Determining your goals and calorie consumption
One of the biggest things that a diet can do is make you aware of what you are doing every day that can contribute to ill health or weight gain. Most people do not count calories or are even aware of what type of food types are contained in their meals. Once they begin a diet that calls for calorie-awareness, they are often shocked at how many calories they were eating in one meal, or even each day.
Let’s take an innocent-seeming activity that most of us do every day- purchasing or drinking a coffee beverage. With the advent of Starbuck and other coffee chains, it’s easy to pick up your breakfast to go, but do you realize what you are eating? A simple coffee with cream and two sugars can run you up around 75-120 calories; add a scone or muffin- even a low-fat one- and the calories are boosted to 300-450! That means that the average coffee run could cost you about 400-600 calories, and some do not count that as breakfast!
Your body requires a certain amount of daily caloric intake to stay alive. This includes maintaining life-centered activities, such as moving, breathing, sleeping, supporting your organs, and even thinking. Depending on your body, you will require a certain amount of calories every day. This is a good place to start- determine what your necessary caloric intake is each day.
This can be confusing if you are active or participate in activities requiring extra calories. However, let’s start with the basics. You will obviously require the minimum amount of calories your body requires to survive. This can be determined by calculating your BMI or using a calorie calculator. Your height and weight are taken into consideration to determine your average baseline of calories needed to survive. Most of us; however, don’t just sit around all day, so this needs to be adjusted to account for our other activities.
Any calories that are over what you burn off each day is stored as fat. This is why determining your calorie-goal is so important. Many experts recommend keeping a food diary, which can be used to keep track of all the meals and snacks you eat each day.
You also do not want to consume too few calories or your body will go into starvation mode and become conservative with calorie-burning. This phenomenon reaches back prehistoric caveman times, when food wasn’t readily available and people weren’t sure when or where they would eat again. The body adapted by storing excess calories as fat for future use. Our modern-day circumstances have changed for the better, as we have unlimited access to food and in unlimited quantities. This ancient protection system means when you do not eat enough calories, your body will attempt to store the few calories it does get as fat, as opposed to burning those calories. This is counterproductive to losing weight and healthy dieting. This is why nourishing your body regularly with the proper amount of calories, coming from balanced sources, is the optimal way to lose weight.
To visualize how easy it is to gain weight and how difficult it may be to lose it, consider that one pound of fat is created by approximately 3,500 calories of extra or stored energy. Losing this extra ‘stored’ energy or weight will require you to consume fewer calories per day or burn off the calories. However you end up ‘subtracting’ the calories, since the normal caloric intake for most people will not exceed 2000-2500 per day, you can see how losing one pound can take some work!
Using this formula, if you maintained your typical caloric intake at 2000 calories each day, you would need to burn off 500 calories each day for a week to lose the pound. If you noticed, it was mentioned above that food diaries can help one be aware of the caloric intake each day. Perhaps you consume over the required amount of calories- could you shave off some of these foods you didn’t realize were so calorie-rich? For example, you could cut out snacks or coffee drinks, taking up to 500 calories off your daily intake. Choose exercises like jogging, walking to your destination instead of driving, or taking your children for a bike ride - these are easy activities to help you burn off calories.
Also keep in mind that you should eat the calories from proper sources to lose and maintain your weight. You could eat a meal of cookies that equals your daily caloric needs, but it will not help with weight loss because the ‘empty’ calories are not nutritious enough for your body to use efficiently.