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Maintaining Your Weight By Counting Calories
How to safely maintain your new weight.
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The foundation of Diet Bites is motivation, counting calories, moderate exercise, and using your Willpower to conquer weight loss. It's a sure-fire way to maintain your new slim shape.
To maintain your weight by counting calories, you'll need access to a Calorie Counting Guide. These are reasonably cheap or you can check one out at your local library. In addition, there are many online charts that provide the calorie content to basic foods, as well as fastfoods.
There are some things to note before you attempt this method of weight maintenance:
- Not all counting calorie guides are alike. One might say that a kumquat contains 50 calories and another guide, will say 25. Obviously, there is variance in the size of the kumquat - so that is going to effect the amount of calories contained in the food. So you'll need to pay close attention to size, because in this case, it really does matter.
- Because foods cannot be cooked exactly the same each and every time, the amount of calories in ALL foods will ALWAYS vary. In other words, a fastfood establishment might list 350 calories for their chicken sandwich, but if it were analyzed, it might contain 355 calories, or 375 calories. The guides are not an exact science, but they provide a pretty accurate point of reference.
- Once you determine the amount of calories that your body expends for the day, you will need to eat throughout the day. If you fast all day and eat all of your calories at dinnertime, you may even see a weight gain.
By the way, dinner should be your lightest meal for the day and you should ALWAYS eat breakfast to break your overnight fast.
- The same theory applies should you decide to diet all week and go ape over the weekend. You can't possibly lose as many calories as you take in during that 2-day Food-a-Thon.
- Counting fat grams rather than calories is also filled with pitfalls and it generally will not work, even when combined with calorie counting. However, there are many people who use this method of weight maintenance, but obviously have mastered the overall eating plan and know specifically what they can and cannot eat.
For example, if you are maintaining your weight by counting fat grams and have a 40 gram per day limit, if you consume 3 large bananas, 2 apples, 5 sodas, and 2 baked potatoes and 3 ears of corn, then you're up to 2,000+ calories and a diet that contains negligible fat. Again, I have never seen anyone use this method successfully LONG-TERM.
- Fad dieting will not work, even if you count all of the calories that you consume. I say that because I've never seen anyone be successful using fad dieting. And it's very stressful on the body and the mind.
- To maintain your weight via counting calories, simply count all the calories that you take in for the day. With a bit of experimenting, you'll soon know about how many calories per day that your body needs to maintain the current weight. Keep in mind that whenever you are more active, you can eat a bit more as more energy is burned.
Maintaining your weight via counting calories is one of the most effective methods I've found and is the one that I most often recommend. It might be a bit difficult in the beginning, but once you grow familiar with the foods and their calorie content, you'll be able to determine the amount of calories without a guide.
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