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Count the Calories

Here is the 96th in our series of 100 Weight Loss Tips articles that are designed so that each one brings you a brand new top tip on how to successfully lose weight.

The last post looked at the dangers of eating white bread and this one will look at another aspect of your diet, which is counting the calories.

You need to know what your daily calorie limit is and then do your best to stay below it. That doesn't mean starving yourself, or sticking rigidly to it either, as some flexibility is allowed or you'd go crazy! Here's what you need to do and how to make it work.

Counting the Calories

Anyone who is in the process of trying to lose weight will do well to consult with a professional nutritionist or dietitian who will be able to tell you what your own, personal daily calorie intake limit will be. This figure is not the same for everyone, and depends on whether you're a man or a woman, your ages group, your current weight, your body shape and size including your height, your daily activity levels and most importantly, your weight loss goal.

So while a man of say average height and build who is fairly active may have a suggested daily calorie intake limit of say 1800 to 2000 calories, a smaller framed woman who sits at a desk all day and does little exercise will have a daily calorie intake limit that is a lot less, say only 1000 calories. Knowing that crucial and very personal number is half the battle when it comes to losing weight, because then you know what you're up against and you can fashion your plan of action around that figure.

Eat What You Want?

This means that you can eat most anything you want throughout the day, as long as you kept at or beneath the limit. Of course, that doesn't mean you can load up on cakes and biscuits until you hit the limit and eat nothing else for the rest of the day.

You have to exercise some common sense and balance your diet so that you get all the essential nutrition from your food and if you still have enough calories left in the bank, then you can treat yourself with something naughty as long as it doesn't haul you over the limit.

While you may not be able to track 100% of all your food items that you will eat all of the time, you can at least keep to your calorie intake estimation. That gives you some leeway to be able to adjust your eating schedule and ration out your remaining calories accordingly.

Stay Below the Level

By staying close to what you can consume in basic calories, it gives you a lot of freedom in your diet as long as you remain at or below that crucial suggested calorie level that is personal to you.

Of course, it makes sense that if you don't know how much in the way of calories your intake is supposed to be, how can you possibly know how much you're allowed to consume?

While counting calories may sounds like a redundant practice left over from the 1970s, think again. It's a commonly known fact that in order to lose weight slowly and safely, you must burn off more calories than you take in every day, so if you are an active person who exercises a lot, you are able to eat a lot more than someone who leads a sedentary lifestyle and still lose weight.

It's a situation that many slimmers and dieters find themselves in and they are not sticking to this one basic rule of weight loss. By not knowing your daily calorie intake limits and therefore not being able to stick to one, it is a very good reason why so many dieters so often fail!

Weight loss tips number 95 will follow in the next post!

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Posted on Thu, 11 Jun 2009 in Top 100 Weight Loss Tips | 1 Comments