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Ok, so I’ve been thinking more in depth with my weight loss recently. I’ve been thinking about how I’ve reduced my portions, fat intake, sugar intake, upped the exercise and fitness in general but I still feel like I’m doing something wrong. That’s when it hit me….my diet has definitely improved over the last year, but there’s still things I need to fine tune to make all work for me. For example, I cut down on a load of sugary things like sweets and cakes and all that, but I was still drinking loads of fizzy drinks with a ton of sugar in it! I’ve been doing a lot of fitness at the gym, but then there’s times when my health issues are too bad to exercise. All these little things make a huge change to my weight loss.

Calories, fat and sugar are my main enemies, and I’ve been cutting down the fat and sugar right down and I think I’ve got to a good understanding and awareness. But I’ve not been thinking into calories very much. Yeah, I’ll look at them and want to have the lowest calorie intake I can, but then is that what I want? What the hell is a calorie?!

Well, for those who aren’t sure like I wasn’t, calories are not completely your enemy. They are the units that give you energy for you to function…to walk to work, to type on your laptop, to wake up in the morning! You need them to keep going otherwise you’d have no energy what so ever to do anything! It’s incredibly dangerous to deprive your body of calories and need a healthy amount a day to get you through the basics of your day…like moving, talking and breathing for a start! But what you don’t want to do when trying to lose weight is eat more calories than you burn, otherwise you’re going to be battling against yourself.

So, what to do with these calories? I’m looking at them in a completely different way now that I know I still need them, but also need to make sure my intake doesn’t outweigh the outgoing that I burn. At www.caloriecount.about.com/ you can type in your gender, age, height, weight, goal weight and general daily activity levels to find out where you’re at with your BMI, but also how many estimated calories you’ll need to consume and how many calories you’ll need to burn for how many months to achieve your goal weight with your current activity levels. With this sort of starting point, it makes your calorie intake a lot easier to understand and control!

So for example, I’m 167lbs right now and my goal is to be 130lbs. I roughly burn 1800 calories on a typical day at my current job and home activity level. So using the Calorie Counter, it estimated that my intake will need to be 1300 calories a day with a burn rate of 1700 calories a day for me to hit my goal by the end of the year. As I said, this is estimated, but it gives me something more solid to go on. Also, it advises that women must consume no less than 1200 calories to function healthily and to not be subject to health risks. I think that I have sometimes fallen under this mark or consumed the bad kind of calories from naughty foods so not getting the better stuff from fruits and whatnot.

With this in mind and a whole load of low fat and most importantly low sugar foods on my shopping list, along with my water drinking challenge for a month and gym 4 times a week, I’m feeling pretty confident!

The times I struggle is when my health issues are bad and the fatigue and pains are too much to cope with at the gym. But you know what? Counting my calories better and being more aware of my sugar intake might be the key to help keep those pounds from creeping back up!

Lets give it a go!

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