SkinnyNotes

This post is going to outline the basics of adopting a calorie counting approach to weight loss for anyone needing to reduce their weight. The basics of calorie counting comes down to calories in and calories out. How many calories do you consume and how many do you burn. In order to achieve consistent, maintainable weight loss, you should attempt to introduce a calorie deficit into your diet and exercise regime. What this implies is that in order to start calorie counting you will need an understanding of the calories you are consuming and burning and how to adjust this so as to introduce the desired calorie deficit.

Calories Out

To start this process it is useful to see an indication of the daily number of calories you are burning. In order to do this, you should take a look at a calorie calculator that will compute an estimate of this. A weight loss calorie calculator will be able to compute your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), indicating an estimate of the calories you burn in a resting state with no digestion occurring. This can be estimated be a weight loss calculator by inputting some basic details about yourself such as you gender, age, weight and height. Your Basal Metabolic Rate is then adjusted by a multiplier based on your general level of activity to compute an estimate of the actual number of calories you burn a day.

This will provide a basic indication of the calories you are burning, and to gain a better understanding, you can also look at the typical number of calories burned during different exercises and activities. An exercise calorie calculator will let you see this information by simply inputting you weight and your gender. It is useful to sum the calories burned in your activities in a 24 hour period to see another estimate of your calories burned at a finer granularity.

Calorie In

The next step in calorie counting is to then look at how many calories you are consuming a day. Useful tools for this are online calorie counters that allow you to search for foods and see the number of calories in standard servings. A good habit to get into here is to maintain a food journal where you keep a record of the foods you are consuming. You can then total the calories of the foods in your journal to see how many calories you consume.

The Overall Picture

Many sources indicate that creating a calorie deficit of 3500 calories over a period of time will result in about one pound of weight loss. To achieve such a deficit you may need to consume less food or simply replace some of the high calorie foods in your diet with lower calorie alternatives as well as exercising more to burn more calories.

While engaging in a weight loss program you should only maintain a basic calorie deficit rather than attempting to introduce too large a calorie reduction. Many people suggest that introducing a too severe calorie deficit can result in your system reducing the number of calories it burns, and is therefore unproductive for weight loss. It is fairly widely recommended that you should ideally aim for approximately one to two pounds of weight loss per week to be sustainable.

It is important to maintain a well balanced diet with all the necessary vitamins and minerals as you adjust your diet for your weight loss process. You should also involve your doctor in your weight loss process as this will ensure you adopt a healthy approach and have professional advice that may be unique to your own situation. Some good resources relating to this stuff are the weight loss sections of About.com and WebMD.

Additionally, if you want to get right into tracking your diet and exercise with calorie counting, you should take a look at Weight By Date.  This program will allow you to journal your diet and exercise along with their calories and nutritional information on your PC and it also includes PDA integration to keep your tracking going while out and about.