March 17, 2007 - Counting The Calories

Listening to many commercials on the radio and T.V. about "diets" talking about low fat that and low fat this, NO carbs diet, points systems, and pureed or fixed foods gets me very confused. With the many "fad diets" out there it makes me want to stop being on them and I'm not even on one! It's no wonder so many of these "fad diets" always comes and goes. They do talk about calories and how much calories you should eat to loose weight but do they go into the why?

A healthy and easy way to loose weight is to burn more calories than what you consume. Now, with that said it does not mean to binge eat then go run a marathon OR eat like a bird then go run a marathon that would be very irresponsible not to mention dangerous! There is more to it than that.

What Is A Calorie And Why Are They Important In Losing Weight?

First off what is a calorie, according to Merriam Webster-Dictionary it is: "the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water one degree Celsius." When the body burns calories it is released as heat. So how does that help us loose weight? Everyone has a unique number of calories they use while at rest which is called the Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). This is the energy being given off by the many different systems of the body while at rest. This BMR is important to know because we can determine how much or how little calories we need to consume to gain or loose weight.

Taking The Guesswork Out Of What Your Caloric Needs Are

There are many different ways of determining BMR, however, we can determine your BMR in the office through our Bio-electrical Impedance Analysis (BIA) within minutes. Unique information about you is needed to determine your specific BMR.

Now that we know your BMR and how many calories you would need to either loose or gain weight, that's the easy step. The challenge would be to identify the right foods and drink that fall within the allotted calories. You maybe asking yourself, okay so how do I loose weight? Good question! We have not talked about exercise, yup that's right you would actually have to get up and move around a little bit. Remember, your body is already burning off calories just for you to function, the extra calories that needs to be burned off is through low to medium to high physical activity.

In theory it takes about 3500 kcal to burn off 1 pound of fat. If you ask yourself are you burning about that much, for some of you that's easy but for the rest of us we don't even come close. So what should you do? Get up and walk that would be a great place to start. Walk about 10 minutes out somewhere so that it would take you 10 minutes to walk back that would be a total of 20 minutes worth of walking. If you can walk 5x a week for 20 minutes than you would be well on your way to loosing the pounds in no time.

This information is just a part of our therapeutic lifestyle change program called FLT. To find out more and to determine if FLT is right for you give us a call at 773.878.2660. This will be the first article on a series on making a therapeutic lifestyle change.