Back To Basics

Anyone who says that you can't use a math equation and figure out how to loose weight is trying to sell you something. I'll describe a math equation that you can use to calculate how many calories you can eat each day and loose one pound per week.

Step 1: Calculate the number of calories your body needs to maintain it's current weight.
You can use the Calorie Calculator located here at the Mayo Clinic website. Fill in your age, height, weight and gender then click Next. Now you need to choose your activity level. For this I always choose Inactive because then we can calculate our workouts ourselves. Click Submit when you've chosen your activity level. We'll use my results as an example. The total number of calories my body burns each day without exercise is 1,850. So if I eat 1,850 calories each day and do no exercise I'll maintain my current weight.

Step 2: Reduce calories for weight loss
A deficiency of 3,500 calories is equal to 1 pound of weight loss. With this in mind if I decided to eat only 1,350 calories each day and still did not exercise I should loose one pound of weight every 7 days or so. Because I took in 500 calories less than what my body required I begin to loose weight....simple.

With all this in mind imagine that I took in only 1350 calories each day and also exercised 3 times a week for 30 minutes each time using a treadmill going 5 mph. For my weight I should be burning 290 calories or somewhere around that. That means each week I create a deficit of 3,370 calories which means I should loose about .96 pounds per week or 3.85 pounds per 4 weeks.

Counting calories is not for everyone but I've proven it to work. I lost 20 pounds in 2 months by tracking my calories from eating and the calories burned by the exercise that I did. This helped me to understand how much I should be eating. I learned to limit the junk food because the junk food was high in calories which meant that couldn't eat much of it before reaching my daily limit of calories. Then I would be left starving for the rest of the day. What did help is that I could eat anything I wanted but I couldn't go over my calorie limit.

A great website for finding out how many calories are in many different kinds of food visit www.CalorieKing.com. They also have software to help track your calories as well which is what I used.