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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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Free Weight Loss Plans and Programs

Trying to lose weight is a difficult task. Not only are you being bombarded with new diet fads that promise hard to believe results, but you are also being bombarded with information that is completely false and if you try these plans you are going to less likely to stick with the new idea of losing weight. This is why it is vital that you find a healthy diet weight loss plan. Not doing so will only cause you to avoid all weight loss plans in the future and you will ultimately never lose the weight.

There are many websites that offer a free diet plan for you to utilize so that you literally lose nothing when you try these new diets. So how can you find these diets? A simple search online through a search engine will give you thousands of hits. The work then begins as you need to decipher between those that are considered a healthy diet and those that are nothing but fad plans that will only have you lose the weight for a short-term basis. You goal is to find a weight loss plan that teaches you a new way to eat without having to starve yourself in order to finally shed the pounds. Too many times people give into these plans that promise losing twenty pounds within two weeks and are surprised that after they stop the plan that they actually gain that weight back or even more weight.

So, what is the criteria that you should set for a free diet plan? For starters, you should make sure that the plan includes a balanced diet in that you are getting foods from all of the food groups. If you are only eating one type of food, for example, the cabbage diet, though you may lose weight quickly because you are essentially starving your body, you will not keep this weight off. Secondly, you want a plan that will help you lose weight by changing your life. You should not look at this as it is just as though this is temporary and once you lose the weight that you want you can then eat whatever you want. This is where most people find the hardest point to accept, this new plan needs to become how you eat from now on, so that you maintain the size that you want to be once you get there.

With the invention of the Internet, it has literally made it easier to find these free diet plans, which saves you money and the number of resources that respond when you simply type in ‘free diets’ is incredible. However, what should you watch out for? Watch out for fad plans of course, but how can you tell if the plan is a fad? Do a little extra research on the plan that you are interested in and find reviews of what other people say, look at the aspects involved in the plan to see if they appear healthy and above all else, ask your physician before you begin so that they too can look at the aspects in the plan. Also, watch out for those plans that say that they are free then ask for your credit card number in case you ever want to buy something else from them, this can more than likely be called a hoax since they are asking for your personal information.

Overall, use your common sense. If the plan seems to good to be true, then chances are that it is. Once you start it if it feels as if you stay hungry or you notice that you begin to have side-effects such as headache, nausea, fainting or whatnot from the particular plan you choose, then see a doctor as it could be this particular plan is just not giving you enough substance to survive.

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