Is weight loss just a simple matter of cutting the number of calories you eat during the day? Well, it is and it isn’t. It is a simple fact that you will lose weight if you eat less that your body burns off in a day, but determining how to do that is not an easy matter. You can change your average calorie balance through a combination of eating less food or more food, eating different foods, and exercising more or exercising less. Some people find losing weight easier by increasing their exercise and eating the same amount of food as normal, while others would prefer not to exercise at all, but just decrease their calorie intake. Every individual is different, so you should create your own program to lose weight and then stick to it until you get results.
There may be some confusion about what a calorie is. To an engineer or physicist, a calorie is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one cubic centimeter of fresh water by one degree Celsius (there are some more picky details in the definition, but that will do for our discussion). To somebody trying to gain or lose weight, what is commonly called a “calorie” is actually a Kilocalorie, or one thousand calories of the above definition, a measure of the energy content in food.
So, from this point forward, when I write “calories” I actually mean “kilocalories.”
Using a very simplistic model of how the body handles food, to gain a pound of body weight you have to eat 3500 calories more than your body burns. Conversely, to lose a pound you have to eat 3500 calories less than your body burns. The rate at which your weight changes depends on how fast you consume that food imbalance. Therefore, by decreasing your caloric intake by 500 calories under what your body burns, you will lose a pound every week, or about four pounds a month.
Eliminating 500 calories a day may seem like and enormous task, but you could achieve this by cutting out one an of soda (approximately 194 calories), two pieces of bread (around 74 calories each or 148 calories,with an additional 40 or 50 more for mayonnaise) and a small bag of chips (150 calories) every day. To lose weight more quickly or more slowly, simply adjust how much food you remove from your daily diet.
Of course, the real world is more complex than that, which is why you need to formulate a personalized plan that includes increased exercise, better nutrition, controlling appetite and other factors in a comprehensive program.
Tags: appetite suppression, controlling appetite, controlling hunger pangs, get rid of unwanted pounds, lose fat, lose weight, lose your middle-age spread
