Calorie counting is a great way to manage your weight loss program.
Essentially you can use calorie counting to drop your weight to your desired level and also use it to maintain your target weight to avoid yo-yo dieting pattern.
To achieve this, you have to get into the habit of tracking the amount of calories or energy in every food or drink that you consume.
The general guiding principle behind calorie counting for weight loss management is that in order for you to lose weight you need to burn more calories than you consume daily.
You either do this by eating less calories than your pre-determined daily requirement or you introduce some form of exercise to help burn more calories than your daily consumption or a combination of both.
So effectively calories out should exceed calories in.
When starting out with calorie counting, it is important that you first of all establish your daily caloric need or requirement.
Now this varies from person to person because your actual daily calorie requirements depends on a host of factors such as your age, sex, height, current weight, and indeed your level of activity.
When you have sorted out your basal metabolic rate you are then required to keep a daily log of all the calories in the food and drinks you consume daily as well as an 'exercise and activity log'. This is to ensure that you tilt yourself into a negative calorie balance because that is how you lose weight.
Keeping these Food logs alongside Exercise and Activity logs can be a nightmare without the help of a reliable calorie counting software or fitness software. However, all calorie counters or fitness software are not created equal.
I had experienced difficulty with calorie counting dieting and calorie counting software for years, so I embarked on a research to discover why you lose some weight initially but the loss just seems to tail off after a while.
Here are the flaws I came up with.
1. Your Rigid Calorie Diet is doomed to fail.
Something that happens when you are on a rigid calorie diet is that your weight loss results become affected by the law of diminishing returns over time.
Your calorie counting software may advise you to consume say 2200 calories a day and you follow that religiously only to discover that you are not shifting enough pounds as you would like to as time goes on.
How, you ask?. You see, in the first 2 weeks of our weight loss program, we may burn say 500 calories a day but as we move into week 3 and beyond, our body's metabolic rate slows down and may start burning about 450 calories or less.
Therefore, your rigid or fixed calorie counting diet weight loss results begin to diminish as a result.
2. Calorie Counting software are programmed to count one pound of weight loss as being equivalent to 3500 calories.
This is wrong. Yes, one pound of fat loss is equivalent to 3500 calories but you lose more than fat when you lose weight i.e you lose water and you also lose lean body.
Although you lose more fat at the initial stages of your weight loss program, you will eventually start to lose lean body mass as time goes on.
If you burn 3500 calories of fat, you lose one pound of weight. However, the story is different with lean body mass. In fact, the calorie loss requirement to lose one pound of lean body mass is totally different. This does not even include variables like your body mass index (BMI) which is important.
Now most calorie counters and weight loss software do not take this into consideration when they churn out results. They simply make one universal assumption of 3500 caloric loss is equivalent to one pound loss. Wrong.
3. Exercise and normal daily activity calorie use overlap which calorie counters miscalculate.
In your normal daily routine activities like browsing the internet as you are doing right now, you do burn calories. You may burn say 50 calories just being idle. Now if you mount your exercise bike, your calorie counter may advise 240 calories has been used up by you.
Well, at the completion of that biking exercise, you have actually burnt 190 calories i.e 240 deduct or take away 50.
Why.....because the 50 calories is what you would have spent anyway even without mounting the exercise bike and this must be taken into account when you do the calorie math.
However, your calorie counter or fitness software does not know this and will report 240 calories.... and you wonder why you have difficulty achieving your weight loss goals.
The point being made here is that your calorie counter tends to overestimate calories spent thereby giving you a false sense of achievement.
Now you know why you have failed to achieve sustained weight loss with calorie counting and calorie counters in the past. To get better weight loss results today and in future, you need to get yourself a reliable calorie counting software or fitness software that has been programmed taking all these flaws into consideration.
About the Author: Joe Amagada is a fitness expert with special interest in calorie counting dieting. If you would like to learn more tips about calorie counting and getting yourself a free copy of this specially programmed fitness software, please visit http://www.caloriecountingtips.net
