The principle that weight loss is entirely related to consuming fewer calories than we use is a good principle to focus on when starting a diet.
As your knowledge of food, exercise, and dieting increases you can take this principle and tweak it to maximize your results, but in the beginning you don’t want to complicate things too much, so just focus on tracking calories.
Why Track Calories?
- In the simplest terms, we lose weight if we consume less than we use.
- Tracking calories will force you to actually see how many calories you are consuming rather than assume. Normally the difference between what we actually eat and what we think we eat is drastic.
- Tracking calories will dramatically increase your knowledge of the approximate macronutrients in foods (calories, fat, carbs, fiber, sugar, protein). This leads to making better decisions about which foods to eat.
- Tracking calories will prevent you from losing focus on your diet because you will be active in your new habit of ‘dieting’ throughout the day as you track.
- Tracking calories shows in stark terms the impact that food, as opposed to exercise can have on the energy in – energy out equation.
- Would you rather eat a 300 calorie slice of cake or walk 3 miles to burn it off?
- the path towards a healthier weight is 80% dietary habits and 20% exercise habits