Nobody can give another person willpower or the drive to do the right thing. Knowing all the science and math behind weight loss means nothing if you are not willing to apply it or if your lazy. Thankfully there is a way to make this aspect of weight loss very easy. It again requires a computer and you will need an accurate food scale. It might be the smallest and best investment you will ever make in regards to your weight goals. Get a digital one that weighs both Oz and grams. Without a good scale you are guessing and you will struggle with success and wonder about the calories you are taking in daily never knowing for sure if you got it right. You won�t be able to adjust and fine tune or even know for sure if what you record daily is what you are actually consuming. It�s that important.
The next most important thing you can do to maximize the likelihood of weight loss success is signing up for a free website called my fitness pal. Here is the link.
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/My fitness pal is priceless as it contains virtually every food ever eaten. You customize it to your needs and you use it daily to track you daily food intake. Only by recording and knowing your daily caloric intake versus your daily calorie goal for weight loss can you guarantee weight loss.
When you set up your profile with my fitness pal you can set your profile to being private so only you can see your account. You will need to provide your current weight and weight goal as well as your gender, height and level of activity (remember your TDEE?) It will ask you to input how much exercise you intend to do in a week (we will cover that shortly) and it will ask you for a weight loss goal. Be realistic. 2 pounds a week is aggressive. Fred didn�t get fat overnight and needs to meter his goals with reality. Fred is in a hurry. Don�t be in a hurry.
Once your data is entered, My fitness pal will suggest for you nutritional goals based on your data and your weight loss goal. It�s a powerful free tool that is a must for your weight loss success.
Now let�s talk about those calories you plan to take in. Calories are just that, calories. Its fuel/energy. If your daily calorie goal is 1,800 calories, it won�t matter if its 1800 calories worth of butter or 1800 calories of bread or 1800 calories of apple. It will only matter to your total health, not your weight. If your goal is improved fitness and keeping the muscle and strength you currently enjoy, you will want to maximize the nutrition of the food you take in. This is where everybody is different.
Within my fitness pal you will find a tab called �goals� Click �goal� and you will see that my fitness pal predetermined how many grams of carbs, fats and protein (your daily macros) you should consume each day to reach your goals. You will notice that its carb centric meaning it has you eating most of your calories each day via carbs. This is where you get to customize your account for improved or better nutrition and your goals. This is especially helpful if you opt for popular low carb diets like �Atkins or �South Beach� or proteins if you are on a Paleo diet. The key is being able to customize your plan and goals and food likes.
When you view the �goals� page on my fitness pal you will see that you can change the goals. Let�s talk about why you would want to do this. Above I said your daily macros (Carbs, Fats, Protein) are the number of grams of each of these you take in in a day and that
A gram of carbs is 4 calories
A gram of protein is 4 calories and
A gram of fat is 9 calories.
Use this when setting your daily macros for not only weight loss but for better nutrition/health.
Your body stores carbs and fat and right now you probably have stored far more than you wish. Use those stores you already have to fuel your body. Your body does not store protein. You need protein intake to keep and build muscle. In your goal to lose weight you won�t just be losing fat, you will be losing muscle as well and if your over 40 you are already losing muscle at too great a rate. Don�t compound this by starting a diet that will cause you to lose even more muscle. You need protein. Of the three macros, protein uses the most calories to digest, its needed to prevent muscle loss and it not stored in the body like carbs and fat. Fred is opting for a high protein, high fiber, low carb, low fat lifestyle to reach his weight loss/nutrition goal because Fred does not want to be skinny and weak. He wants to be fit, healthy and strong.
When Fred set up his account with my fitness pal, the default macros it set up for him looked like this.
Daily carbs: 165 grams x 4 calories per gram = 660 calories from carbs
Daily fat: 40 grams x 9 calories per gram = 360 calories from fat
Daily protein: 45 grams x 4 calories per gram = 180 calories from protein. For a total daily calorie intake of 1,200 calories a day.
Fred�s TDEE is 2,857. If Fred�s goal is to lose 2 pounds a week, he would want to set his daily caloric intake (assuming zero exercise) at 1,000 calories less than that or a daily caloric intake of 1,857 calories or he must increase his level of activity (or better yet, both) but how he gets those calories in key for improved health and nutrition. Fred could get all those 1,857 calories each day if he ate 18 tablesthingys of butter and nothing else. He would suffer from a lack of vitamins and other important nutrients but if weight loss were his only goal he would get there on the butter diet but his overall health would suffer greatly.
