This is the main ingredient to losing weight and fat. If you burn more calories than you eat or drink, you will lose weight. It's not as easy as you think. For weight loss to occur you'll have to keep track of everything that you eat and count calories in your diet.
- Write down everything you eat on a typical day.
Take a day or two to go about your usual business, but bring a long a notebook and a pen. Write down everything that you eat and drink. Do you drink coffee in the morning with extra creamer, write it down. Do you order salad with dressing, write it down. Before we can begin to cut down our calorie intake, and lose weight we need to know what to cut down on. - Count calories in food you eat.
Once you have created the list of everything you eat and drink during a regular day, calculate how many calories each item contains. You may be surprised.- Did you know that a 20 ounce soda contains 250 calories? If you drink two sodas a day that’s 500 extra calories that you consume. If your average calorie intake per day is 2000 calories, switching to diet soda would reduce your calorie intake by 25%. That’s huge!
- Do you drink beer? Calorie range for beer is anywhere between 100 – 200 per a bottle.
- Do you like coffee with whole milk? If yes, you can save 100 calories a day by drinking two of you regular cups with skimmed milk instead of whole.
- Salads are great for you, but don’t forget to check your salad dressing. One packet of salad dressing can have 160 calories in it. Maybe you could switch to low fat dressing or cut down the portion you use.
- What about snacks? Regular potato chips contain loads of calories. Switch to baked potato chips or pretzels
- Chose lean meats. Chicken and fish are both very low in fat (and certain fish like salmon, sardines, and fresh tuna are an excellent source of antioxidants, which are also beneficial to your health), so aim to replace some or all of the beef or pork in your diet with these foods.
- Replace side dishes like French fries which can contain up to 600 calories per serving with vegetables.
- Use an online calorie counter to get a quick estemate of how many calories are in the food you eat.
Now that you have taken the first steps of learning how to reduce calories in foods you already eat on daily basis, it's a good time to learn more about how to make Eating Healthy a regular part of your lifestyle.