Chances are that you have heard the old adage of dieting. Calories in, calories out. That means that in order to lose weight, you have to take in fewer calories than you burn in a single day. Or you can burn more calories through exercise than you gain by eating. Either way will work, but since we are talking diets here, we’ll stick with the first description. Losing weight then turns into a simple numbers game. As long as your caloric intake is less than what you burn each day, you will lose weight. That is really all there is to it. But do not go running off and starving you just to shed a few pounds. The five step program we will be discussing in this report will help you learn how to eat the right foods at the right times for the rest of your life--so you can lose the weight now and keep it off for good. After all, losing a huge amount of weight and then putting it right back on gets you nowhere. That’s why this diet and all other diets require you to keep up with your dieting and get at least a little bit of exercise at the same time. Then, and only then, will you be able to keep the weight off for years rather than weeks.
Step 1: Know What You’re Dealing With Before we get into the proper practice for counting calories and losing weight, we have to learn what a calorie actually is. A common misconception is that calories are, by their nature, bad for you. This could not be any further from the truth. Calories are the energy our bodies need to survive. Without taking in any calories (caloric intake), our bodies would shrivel up and die due to lack of energy. After all, our cells need energy to survive and they get that energy from the food we eat, specifically calories. From a more scientific perspective, calories are a measurable amount of energy. One calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water by one degree Celsius in temperature. It is important to note that a food calorie is not the same as a regular calorie. Food calories are actually kilocalories, or one thousand regular calories. Therefore, the amount of energy in one food calorie is actually enough to raise one kilogram of water by one degree Celsius. Calories are used for everything our bodies do. We expend caloric energy when we walk, run, eat, dance, watch TV, type an email, tap our foot to music, and even when we sleep. There is nothing our bodies do that does not require energy from calories. Like it or not, we need calories to keep on living. It’s the amount of calories that we intake each day that has to change if we want to lose weight. But more on that soon.
