Calories In Minus Calories Out

Please know this, I am not an expert but, I have learned a few things. If I am wrong about something, it will not be first time. So, read with caution and find out for yourself what the truth is.

Weight Loss or Weight Gain comes down to one mathmatical equation, calories eaten minus calories burned. If the resulting number is negative then you are burning calories. If the resulting number is positive then you are storing calories. If you burn about 3500 calories you will lose about one pound. If you store 3500 calories you will gain about one pound. To effectively lose wieght safely it is suggested that a person should burn between 250 to 1000 calories a day more than is eaten. That would workout to be one half pound up to 2 pounds lost a week. This is good information but how does one know how many calories he is burning or eating.

With all of the nutritional information on packages and on the internet and the development of mobile applications that track activity, it is becoming increasingly easier to track calories eaten and calories burned. If you use one of the many health apps out on your favorite app stores and/or a device that is worn to track your activity, you will find that they all are based on the calories eaten minus calories burned equation. In the interest of knowing why these apps are successful at helping people lose weight, I will discuss the math and the health principals behind their development as well as the power of the information that is utilized.

The first thing that you find when you start using a health app is that it will ask for your height, weight, age, gender, hip measurement, waist measurement, and maybe even your neck measurment. It will also ask you for your activity level. This information is needed to figure out the amount of calories a person like you would normally burn in a day's time. The first factor to figuring out calories burned is basel metabolic rate (BMR). This is the amount of calories burned with no other activity other than resting and breathing. Some of the provided information is applied to an equation to arrive at your approximate BMR. There are calculators on the internet that you can use to find your BMR. Mine is around 2200 calories. Your daily activity level is the next factor that is taken into account. I picked sedentary and based on my information applied to an equation for sedentary people like me the program figured I burn about 400 calories over my BMR. So, my activity level plus my BMR is around 2600 calories. These programs then ask how many pounds you would like to lose per week. You will be given the choice between half and two pounds a week. If you choose 2 pounds the program will subtract 1000 calories from the amount they figured you will burn (2600) to come up with the number of calories you should eat a day. For me it works out to 1600 calories. This is the base amount of calories you are allowed to have if you do not change the amount of activity you have in a normal day. The amount of calories you are allowed to eat increases with the amount of activity you enter into the application.

Because I wanted to be agressive with my weight loss, I decided on minipulating the app to figure out the absolute minimum amount of calories someone like me burns in a day. According to the app I am only allowed to eat about 1600 calories. In reality I could probably eat about 2200 calories a day and still lose weight. I wanted to keep the calorie count allowed as low as I could for several reasons. First I really want to make sure I lose about 2 lbs a week. Second, if I make mistakes when entering the amounts of food I eat (I try to be as accurate as I can), it will not impact my weight loss too much. Third, as my activity increases the app adds calories to the amount I can eat. If the amount of activity is miscalculated it could impact my weight loss. I want to assume the app is correct without worrying about it being wrong in the wrong direction. This way if I follow what the app says I can be relatively sure I will lose weight. So far so good.

Tracking Calories is royal pain. I hate tracking calories but I am finding that using technology is making it much easier than I expected. I am actually learning that the knowledge I get from tracking calories makes it worth doing it. To give you an idea of what using technology to track calories is doing for me, I want to talk about what I am learning. Knowledge is power. You have heard it before and still holds true. As I record what I eat I am learning so much. Vegetables are filling but have few calories. I can eat a lot of veggies and satisfy my appetite or I can eat something high in calories and satisfy my taste. I can do both if I keep track of calories. I am learning that tracking calories makes me chose. If I have the peice of cake that satisfies my taste I will have to sacrifice satisfying my appetite because the number of calories compared to the amount I am allowed to eat will not satisfy me. It is OK if I choose being hungry over being satisfied. It is OK to be hungry. If I am smart I will eat what costs me less calories to get my hunger satisfied first and then I can enjoy a smaller peice of what satisfies my taste and stay under my calorie count. Trial and error along with tracking my calories is teaching me what the balance is and how to control the portions I eat. You can read and read and learn but until you do it you really do not know what is right for you.

Exercise is the answer. I dont know about you but it is next to impossible for me to only eat 1600 calories in a 24 hour day. Like tracking calories, I also hate tracking excercise but tracking exercise is what adds to the number of calories I can eat. It is a necessary evil if I want to eat more. Trust me, guessing how much excercise and the number of calories I burned did not work. For the past few years I have been using pedometers and measuring miles and logging activities but I always gave up, because I hated it. For Christmas this year I got an Activity Tracker to wear on my wrist. It does all the work. My activity is logged automatically through the wireless interface and I know exactly how many more calories I can eat. As I see that number go up it makes me want to exercise more. As an added benefit I am now anxious to get my food intake logged so that I can keep track of how much more I can eat.

Remember the goal. The goal is too lose excess wieght. This activity has been kind of like a game to me. I am very competative. If I don't reach the goals I set, I feel like I was beat at a game. I like winning and in this case winning means losing wieght. I have been winning little battles and it feels good. I cannot wait until I win the war. I want to get under 200 pounds. I have lost 6 pounds in 11 days. Only 71 to go. When I get to 200 I will be able to adjust the number of calories I eat to a higher amount and just maintain my weight. I cannot wait for that day. I plan on using this technology to track my calories so that I never gain the wieght again but it will be nice to adjust its use to maintain my wieght instead of to lose wieght.

I will be 50 years old this year and my eighth child is going to be one year old. I want to be able to walk her down the aisle and dance with her at her wedding. Assuming she gets married at 30 (that's when I will allow it ) that will make me 79 years old.