How else will you lose weight? For me I lost weight well by exercising, but I really dropped the pounds after installing an app to my phone to track the calories I ate. I still use my calorie counter every day, including the days that I do long cycle rides which helps with nutritional preparation.
This is tip one because you, the reader, may not have as much time as I did to exercise. I had a lot of free time after choosing to leave my high pressure and high stress job.
I will write about the importance of exercise as one of my next topics, but before exercise can become really effective you need to be able to work out how much you need to cut from your diet. Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is the next topic; this is the amount of calories you need to eat in a day to maintain your body weight. To find this out use an online calculator. It will take your age, gender, height, and weight and give you a figure in calories. This is your BMR.
Back to Calorie Counters, I use an app called Calorie Count but there are other available. In fact, have a look around before randomly downloading an app. This is what I should have done. Calorie Count has lasted on my phone simply because I have spent hours logging customised foods - mainly due to my high calorie diet used to fuel my cycling. Calorie Count frustrates me with randomly logging foods when using the copy button to reduce time taken to load a food onto a specific day. It also doubles up quantities on "favourite" foods, so instead of logging two slices of toast for my breakfast the current count is 18 (yes eighteen) slices. Of course, I just copy yesterdays and so on, but then you get the aforementioned problem.
Anyway, my frustrations have taken me off topic. The point I am trying to make is if you know your BMR and plan your daily diet you are on the road to weight loss success. So, download an app, find out your BMR and log this into the app. Then start to log foods onto tomorrows date. Aim to eat about 500 calories less than your BMR a day. You will be very surprised at how easy it is to add a food that blows your daily calorie intake away. Then take it one day at a time. You will fail some days. But if you succeed more days than you fail you should lose weight.
That concludes the first tip in my Weight Management Series. Please also share this page. The more shares these tips get the more likely I will keep posting. Please also remember that these tips are based on my personal experiences and successes. The actual results may vary from person to person.
