Despite the numerous variations on diets, one thing that all effective diets have in common is that they involve calorie restriction and monitoring. Restricting your daily calories is a foolproof way to weight loss. When restricting your calories, try keeping a small notebook with you to help monitor your caloric consumption.
Determining Caloric Needs
Before you begin cutting calories out of your diet, first determine how many calories your body needs just for normal day-to-day function. Choose an online resource that takes more into consideration than just age and sex when calculating your needs. Pick one that includes height, current weight and activity level. All of these factors play into the number of calories your body needs per day and should be accounted for.
Significance
If you do not know how many calories your body needs per day, you could be unknowingly consuming too many or too few. Consuming too many calories daily will lead to weight gain, while not consuming enough calories consistently can result in slowing your metabolism. If you consume very low caloric amounts, your body will begin to function just off of this low number of calories, and will not burn extra calories to enhance weight loss, advises Epigee.
Time Frame
Healthy weight loss is 1 to 2 lbs. per week. There are 3,500 calories in 1 lb., so to lose 1 lb. a week, you must create a daily deficit of 500 calories. For 2 lbs. of weight loss a week, you should restrict your calories by 1,000 daily.
Exercise
Adding exercise helps you reach your daily caloric deficits. When you exercise you burn calories and build lean muscle. Muscle burns more calories than fat, even at rest, so as your lean muscle mass increases and your body fat decreases, you will burn more calories throughout the day than you did before changing your body mass. This not only helps you reach daily caloric deficits, but also enhances the rate and amount of weight lost, notes MedlinePlus.
Misconceptions
Even though on the most simplistic level losing weight is all about calories in, calories out, decreasing calories to unhealthy number, below 1,200 for women and 1,500 for men, has harmful side effects. First, you will only initially lose weight on theses low-calorie diets through fluid loss. Once you resume a normal diet, all of the weight will return. Very low-calorie diets are also associated with the development of an eating disorder like anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa, because such a strong emphasis is placed only on calories and not on nutrition.
Member Comments