Weight Loss: How To Lose Weight By Counting Calorie And Fat

Calories don’t make you fat. Fat doesn’t make you fat either. You only get fatter if you consume more calories than you burn off. You can eat as much as you like as long as you burn it all off with exercise. Reducing your weigh is about getting to know your body and balancing your calories. Read on to learn how to lose weight by counting calorie and fat.

Don’t rely on diets to tell you how to lose weight

Many diets that you can pay good money for will put you on a fixed daily calorie intake and they try to make an estimate of how many calories you should consume based on things like your sex and height hoping that the suggested calorie intake will be right for you. The problem with this approach is that everyone is different which means that you might lose weight eating 1500 calories per day and someone else might cheerfully shed pounds by eating 3000 calories a day.

How can these diets hope to get this right for you? In my opinion they can’t and they rely on the laws of averages to make their diet work for enough people to call it a success. This is why you should never rely on popular diets to lose weight. There is more on this subject here Lose Weight, Plan To Stay Lean and Healthy

So how do you work out how many calories you should be eating? You know that you will gain weight if you consume more calories than you burn so just take a look at what’s happening to your body right now. Are you getting fatter or is your weight stable? If your weight isn’t changing much week to week then you know that you’re balancing your calorie intake with your natural metabolism and exercise level. If you’re weight is increasing then you know that you are consuming too many calories and you aren’t in balance yet.

Counting calorie and fat to determine how much you need to eat

Calculate your daily calorie intake now before you attempt any dieting. Make a careful note of everything that you eat and drink every day for a week or two and use one of the widely available calorie charts to work out your average daily calorie intake. You should keep separate totals for the different food groups; carbohydrates, proteins and fats because just changing the proportions of these can help to make a big difference.

Knowing how many calories you’re consuming every day should give you some idea of what you need to do to lose weight. If your weight is increasing then you know that you must reduce your calorie intake or increase your exercise level until your body reaches balance and your weight is stable.

If your weight is stable then you know exactly how many calories you normally burn because it’s now equal to the calories that you calculated that you consume. You should now realise that what you need to do to lose weight is either consume fewer calories than you usually do or take more exercise or both. You will make these adjustments to your personal nutrition, which is going to be far more accurate and effective than any estimate you got from a diet plan.

How to adjust your calorie balance to reduce your weight

Now the rule of thumb is that 1 pound of fat is 3500 calories which means that you need to burn 3500 more calories than you consume to lose 1 pound of fat. For healthy safe weight loss you should plan to lose no more than 2 pounds each week which will encourage your body to shed fat rather than muscle and it will give you a good chance of keeping the fat off permanently.

I suggest that you aim to lose 1 pound per week, which is 3500 calories, or 500 calories per day. Burning off as much as you can with exercise and reducing the calories in your meals to take off the remainder is the best way to do it. You should also try to reduce the amount of fat and carbohydrate in your meals and replace it with lean protein, which will help your body to burn fat without increasing your appetite.

Simplify calorie counting with menus

So that’s given you an idea of how to lose weight by counting calories and fat but counting calories accurately every day is a chore and you probably don’t have the time to do it. An alternative that has worked very well for me is to create daily menus. Take a sheet of paper and plan a day of meals. For each meal calculate the calorie value broken down into fat, carbohydrate and protein and make sure that the total for the day meets your daily calorie goal. Do this for several days meals and pick the one you fancy every day to follow. Making menus like this and only counting the calories for each one once makes losing weight by counting calories a lot easier than doing it every day.