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February 05, 2014

COUNT YOUR CALORIES ON YOUR OWN!




The term “CALORIES” brings a lot of fear to the mind of those looking to reduce weight. They are afraid to eat real meals and believe that a peanut butter sandwich makes them fat. Eating diet food such as carrots feels safer. The problem is that self – created diets commonly allow too few and too limited a selection of boring foods. The dieter ends up becoming too hungry and craves calorie-dense foods. As a result, he or she blows the diet and regains any lost weight, plus more. Those people are unaware of estimating their daily calorie budget and focusing on more and more consuming fewer calories that can be very harmful to their brain.

To assess your calorie needs, either you should meet a registered dietician or you can use a “calorie calculator” on the web, or you can make an estimate of your calories needs by using the following steps:

Estimating your basal metabolic rate- The number of calories you need simply to breathe, pump blood, and be alive.



BMR/RMR(Resting Metabolic rate)

Organ                    calories.day-1                     % metabolic rate

Brain                      365                                         21
Heart                     180                                         10
Kidneys                 120                                         7
Liver                      560                                        32
Lungs                    160                                          9
Other tissues          370                                         21

If you are significantly overweight, use an adjusted weight, a weight about halfway between your desired weight and your current weight. That is, if you weigh 190 pounds but at one time normally weighed 140 pounds, use 165 as your adjusted weight. For example, Mr. X weighed about 198 pounds but could healthfully weigh about 154 pounds according to BMI. Hence, Mr. X needed approx. 1,540 cal simply to do nothing all day except exist. This is the basal metabolic rate of his total body weight calculated by various methods or you can check your approx. BMR by the BMR calculator at the lower right hand side column.

Add more calories for daily activity apart from your purposeful exercise – If you are moderately active throughout the day, add about 50% of your RMR/BMR. If you are sedentary, add 20% to 40%; if very active(in addition to your purposeful exercise), add 60% to 80% of your BMR. Suppose, Mr. X is moderately active throughout the day with his job. He burns about 600 calories for activities of daily living. His totals are as :
1540 BMR + 600 cal daily activities = 2140 cal/day (without purposeful exercise)

If he goes to health club, and he burns 400 calories aerobically in about 45 minutes on the treadmill. Then his total calorie need will be:
1540 BMR + 600 cal daily activities + 400 cal purposeful exercise = 2540 total cal/day

This 2540 calories are the required calories to keep your organs healthy and to live actively and also to maintain your body weight.

To lose weight, subtract 20% or even less of your total calorie needs – Mr. X deserved to eat about 2540 cal/day to maintain his weight. Subtracting 20% of 2540 cal i.e. 508 calories, left him with 2032 calories for his reducing weight. Most of the people without any awareness towards the calorie budget focus on reducing per day as much as possible and still don’t get result or dissatisfy with their performance.



The reason is that when they cut back too much, they would get too hungry and blow their diet. They also lose muscle, slow their metabolism, and consume too few of the nutrients they needed to protect their health from “free radicals” and invest in top performance. They need to understand the slow and steady weight loss stays off; quick weight loss rapidly reappears. A reasonable weight-loss target is 0.5 to 1 pound(0.25 to 0.5 kg) a week for a person who weighs less than 150 pounds(68 kg); 1 to 2 pounds a week is reasonable for heavier bodies.

The theory of “the less you eat, the more fat you lose” contains little practical truth. Generally, the less you eat, the more you blow your diet and over-eat because of extreme hunger.

Remember, that weight loss is not always mathematical. Nature makes weight loss harder for people who try to get blow their set-point weight. If you no excess fat to lose, nature will cause your body to conserve energy.

If you hold the fear that meals are fattening, think again and remember these ideas:

  1. You won’t gain weight from eating a substantial breakfast or lunch. You will have more energy to exercise and burn calories. Even if you were to eat too much at those meals, you could compensate by eating less at night.
  2. If you skimp on daytime meals and develop a deep hunger, you will be likely to over-eat at night because of the strong physiological drive to eat.
  3. You will end up eating fewer calories, even though the breakfast and lunch (@10 am; if you wake up at 6 am) and second lunch (at 2 pm accordingly) may be larger than before. You will simply trade in the evening blown-diet calories for wholesome foods earlier in the day.
  4. If you are not hungry at night, you can skimp at dinner and simply eat soup or salad. But don’t just soup or salad for lunch. It is not enough.
  5. Just get familiar with the calorie content of the foods you commonly eat, and then spend your calories wisely. That is, include at least three of the five food groups (grain, fruit, vegetable, dairy, protein) at each meal and two kinds of food per snack. Too many people repetitively eat as ingle food, such as cottage cheese, for a meal. This practice limits their intake of the variety of vitamins and minerals and other nutrients offered by a range of foods.



In my next post I will be discussing the habits to be adopted to achieve healthy and successful fat loss. Till then assess your pre-exercising level  and make a diary of calorie content of the foods that you frequently eat.

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