it comes to your calorie count? These are some of the things you should consider.

If you are taking things slow, which you should, then you should aim for a loss of about one pound a week. If you are working out heavily though, you can aim higher, for about two to four pounds a week. If you see a bigger loss than that on the scale, then that’s a bonus!

Setting realistic weight loss goals is important so that you don’t end up disappointed and give up altogether. Indeed, weight loss is a slow process, but in the end, it’s definitely worth the effort. So eat healthy, exercise regularly, and change your lifestyle to a healthier one, so that the weight slips off, and stays off, in the long run. Start your journey, keep at it, and don’t give up!


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Weight Loss Exercise

Why Most Diets Suck




I get tired of watching the latest and greatest crazy diet fads come and go. You have probably heard that the whole diet industry makes their money by taking advantage of fat people.

It is true

The reason that the diet industry is screwing over fat people is because almost every diet out there has some magic bullet in it. Eat this and lose weight, avoid that and lose weight. Lose weight eating cookies, lose weight drinking sweetened lemon juice.

Most of it is crap and we all have to realize that. Every time I go to the bookstore I get intrigued and then leave shaking my head.

The trouble is there is no magic bullet. Losing weight always comes down to bringing in less calories than are going out. The trouble is there are lots of variables and the diet makers are always looking to exploit people that are having trouble losing weight by depressing people, confusing them, and then offering the newest magic to lose weight.

Don’t fall for it.

Only Three Things Matter for Losing Weight

What you really need to lose weight is to get your eating under control, your metabolism high, and your exercise up. Lets just looks at these three pieces in isolation

Get you Eating Under Control – almost everyone gets portion control wrong. Your body is a machine and whatever food you can not use your body will just eliminate or store. If you have a burger, fries, and soft drink then no matter what crazy diet you would use you will still have to burn off that 1100 calories or so and it is just not possible, so you eliminate some and store the rest. Now if you eat a normal meal which would be about 400 calories or so you would not be hungry but not full either.

Now again if you eat just the hamburger for a meal you may drop the calorie count but you are not getting the nutrients and vitamins that you need and also you are getting a lot of those calories from artery clogging fat. So if you just had fruit and veggies and lean meat in your diet then that 400 calories would go a lot further and keep you healthier.

Is Running Healthy

Is Running Healthy

Get a Higher Metabolism – This is a bit stranger to look at. Your body really just runs like it should. Your body burns calories to keep everything going, your muscles healed, maintaining your organs and giving you the energy to run or not or whatever you need to do as you have over the last little while.

When you look at your metabolism this way then it is obvious that your metabolism is naturally going to be faster when you are working out a lot (your body is prepping for your lifestyle) and your metabolism will be slower if your are in an office and then living on the couch all evening (the most your body needs to do is get you to the fridge) so your exercise history over the last little while will make a difference to how many calories you burn at rest. Still this is only going to make a smaller difference then eating or exercise.

Get Your Exercise Up – The third piece of the calorie in/calorie out equation is your exercise. If you were to walk well and burn 350 calories in an hour or run hard and burn 1500 calories in the same hour you are doing three things that are helping you. You are raising your resting metabolism, your are making your body work better an more efficiently, and of course you are burning up those calories.

So exercise is going to make a big difference not just for that one workout a day but also the other extraneous exercise. Walking to work, biking with the kids, doing laundry. An active lifestyle means that you are letting it all add up and burning more and more calories as you get stronger and better. Just think, how long would it take for you to going from walking for an hour to running fast for an hour and burning 5 times the calories in an hour.

What About Diet Plans

So bearing in mind these three critical points to losing weight where does everything else fall? Did you know that there are over 37,000 diet books on Amazon.com?

Well if we look at the GI Diet, the Atkins diet, the Mediterranean Diet, in fact any kind of Carb restricting or Fat restricting diets is that the diet itslef is based on moving around your carbs, fat, and protein and these can be important but not as important as eating and exercising right.

The other diets that we see are centred around a food or pill. Eating Acai berrys, or PGX pills are only going to have a small factor on increasing metabolism and do all their work in reducing your hunger.

Finally we have specialized diets like Paleo Diet, Vegan Diet, non-wheat diets, and carb cycling diets. These have their place and the thing that I really like about these diets is that they use science as well as a very passionate group of people teaching others about the benefits of their particular diet.

This gets back to the two diets that I support here on the blog.

Fat Loss for Idiots – Based on what you like or don’t like this diet uses carb cycling to make an exact menu for you to eat. This diet tends to be very successful because you eat what is right and don’t have to become a dietitian to use it. I have more comments on the review for this diet than almost any other post and mostly because people are surprised and excited about the success.

Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle – This is a one book based diet and exercise program that a former bodybuilder teaches us how to eat and exercise to make sure that you lose weight and know how to do it. Tom Venuto is a guy with a track record and a best selling book for years teaching you how to lose the weight and keep it off.

 


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