If you want to lose weight and went on a diet, one topic that sooner or later come up is calorie counting. Is that really necessary to successfully lose weight?
Well, the only thing you really need to lose weight is to create a calorie deficit, meaning you need to make sure that you burn more calories than you eat. And that exactly is not so easy to monitor unless you have changed your eating behaviour drastically or even went on a fast.
Usually, the easier way to diet is to go onto a calorie deficit of about 500 calories, which would make you lose one pound per week. This is not the speediest weight loss, especially when you consider the promises of the weight loss industry with it’s different diet schemes and pills where it looks so easy to lose 10 pounds in only 5 days.
However, a pace of losing 1 pound per week is healthy and doable. You do not even need a specific diet plan, just cut out 500 calories per day. The danger is that after a few days you start slipping back eating something extra here and there and soon you are up to your old level of daily calorie consumption. The way to control your calorie intake is to measure it! There is a saying that you only can control what you can measure.
And we can measure our calorie intake, we are just too lazy. But it is not even that hard to do. Yes, you need to weigh you food and look up how many calories there are in 100g of that food and then calculate how many calories you just ate. But on most food items, there are even labels indicating the calorie content making it fairly easy for you. For the other food items, just look up the caloric value on the internet and write it down, so you don’t have to look it up again the next time. You will see, we really don’t eat that many different dishes, we are creatures of habit!
If you are on your computer often, then you may also want to use special calorie counting widgets that you can load into your yahoo account or igoogle. Or you can get more sophisticated using an electronic food scale which stores nutritional values for up to 1,000 food items.
