Thursday, April 24, 2008

How many calories do I need to consume daily

How to understand how many calories do I need to consume daily.
Here's the answer:

The first thing you should do is weigh yourself. Do it first thing in the morning on an empty stomach.
The second thing you need to do is eat exactly like you normally would for a few days. Whatever and however you normally ate and drank during the course of a usual day, keep doing it like you usually would. The only difference is you will be paying attention to what you are eating and drinking. More specifically, you will be keeping track of the number of calories in everything you consume. Unless you have a really good memory, I'd suggest keeping a list of it all.
If you are eating something that has it's nutritional info on the package, be sure to take notice of how many calories are in it and write it down.
Once you've done this every day for a few days, it will be time to figure out the average amount of calories you consume in a day. So, go and look at your totals for the few days you've been counting calories, and then take the average If your goal is to lose weight, you should now start eating 500 LESS calories a day.
All you have to do after that is wait a week and then weigh yourself again (first thing in the morning on an empty stomach) and notice what your weight did.
If your weight did NOT do what you wanted it to do, then make an adjustment. If you wanted to lose and you didn't, subtract an additional 250 calories from your daily total for another week.
Then weigh yourself at the end of the week and see what happened.
The reason all of the calorie adjustments are always done is small increments is because removing too many calories too fast will have a negative effect causing you to lose much too fast. This is unsafe and unhealthy. You should be losing typically 1 or 2 pounds a week at most. Even a half of a pound counts as a change. In the beginning it is normal to lose a little more than these numbers a week. However, this shouldn't last longer than a few weeks before you reach the usual 1-2 pounds a week numbers.
So now you know how many calories to eat each day. All that's left to figure out now is where those calories should come from...

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