Food Tracking Diet

When you are on a food tracking diet, you must monitor everything that you eat or drink that contains calories. Your body needs a specific number of calories to maintain homeostasis. If you calculate these calories and eat based on that number, you will lose weight. Tracking your caloric intake makes it easy to monitor what you are eating and make appropriate food choices.

How It Works

When you track your food intake, you should be concerned about how many calories you are consuming in reference to how many calories your body needs. Your body burns a specific number of calories each day, just by being alive. This is known as your basal metabolic rate, or BMR. If you consume enough calories to meet your BMR, then anything else you do throughout the day will result in a caloric deficit. When you use more calories than you eat, your body must obtain the energy from your stored nutrients, which is fat.

Your BMR

Estimating your BMR is as easy as doing some simple math. BMR differs for people based on your age, gender, height and weight. A male's BMR can be calculated by 66.473 + (13.7516 x kg of body weight) + (5.0033 x height) + (6.755 x age). A female's BMR can be calculated with 655.0955 + (9.5634 x kg of body weight) + (1.8496 x height) + (4.6756 x age). To calculate your body weight in kilograms, simply divide your weight in pounds by 2.2.

How To Track Food

Once you have decided how many calories your body needs, your next step is to track your food intake. In today's world of smart phones apps and an internet that provides anything you can think of, tracking food is easy. Simply find a website or download an app that will allow you to enter your caloric goals and keep a food diary. Most websites or apps come complete with a database of the nutrition content of many foods. If the internet is not your style, you can manually track your calories in a log, writing out all of the food you eat and the calorie content of it.

Exercise

Any good diet includes an exercise program. Exercise not only counts toward your caloric deficit, it also help you retain lean muscle mass while dieting. In addition, it is a cornerstone to maintaining any weight you have lost. Try to get at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise three days per week for health. To help with weight loss, increase either the duration, frequency or both. Any exercise you do can also be recorded in your food tracker.

Putting It All Together

There are 3,500 calories in one pound of fat. If you manage to reduce your caloric intake through diet and exercise by at least 500 calories per day, you can count on a weight loss of at least one pound per week. A safe exercise program aims for realistic weight loss goals of 1 to 2 lbs. each week. To keep your calories under control, get regular exercise and make food substitutions to choose lower calorie foods whenever possible.