Nutrition Part One: Counting Calories

Diet Starts Monday.

You hear this often and I've even said it a few times myself.

The key word here being "diet". Diet/Nutrition is a HUGE part of weight loss. I've heard that weight loss is "80% Diet, 20% Exercise". I've also heard "You can't out exercise a bad diet".

But Nutrition is not an easy subject because there are so many variables that play into it. Our body mass, our metabolism, our height, our age, the food we put into our bodies, the quality, the quantity, etc. There are so many things that factor into nutrition that you really have to find out what works for you.

I started with Calorie Counting.

Now often times when I am asked how I lost my weight and I try to put simply by saying "I exercise and calorie count", people look at me with a sympathetic look or tell me they could never do that. But for me, what did seem difficult at first was really not as hard as it seemed.

There is a great app and website that most people know of called My Fitness Pal. It is an app that lets you put in your stats (ht, wt, age, activity level, etc) and figures out how many calories you need to consume based on your goal (ie. lose 1 lb a week). When you figure that out you have an idea of how many calories a day you get to eat in order to capture your goal.

The problem with this is that many people want to lose as much weight as fast as possible and set their goals at lose 2-3 lb a week which may put your calorie intake at dangerous starving levels which will cause your body to drastically reduce your basal metabolic rate (BMR) and kill your metabolism that you have been working so hard to "fire up".

That is when I found TDEE. Which I post about HERE. It was the best way for me to eat enough calories to keep my metabolism going as well as lose weight and feel satiated.

After you figure out how many calories you need to eat you can record everything you eat in a meal log on the app. The great thing about this is that anything with a bar code you can scan and it will automatically bring up the food label, and it has a vast library of foods from peaches to restaurant meals that give you a good idea of how many calories are in the foods you are eating. It will never be exact, but it is a lot more accurate than guessing. And it brings up foods you have recently eaten. So if you have eggs for breakfast every day, it will bring that up and it takes about 5 seconds to log your meal. Not very time consuming.

I also went to dollar tree and bought a bunch of measuring cups and spoons and a food scale from Target to be able to weigh and measure proportions. You think you know how much you are eating until you actually measure a serving of cereal and realize all along you were actually eating 2.5 servings in your bowl. Here is another secret about cereal. If you eat honey nut cheerios you get 3/4 a cup for about 120 calories, but if you go for regular cheerios you can eat 1 and 1/4 cups for about the same amount of calories. If your like me and love to eat, you go for the larger quantity for same amount of calories. This is the beauty of fruits and vegetables as well.