Counting Calories 101

Calories Burned > Calories Consumed = Weight Loss

It's a very simple equation - eat fewer calories than you burn and you WILL lose weight. It just takes work. And many people aren't sure how to go about counting calories.

This is also very simple but takes a lot of work but I will help you get started if it's an approach you want to try.

What you will need:

• a notebook or online journal dedicated solely to your calorie count
• measuring cups
• a food scale helps but if you can't run out and buy one -----> a serving of meat is considered 3 oz which is about the size of a deck of cards or a checkbook
• consistency
  

The first thing you will need to do is determine how many calories you need to eat in a given day. Follow this link and plug in your appropriate information (I put in "very light" as activity level so that I know it gives me the bare minimum of calories I should eat) and the site will give you the amount of calories you need just to maintain your current weight and the amount you need to lose a pound a week. To lose a pound a week, you will need to cut out or burn 3500 calories, or 500 calories a day.

The next step is awareness. Start reading those nutrition labels. Everything you buy in a grocery store (except produce) is required to have one on its packaging with serving size, servings per container, calories per serving, fat, carbohydrtaes, protein, fiber, sodium, etc. For measuring produce, you can very easily Google "calories in an orange" and come up with a fairly good estimate of the calories. A few good tools to have, although not necessary, are a food scale, a calorie counting book, and FitDay.com - this is a FREE website that will host an online food diary for you and it has tons of nutrtional information built into it.

Once you are committed to the idea of counting calories, you must log ALL of the food that you eat. That handful of jellybeans, the extra meatball when no one was looking, those ten chips. Count absolutely everything you eat, write it down, and record the calories. You must make sure you measure out everything that you eat too. If you don't measure, you will have no idea how many calories to count and when you don't count everything properly, the only person you're cheating is yourself.

I make dinner with a sheet of scrap paper so I can write down everything that goes into the meal. When I make meatloaf, for example, I would write 1 onion = 100 calories, 3 egg beaters = 120 calories, 1 cup ketchup = 233 calories, 1 pound ground turkey breast = 480 calories, 1 pound lean ground beef 93% = 680 calories, 3 slices diet bread broken up in pieces = 135 calories for a total of 1748 calories. If I divide this up into four servings, each serving is 437 calories. With that, I would serve a baked potato which is about 200 calories for a medium size, or the size of your fist, with I Can't Believe It's Not Butter spray butter which has a negligible amount of calories (25 sprays = 20 calories) and a salad which is 50 calories plus light salad dressing which is usually around 50 calories, depending on what you use. This whole meal, which is very filling, is 737 calories.

That was just an example of how I would count a meal. The most important things to do when you count calories are to record and measure EVERY SINGLE THING YOU EAT. If you dine out, most chain restaurants have their nutritional information posted on their websites but studies have shown that calories can vary in these meals and can be up to almost double what their reported totals are and nutritional information can be found for just about anything online or in a calorie counter book.

If you have questions or want to learn more about counting calories, please let me know or post a comment and I will try to help. Good luck and happy journaling!