Calorie Tracking

Lets go more in-depth on calories and start putting a framework in place for your own personal requirements . It is still essential to understand what those numbers mean. We need to find a way to show our behavior's consequences. We need to show this in a factual manner, an immediate visual display of our overindulging results. It is not punishment right away, but over time our brain will be conditioned such that taking an extra piece of cake/calories will give negative weight loss results. Then we will start to understand why we don't lose weight and can pinpoint the causes. Here’s the lowdown on calories: if you eat more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. If you eat fewer than you burn, you’ll lose weight. On paper that is as simple as it gets, in real life however its never that simple or is it?

In theory, these calories can come from any food. Let’s say that you burn 2,500 calories per day. This is known as your TDEE/maintenance level. If you ate 2,400 calories of cookies and donuts, you’d lose weight, even though most people perceive those foods in an unhealthy manner. If you ate 2,600 calories, even if only from apple, chicken breast & sweet potato, you’d gain weight. Granted, there’s a lot more than just calories that go into it. We will go into more detail about this later on, but we want to keep it simple for now. So, what would happen if you over or under-ate 100 calories per day? Well, it takes 3,500 calories to lose or gain 1 pound. So, eating 100 calories under the number that you burn every day & ignoring the fact that weight loss at times isn’t linear...

It would technically take 35 days for you to lose 1 pound.

100 x 35 = 3,500

If you over-ate by 100 calories per day, it would take 35 days to gain a pound.

100 x 35 = 3,500

This is known as energy balance, and there’s no getting around it. It doesn’t matter how ‘healthy’ you eat, the diets you have followed in the past, what times you have your meals, whether you have one big feast every day, or 10 tiny meals – Every diet strives for the same thing!

Now, here’s where we get slightly more in-depth. One day of overeating or under-eating isn’t going to dictate long-term progress. You’re better off looking at things on a weekly or a monthly basis. Better yet, think of things as ‘overtime’. The reason why many people like the rule of losing 1 to 2 pounds per week is because this is easy to adhere to and work out.

Like we mentioned, 1 pound of fat equals 3,500 calories. So, if you reduced your calorie intake by 500 per day, then over a week, that equates to 3,500, or 1 pound of fat loss (that’s nearly half a kilogram).

Reduce calorie intake by 500 and do an extra 500 calories’ worth of exercise? That’s a 7,000-calorie deficit per week or 2 pounds. But if you’re thinking, “I’m sure I don’t overeat calories, I’m good all week. Why am I not losing weight?” Here’s the answer: Either, you are eating too many calories, given how many you’re burning, or you belong to another group of people. The ones that DO eat in a calorie deficit every week but tend not to track on the weekends. You might not eat all that much Monday to Friday and may end the working week in a deficit of 2,000-3,000 calories. Unfortunately, if you blow it over the weekend, and consume 1,000-2,000 calories extra each day, meaning that by Sunday you’ve pretty much eaten around your maintenance level, you’ll stay exactly where you are. Now, that’s not to say you can never go out, have fun on the weekends, or even over-eat at times and still get away with it. Still, it does mean you need to be aware of what this does to your body, and how just one or two days of massive overeating can mess up five or six days of hard work and consistency.

Thats why we love charts at HLA; they are straightforward to understand and can show trends and correlations between variables. You will be able to see the average calories you take in per day overtime.

Adding your hunger levels before and after the meals, can finetune meal plans and daily activities. In this way you can sustain your dieting for a long time and preferably it will become a way of life. You have minimized the hunger pain and increase the pleasure of losing weight and feeling more attractive.

When you seriously can track and correlate your calorie intake over time and your activity intensity levels, you can precisely measure your calorie balance. You see visually that your weight loss program works are a big motivator to stay on track. Also, you can see when you are off track, and you can adjust your situation accordingly.

Acquiring great health is a complex task. Interrelating factors like diet, nutritional facts, meal plans, calorie balance, body reading measurements, supplement and medicine intake, exercise routines, daily activity intensity and costs will make it very difficult for you to see the forest for the trees.

Well-designed software that keeps track of all of the above factors and can correlate them will make it very easy to manage your health, fitness, weight loss, mass muscle gain, or any goal you have set.