Why counting calories is the best way to lose weight.

There are a lot of fad diets out there that make a lot of promises. Eat this special fruit! Three foods to stop eating and the weight will melt off! Take this pill and the weight will shred off of you!

The truth is losing weight is simple fact of math. Too many calories and you gain weight. To lose weight you need to consume less calories than the body burns in a day.

Why are calories the key to weight loss? Because they are the fuel that keeps the body running.

Just like you need to gas up your car for it to run, you need to fuel up the body with calories to keep it running.

Think of calories as the energy that helps you move. But you have to be wise in how you use them.

Your body functions differently than a car. When you fill your gas tank until it’s full, you have to stop filling it or it will spill out of the car. Our body doesn’t do that.

Instead of stopping when it is full, the body converts the extra energy into stores of fat. The body is programed that way so it is prepared if times are lean it can draw upon that fat stores for energy. It is as though it adds extra gas tanks in the body.

The problem is if you keep fueling the body with too many calories it will simple keep adding to the fat stores. It doesn’t know when to stop.

Cutting calories is the only way to lose weight because we ate too many calories to begin with and that is why we gained weight.

Starving ourselves is not the answer

We can’t just go cold turkey and starve ourselves to lose weight. We need to be sensible. Some will try to lose weight by fasting. It may work at first, but it won’t work for long.

Our body is an amazing machine with a lot of ways to protect itself automatically. One of its self defense mechanisms is if it notices it is getting to few calories it will go into a preservation mode and slow down the metabolism.

We should keep in mind that our bodies needs at least 1500 calories a day to function properly. If we go below that many calories the body will slow down the metabolism.

Exercise is not enough

Another misconception is that all I have to do is exercise a lot and I can eat what I want.

To eat what you want you have to do an awful lot of exercise. You may have heard of athletes who eat 5000 calories or more in a day and yet look lean, but you have to remember they are athletes. Their job is to exercise and they usually are exercising 6 to 10 hours a day.

Most of us have our hands full getting in one hour of exercise with our busy schedule.

This morning I walked on my treadmill for 20 minutes and weight lifted for 40 minutes. According to my LoseIt! App I burned 306 calories.

That is less than a slice of Papa John’s pizza. Be careful thinking that exercise alone will burn enough calories. It doesn’t.

How many calories do I burn in a day

To figure out how many calories a day you probably burn there is a calculation. For men it is 66 + (6.2 x weight) + (12.7 x height) – (6.76 x age), for women it is 655.1 + (4.35 x weight) + (4.7 x height) – (4.7 x age).

Of course the LoseIt! App I use does this automatically for me and tells me what my target calories for the day is.

The best way to lose weight is to figure out how many calories your body needs in a day and then aim to eat 500 calories less than that.

The reason 500 calories is a good target is because 3500 calories is equal to one pound of fat. If you eat 500 calories less than you need every day, by the time you reach 7 days you will have not eaten 3500 and could lose one pound of fat in a week.

Hopefully this post has been helpful to you. Let me know what you think. Is there anything you are not sure about? Drop me a line and let me know.