Is it really necessary to count calories for a successful diet?
If you want to lose weight and have gone on a diet, one topic that sooner or later comes up is calorie counting. Is that really necessary for successful weight loss?
Well, all you really need to do to lose weight is to create a calorie deficit, which means you have to make sure you burn more calories than you eat. And that’s exactly not so easy to monitor unless you’ve drastically changed your eating behavior or even fasted.
Typically, the easiest way to diet is to be in a calorie deficit of about 500 calories, which would make you lose a pound a week. This is not the fastest weight loss, especially when you consider the promises of the weight loss industry with their different diet schemes and pills where it seems so easy to lose 10 pounds in just 5 days.
However, a rate of losing 1 pound per week is healthy and doable. You don’t even need a specific diet plan, just cut 500 calories per day. The danger is that after a few days you start eating something extra here and there again and soon reach your old level of daily calorie intake. The way to control calorie intake is to measure it! There is a saying that you can only control what you can measure.
And we can measure our calorie intake, we are too lazy. But it’s not even that hard to do. Yes, you need to weigh your food and find how many calories are in 100g of that food and then calculate how many calories you just ate. But on most foods, there are even labels that indicate the calorie content, which makes it quite easy for you. For other foods, just look up the caloric value online and write it down, so you don’t have to look it up again next time. You see, we don’t really eat many different dishes, we are creatures of habit!
If you use your computer frequently, you may also want to use special calorie counting widgets that you can upload to your Yahoo or iGoogle account. Or you can get more sophisticated by using an electronic food scale that stores nutritional values for up to 1,000 foods.