Lose Weight and Optimize Your Diet by Counting Calories

To lose weight, the energy intake from food must be less than the energy output of your body. Many diets attempt to achieve this through giving rough guidelines on “portion sizes”. However, the best way to achieve the calorie deficit is through calorie counting. It is only when you count your calories that you know for sure how much energy from food you have consumed. Counting portions may actually prevent you from losing weight because, quite simply you may be consuming too many calories and not know it!

How Many Calories do you need each day?

As a general rule of thumb, the average adult requires 2000 calories per day (for women) and 2500 calories per day (for men) in order to maintain their current level of bodyweight. These should come from a balanced diet with foods from all the food groups. To lose weight, you should start by eating 300 calories less than your maintenance amount, then adjusting from that benchmark based on whether you lose weight or not.
How to keep track of calories.

Although it may seem a chore at first, counting calories allows you to see exactly how much food you have consumed so that you know whether you are on track with your diet or not. You can keep track of your calorie intake in a small notebook or on a spreadsheet on your computer. How you do it doesn’t really matter, so long as you do actually keep track of your calories. To find out how many calories your food contains, use a calorie counting book such as Corinne Netzer’s “Complete Book of Food Counts”, or “The Calorie, Carb and Fat Bible 2009” by Lyndel Costain, Juliette Kellow and Rebecca Walton.  Make it a habit to record everything you eat and calculate the total calorie intake at the end of each day. From this you will be able to see if you have done enough each day to lose weight, or whether you have made a mistake and indulged too much! You will also be able to check that you are not eating too many calories in any one sitting.

Don’t leave it to chance by counting portions, get yourself a book of calorie counts and know for sure that you are going to lose weight!