Fred could get those same 1,857 calories as day if he ate 16.5 pounds of cabbage a day and nothing else but again, his health would suffer or he could get those same 1,857 calories a day by eating 1 � loaves of Wonder Bread and nothing else. Fred however has a goal of not only weight loss but improved nutrition and fitness so he is going to eat a balanced diet high in protein and fiber and low in carbs and fat.
So Fred goes to my fitness pal and customizes his macros to look like this.
Carbs: 30% (or 139 grams) which equals 556 calories a day from carbs.
Fat: 25% (or 52 grams) which equals 468 calories a day from fat
Protein: 45% (or 209 grams) which equals 836 calories a day from protein.
This is where my fitness pal is so powerful. You input what you eat daily in the amounts you weighed/measured accurately and strive to hit (but not exceed) those targets for your carb/fat/protein goals. I have yet to be able to stump my fitness pal and I eat some funky stuff. Every food I entered was already in the data base. All I had to do was type it in, search and apply the amount of it that I ate (this is why you need a good scale to measure your food). My fitness pal does all the math for you.
But Fred likes to eat (a lot) and does not want to starve himself. Fred is in luck. My fitness pal allows you to input your daily exercise because increased activity is calories in the bank. Remember TDEE? The more active you are the more you burn, the more you can eat and still reach your weight loss goals. My fitness pal allows you to enter your exercise minutes/calories so you can accurately capture your daily TDEE. My fitness pal takes the exercise you input and adjusts the amount you can eat accordingly.
What does this all require? Well its free so all it requires is your adherence to the plan/goal and you tracking your calories. If it�s important to you, it�s a very small price to pay. It will work. That is a guarantee I can safely make but you have to stick with it and be consistent. On the days you are not such a good eater, make sure to track those calories with my fitness pal and you will see the results. There is no reason to cheat since only you can see the data and results. The software even lets you know what you will weigh in 5 weeks based on your inputs. I find it to be very accurate. Use it honestly and you will find it to be fast and easy and a way to know what works and what doesn�t. Its customizable to you.
So now you know your BMR and your TDEE and you already know your weight loss goal and now you know how to track it and how to pick a daily calorie goal. Pick a pre-designed diet (like Atkins, south beach, etc) or design your own diet plan based on your likes and goals. My fitness pal tracks your results that you can chart in a variety of methods within the site. You are now armed with all the info you need to lose weight, get fit and get proper nutrition. Add exercise and multiply your weight loss benefits.
What�s stopping you?
Remember this. The number on a scale is only the numerical value for your relationship to earth�s gravity. Don�t get too hung up on a number. It cannot measure your potential, talent, worth, beauty, purpose, strength, family, friendships, caring or all the other things in life that really matter. Focus on treating food as performance fuel and as a medicine for all around fitness and make sure to move. It doesn�t matter how much you move, only that you move. Set a fitness goal and work towards that and you will hit your weight goal in the process.
Lastly, during the time you are in a caloric deficit, it may be a good idea to begin a vitamin regimen. Find a good quality multi vitamin and take it daily to make sure all your nutritional needs are met so you will not only be trim and fit but also nutritionally healthy.
A note about fat
A pound of body fat equates to approximately 3,500 calories. So if you have a calorie deficit of 500 calories (meaning that you burn 500 calories more than you eat each day) you would lose approximately one pound per week:
500 x 7 days = 3,500 calories
It's easy to see that a calorie deficit of 1000 calories would mean that you'd lose approximately two pounds per week. And that's a good number to remember, because two pounds a week is commonly accepted as the maximum rate of weight loss that is healthy.
Body Fat vs. Nutritional Fat
As you will learn in the topic Calories in Protein, Fat and Carbohydrates, it is commonly said that a gram of fat contains 9 calories. But there are 454 grams in a pound, and 9 x 454 = 4086 calories, not 3,500.
The reason for the discrepancy is that body fat, or adipose tissue, contains not only fat, but also other substances including protein, connective tissue, and water. The dietary fat referred to in the nutritional analysis of food is pure fat such as oils or butter.
Looking at it another way, 3,500 / 454 = 7.7 calories. Thus a gram of body fat contains only 7.7 calories versus the 9 calories found in pure food fat. It's easy to see that there should be a difference when you consider that body fat contains water, which has no calories.
Because of the differences in the two types of fat, it is appropriate to use the 3,500 calories per pound figure when discussing fat "burned" by activity, and the 9 calories per gram figure when discussing the nutritional content of food.
So there you have it. Use this info to your advantage and set about getting fit. Couple this with a fitness regimen (like heavy lifting) so you keep muscle tone that tends to disappear during weight loss. You don�t have to lose muscle while losing weight. The added benefit in heavy lifting is you increase your caloric output making it easier to drop the fat.
