According to the American Cancer Society, two pounds is a healthy amount of weight to lose in a one-week period. To lose one pound, a person needs to eliminate just 500 calories from his diet each day. Another pound can be shed in one week by burning 500 calories each day through exercise. To easily keep track of your calorie intake and calories burned, keep a food and exercise journal. By the end of five weeks, you could easily drop 10 pounds.
Keep a Food Journal
The American Cancer Society offers an online calorie counter (see Resources below) that calculates the number of calories a person should consume each day just to maintain a healthy weight. Once you’ve determined your daily calorie goal – remember to subtract 500 to lose one pound – count all of the calories you consume. Packaged foods have calorie information on the nutrition label. Be aware of portion size. For example, a box of dried pasta can have eight servings. One serving of pasta, about 56g, could be 200 calories. You’ll need to measure your portions so your calculations will be accurate.
Keep an Exercise Journal
Between walking the dog, your daily house chores and your evening indoor cycle class, you probably burn more calories than you’re aware of. Keep track of all of your burned calories using HealthStatus.com’s Calories Burned Estimator (see Resources). Type in your weight and indicate how much time you’ve spent doing each activity. Not only will it calculate activities such as jogging, dancing and yoga, but it will also add in the calories you burn washing dishes, brushing your teeth and playing with the kids.
Exercise for Extra Credit
When trying to shed a few pounds, all the extra-credit exercise you can sneak in will only benefit your bottom line. You can feasibly burn hundreds of additional calories each day by wearing a pedometer. In a study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association, over 2,700 adults were evaluated for more than four months. By the end of the study, the participants who were instructed to wear a pedometer were found to have increased their physical activity by 26.9 percent.
Drink Healthier
Drinking water or seltzer could help you burn a half a pound in one week. A can of cola has 105 calories. Eliminate two cans a day for seven days and you save yourself 1,470 calories a week. But avoid the temptation to switch to diet cola. A 2007 University of Rochester article reported that people who drank more than one diet or non-diet soda a day increased their risk for developing metabolic syndrome, a condition that can cause obesity, by 44 percent.
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