When I talk with my friends, family, co-workers, etc. about their weight loss struggles. Almost the number one thing they complain about is... "But I don't WANT to count calories!!"... and sure, there are places like... Weight Watchers who have made this a little easier with the Points System...but in my opinion, it doesn't really teach you about food.
I suppose a number is a number, but maybe my inner scientist wants to know more like the difference between a good calorie and an empty calorie, or a good fat and an artery clogging demon. I have found a number of databases online that give you entire nutrient breakdowns per food, just like a nutritional label on a box, but for produce, lean meats, and those other grocery store items that seem to be without a lot of information.
Sparkpeople
The website I used most often when I still logged what I ate every day was Sparkpeople. You can set up a profile in a matter of minutes, input your weight loss goal, height, current weight, etc. and it will give you a magic number for the amount of calories you should consume daily in order to reach that weight. It also has a huge food database, you can be as specific or as general as you want. Say one of your favorite food items is Orville Redenbacher's Mini-bags of Salt & Cracked Pepper popcorn (amazing - one of my most favorite filling snack items rolling in at 160 calories) you can just input that into the search item and likely one of Spark's 9 million members have already input that data in there, all you have to do is click!
If it's something that's really unique, maybe you have to order it from some specialty store, or even your own recipe, you can input those too! You can add foods to the databases and create, save and share your own recipes. Or maybe you just want to look at recipes other folks have come up with, you can search those too.
We all know exercise is an important part of a "diet" or healthier lifestyle change ( I hope you're choosing the latter, diets tend to fail, long term changes stick around), but maybe we don't know how to do them or even what to do. Maybe some of us aren't even sure there are more than one type of arm muscle, and that's okay! There are plenty of videos on the web and on Sparkpeople that show you how to properly do an exercise and what area of your body it targets.
Other websites you can use just to get calorie counts are Calorie Count and Livestrong. I haven't had as much experience with those but I can tell you that Calorie Count does sometimes throw me off because their food servings tend to be in grams instead of ounces. There are simple converters you can use online if you find a food you must have converted.
The nice thing about these websites is sometimes you can even find things for restaurants. You're not going to be able to count every single thing you eat, every day of the week for the rest of your life, and no one is asking you to. It's more important to get a general idea of how many calories are in certain foods. For example, I can easily tell you without looking it up, how many calories are in 90% of my favorite foods, simply because I've calculated it for months at a time, and now it's ingrained in my memory. I use these websites sparingly these days, to find foods I've never had before, or to double check something I thought had x amount of calories.
IMPORTANT: Why you should count your calories...
Now that I've rambled on for too long about tools you can use, I know that you need more convincing. You're reading this saying..."Okay, but this is still labor intensive work! I'm tired, I don't want to count every morsel I put into my mouth, I just want to eat, and lose weight! Whyyyyy do I have to do this!?"
Answer: You may not have a clue as to how many calories you're consuming, most people don't, trust me, you are not alone in that boat. Weight loss is easier than it's made out to be, it's scientific, you must burn more calories per day than you consume. Seems pretty simple right?
Now don't get scared if you're thinking... "I can't burn 1200 calories a day! I have a job! I have kids! That's 8 hours of walking!" You don't need to burn 1200 calories a day if you are consuming 1200 a day - which is the LEAST amount of calories a woman should consume, I think for men it's 1500. There's this great thing called BMR or Basal Metabolic Rate - which in layman's terms simply means - what your body burns for basic body function (breathing, sleeping, heart and blood pumping) if you did nothing all day long but lay in bed. Most people should have a BMR higher than 1200. For example mine is, 1414 calories. Find yours here.
So, to recap, my body burns 1,414 calories per day if I was nothing but a snug bug in a rug. Everything above that you do every day burns calories. Washing dishes, walking down steps, showering, reading, typing, and playing a game even burns calories!! You are already on your way to losing weight simply by cutting down your calorie intake!
1 pound of fat = 3,500 calories. Yep, quite a lot of calories. So you have to work pretty hard right?! Maybe.
Example Scenario: I am a 195 pound, 5'7", 35 year old woman... my BMR is 1,653. I eat 1,200 calories a day. Even if I did nothing all day, my body will burn 453 calories. 453 calories x 7 days a week = 3,171. In one week I will have almost lost a pound just by laying in bed and taking in less calories. But, I'm an active 35 year old woman, I go to the gym 3 days a week and walk on the treadmill at a moderate pace of 3.5 mph, which should burn about 175 calories per gym day. Therefore burning 525 additional calories just from that short amount of time. Total calories burned for the week with 3 days of exercise is at least*: : 3,696 (That's one pound!)
* I say at least because everything else you do that week burns additional calories. But, you will have at least lost a pound, maybe two if you were active enough in your daily activities such as job, running after kids, etc.
Grocery Tip: When shopping the supermarket, shop from the most outer aisles (produce, dairy, meats, seafoods) for 75% of your groceries, use the inner aisles as sparingly as possible - that is where the most processed foods hang out, the ones high in sodium and empty calories.
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