How to Lose Weight
How to Lose Weight
Dieting doesn’t feel good. There, I said it. Losing weight is an uphill battle against bad habits and an unhealthy lifestyle that you’ve built up for your entire life. The good news is that losing weight is not exactly a mystery. Dropping pounds is a simple formula consisting mainly of burning more calories than you consume.
Then again, if it were just a simpe matter of mathematics, there wouldn’t be a $35 billion business and that’s just money spent on weight loss products. Many of us think we need to take drastic steps in order to lose weight and be more attractive to potential lovers. Losing weight isn’t always a matter of finding the latest fad diet, fitness tools from television, or diet pills and other products that swear you’ll have instant success with little work. The best way to lose weight over the long haul is to make specific smaller changes in your daily habits to slowly shed extra pounds and feel healthier. Though the dieting industry wants us to concentrate on fast results, healthy weight loss usually means a long term commitment.
A Formula for Weight Loss
When you read dieting material, much is made of something called the BMI, or Body Mass Index. What people don’t tell you is that BMI was invented as a sociological experiment a hundred years ago in Europe, and not intended for use as a dieting statistic. There are better ways of calculating your weight as it corresponds to your health. The following formula is the one recommended most by doctors and diet experts.
The most important step to weight loss is to calculate a number called your “BMR”. The BMR is a better indication of your weight health than the BMI. It stands for basal metabolic rate and it indicates what your body naturally needs to maintain basic functions like breathing and digestion. The BMR number corresponds directly to the bare minimum number of calories you have to consume each day for healthy living. Think of BMR as your baseline for food intake. Even though the BMR calculation method below is accurate for most people, no single formula is perfectly accurate, so take stock of how you feel and adjust your caloric intake as you need to.
1. Figure out your daily activity level. There are plenty of calorie calculators that tell you how many calories you burn naturally doing everyday things like sitting, standing, lifting weights, or other exercising throughout a given day. My favorite calorie calculator can be found here through About.com. Simply select your activity and the length of time you do it and the calculator spits out a number to help you determine how many calories you’re burning. If you can keep a daily journal of your activities for a week or so, you should be able to get an accurate number of how much caloric burning you’re doing.
2. Find your BMR number. The BMR is basically just a ratio based on your age, weight, height, and gender. A good automated BMR calculator can be found here or if you’re more the DIY type, use this pencil and paper formula found here. Write down your BMR number.
3. Keep an accurate journal of the number of calories you consume. Again, there are thousands of websites that contain basic food calorie information that, used in cooperation with your food journal, tell you the caloric amount of the foods and drinks you consume on a daily basis. Sometimes simply looking at the calorie count of certain food items can help you lose weight — you may not know just how bad for you those three cups of morning coffee are until you look at the numbers. When you journal and count calories, it is most important to be perfectly accurate so that even if you’re off by a little you still have a close estimation of your intake.
4. Add up your numbers. Using your BMR number, add it to your daily activity calories and finally subtract your intake of calories from food and drink from the first total. If you take in more calories than your burn (for instance if your BMR + activity number is 2000 and you eat 2500 calories a day) it is no wonder that you keep gaining weight. If you burn more than you eat, you’ll start to lose weight.
Alternatives to Unhealthy Eating Habits
There are simple small changes you can make to decrease your caloric intake and find yourself fast on the way to losing weight. Simply substitute high calorie foods and drinks for more responsible choices to get rid of bad calories and speed up your weight loss.
Here are some examples of unhealthy eating and drinking habits and simple ways to replace them with better calorie sources.
If you like to have a soda in the afternoon as a pick me up, consider the amount of calories that one can of fizzy drink adds to your body. A single Coca Cola adds 140 calories to your intake. If you need the alertness that a soda provides, switching to tea (either iced or hot) could save you nearly every one of those calories, as even the most caloric tea contains only two calories.
It is easy to make unhealhy calorie choices at breakfast time. Fast food breakfasts are the worst choice. A typical breakfast sandwich from a fast food restaurant contains hundreds of calories which can easily be replaced by a tasty (and quick to prepare) home breakfast. If you eat a whole wheat bagel with a little bit of peanut butter, you can save yourself nearly 200 calories over a fast food stop.
Eating sweets and candy is a very common unhealthy habit that people do sometimes without realizing it. Rather than using a break at work or at home to take in hundreds of calories from sugary candies, use that impulse to eat junk food as a springboard for burning calories. Try walking up and down stairs for five minutes instead of eating that piece of chocolate to burn 100 calories rathe than absorb them.
To lose a single pound of fat, your body has to burn 3500 calories above what you normally burn from daily acitivity. Thinking of it that way, it seems impossible to lose weight, yet people do it all the time. Since there’s simply no healthy way to burn all 3500 calories in a single day, taking a long view of weight loss and working day by day to drop excess pounds is the key to successful dieting. Don’t let daily mistakes or setbacks break your spirit. Any healthy change takes time, including a change that leads to a lower weight and more sex appeal.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 5:06 am and is filed under Attraction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.