Dieticians and weight loss experts around the world would agree that the key to losing weight is not just starving yourself or working out – it is counting the calories you’re taking in. If you’re actually trying to lose weight, you should start keeping an eye on the number of calories you’re consuming in a day. Look, we aren’t asking you to give up your favorite foods altogether; but if you manage to keep count of your calorie intake, you’d also be reducing the intake of carbs.
Here are some hacks for calorie counting which could make your lives easier:
A Daily Diet Chart
Let’s start with your daily diet plan. What do you eat during the course of an average day? Do not jump to strict diet charts, TDEE or BMR equations, and calorie targets just yet. Your body is used to a certain kind of diet that you follow. Start with that. Make a list of the meals that you consume in a day and create a chart. We’d advise you to leave out any major changes in your diet at this stage.
The Cool Calorie Counting App
Gone are the days when you would manually have to count your calories. Modern technology has certainly made our lives a whole lot easier. If you just visit the app store on your phone and type “calorie counter”, you’d be bombarded with tons of apps that could help you keep a tab on your calorie intake. However, we recommend that you download apps with good reviews and ratings since this is not as simple as it seems. Most apps have activity trackers in them, you could check apps like MyFitnessPal, Lose It! or SparkPeople for best results. That would help you calculate the total number of calories consumed and the total number of calories burnt in a day.
Being a bit Careful
During your diet plans, you have cheat days when you’re allowed to indulge in a favorite snack or dessert. However, it might so happen that the dessert of 200 calories which you indulged in ended up adding 500 calories. Look, it’s very easy to cross the mark and consume more calories than you intended to. This is why noting down what you ate in a cute, little food journal is pointless. It is important to keep tabs on the number of calories you have consumed. That way, you’d be able to pin point where you’re going wrong and why you aren’t losing weight.
Calorie Cutting
A great method is to create a normal diet plan without major changes. Observe and note down your intake for a few days. See how your body responds. Once you feel your body’s used to it, start cutting down on calorie intake.
Calorie counting is an elaborate, systematic process – one that can help you lose weight the healthy way. However, once you become an expert in eyeballing the portions, the difference that it makes becomes more important than the exact calorie counts.
