Keep your Body Guessing-

Once you have figured out your daily calorie count I want you to try this little trick...



Say you are supposed to have 1400 calories a day, meaning you should take in 9800 calories a week. So instead of dividing those calories up into 7 days of 1400 calories each try eating 1200 calories one day and 1600 the next. Then try 1300 calories, followed with a 1500 calorie day. Just make sure you are at 9800 calories at the end of the week.



Apply this same idea to your workouts. Have some killer workout days mixed in with more moderate exercise. Just be sure to reach your calorie burn for the week.



Not only will this keep things more interesting it will also help you to fight the dreaded weight loss plateau.

Counting Calories Continued...

Hopefully by now you are more aware of what you are eating. Or at least questioning your food choices. Maybe you have even made a few changes.



I want to continue talking about counting calories...



The concept of counting calories is pretty simple. Yet, as noted earlier, most of us underestimate how many calories we consume. Here are a few tips to help make your counting more accurate and more practical-

Measure your food. Take the time to learn what a half cup of pasta or a cup of cereal really looks like. Do you know what 3 ounces of meat looks like?



You hear often you should eat off smaller plates. Not only does this force you to eat smaller portions, research has shown that people make bigger errors in calorie content (underestimating) when the portions are bigger.

Create 400 calorie meals. We are creatures of habit. Most of us eat the same things over and over again. Figure out which 10 meals you eat the most and make sure they are under 400 calories per serving. Make the neccessary changes to make these meals healthier. There is a new diet book out called the 400 calorie diet. I haven't yet looked at the recipes but essentially the idea is to eat 400 calories 3-4 times a day depending on your caloric need. I think it is a fantastic idea and makes counting calories simple.

Snacks need to be planned out. There are a lot of extra calories that creep into our diet without us even realizing it. If you are going to eat snacks make sure you have budgeted them into your daily calorie count. Remember a little extra this and that makes a big difference.

Let me know if you have any questions so far.

We will further this discussion by talking about how to not only count your calories but to make your calories count.

~PCFitness

Counting Calories

Despite all the diet strategies out there, weight management still comes down to the calories you take in versus those you burn off. Forget the fad diets. You have to create a healthy eating pattern that will stick with you for life.

Calories: Fuel for your body
Calories are the energy in food.

Carbohydrates, fats and proteins are the types of nutrients that contain calories and are the main energy sources for your body. The amount of energy in each varies.

Calories per Gram-

Carbs and Protein=4

Fat=9

Alcohol= 7

Regardless of where they come from, the calories you eat are either converted to physical energy or stored within your body as fat. These stored calories will remain in your body as fat unless you use them up, either by reducing calorie intake so that your body must draw on reserves for energy, or by increasing physical activity so that you burn more calories.

So how many calories do you need? Of course this is different for everyone. It also depends on whether you are trying to maintain, lose or gain weight.

You can plug your information into this calculator to get a very rough estimate of your caloric needs- http://www.ahealthyme.com/topic/calneed

In general if you are trying to lose weight you will need to cut your calories back somewhere between 1200-1600 calories a day. I will discuss this in more detail in a later blog post.

The problem is counting calories in real life is hard, confusing and usually we don't do a very good job at it. Research has shown that most people underestimate how many calories they consume. These mystery calories are what make the numbers on the scale go up and up.

But this doesn't mean that you shouldn't take the time to figure out you daily calore intake. It just means that you will have to use other tools to keep you on track. For today start keeping a food journal. Even if you are not trying to lose weight a food journal can be very enlightening. Keep track of what and how much you are eating. And figure out how many calories you consumed at the end of the day. You can just use a notebook or if you perfer there are tons of on-line programs for tracking calories. We will discuss where to go from here tomorrow.

~PCFitness