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Calories & Weight Loss

Hi gang! Welcome back to my LWFY blog! Today we cover jump-starting your weight loss.  Last time we talked about setting up realistic expectations to achieve your goals. (Hopefully you’ve marked off two weeks on your calendar!). I want to give you some information about what a calorie is and how it equates to weight loss.  When I started losing weight, I had nooo idea what a calorie was.  I think one of the reasons it’s so hard to lose weight and so easy to gain it, is because most of us don’t have any information about nutrition. (You’ll find lots more information on all types of simple nutrition information in my upcoming book, Lose Weight, Find Yourself: Six Steps to Having a Healthy Relationship with Food…Bite by Bite and Pound by Pound.)

If you’re anything like I was, you innocently eat what you want without knowing whether it’s good, bad or indifferent.  I used to be so confused, because I was only eating one value meal from the fast food place. How come one double cheeseburger meal was making me gain, or keeping me from losing? It is shocking to me that we don’t have basic nutrition courses as part of school curriculum in this country, how are we supposed to know that simple meal can equate to an entire day’s worth of calories? (Well that’s what I’m here for.)

So here’s the deal with calories: a calorie is a unit of measurement, it is the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of one liter of water one degree. (So who cares about that, right?) For us, what we need to know is that 500 calories = 1 pound of fat gained or lost.  Let’s say you were to cut your calories back (either through calorie restriction, exercise, or ideally both) by 500 calories a day for seven days, you would lose 1 pound. (7 days x 500 calories = 3,500 calories = 1 pound).  If we go in the other direction and eat more, exercise less and add 500 calories a day for 7 days, well then we gain that pound. Simply put, this is how we get fat, and stay fat.

Start by simply monitoring your calories consumed for one week.  When you have it written down, it’s easier to assess where you can begin cutting back on those calories.

So I hope this briefly give you an idea of how you gain or lose a pound. It’s simple enough, and losing weight doesn’t have to be difficult! I did it and so can you!

Bye for now…