It's A Numbers Game You Have to Play!

In my last post, I explained how your primitive body sometimes works against your weight management efforts.  In this post I'll show you how to work with your primitive body to make weight loss and weight maintenance easier.

First you will need a good tracking system.  I really like The Daily Burn because it makes tracking all these numbers much easier.  So unless you like to crunch your numbers by hand, I would recommend signing up.  It's free!

You need to know how many calories you actually use in a day.  If you go to the daily burn and put in a few stats (height, weight, sex, age and activity level) it will figure this all out for you.  Now you plug in a goal.  When I started, I decided I wanted to try to lose 5 pounds.  Daily Burn will then figure out how many calories you can consume in a day to lose that much SAFELY (this is a big plus).  It will give you a windowof calories (low and high) that you should stay within.

Now, every day keep track of everything you eat.  There are so many foods in the Daily Burn food catalogue that you should not have any trouble finding the things you are eating.  The site will keep a running tally of your calories, fat, carbs and protein.  I can't stress enough, the importance of staying within your calorie window.  IF YOUR CALORIES ARE TOO LOW, YOU MUST EAT MORE.  This will keep your metabolism up and your body will not think it is starving and start to hold onto everything.

If you work out (and you should be to further boost your metabolism)  you record the workout and Daily Burn will adjust your calorie window.  You will have to add in the amount of time you worked out (if it was cardio) and number of reps and amount of weight (if it was some type of weight training).  Again, you must stay within your calorie window.  This will make getting to and maintaining your goal weight much easier.

Now I have to stop blogging and go eat something, I'm not quite in my calorie window for the day!