I’m a pretty technical guy, a geek you may even say. So when I looked at the task of losing weight, I came at it from a scientific point of view. Food is simply fuel for the body. The amount of fuel in each individual piece of food is scientifically valued in units called ‘calories’. Calories are what our bodies burn for energy. We burn calories doing pretty much anything. Running a marathon, typing this article, or even eating are all activities that burn calories – though the first activity seems to burn a little bit more than the second two.
If the amount of food that we eat contains more calories than the amount of calories we burn off throughout the day, then we store those extra calories as fat and gain weight. If, however, the amount of calories burned is greater than the amount of calories eaten then we lose weight. (I think we’re all fairly familiar with this concept, I just like rehasing things in a scientific voice). However, what I’m trying to do is simplify the whole issue into numbers. If you can see food as simply part of a mathematic equation, the mystery and mumbo jumbo that clouds alot of our minds about dieting simply vanishes. No wive’s tales or urban legends here, just cold hard numbers.
Now that we’re not afraid of the magical calorie goblins, lets go a bit deeper. Generally speaking, you will lose 1 pound for every 3500 calories that are burned. That means that if you can cut out or burn 500 calories a day from your usual daily diet you will lose 1 pound per week. 500 cal X 7 days = 3500 cal/week = 1 pound of weight loss per week! (Everyone still with me?).
When you stop and think about what you’ve been eating throughout any given day (see my previous post), it’s not that hard to cut out or burn 500 little calories. Instead of drinking a Mtn. Dew (around 170 cal.) for breakfast, lunch and dinner try a water or unsweet tea instead. That wasn’t so bad was it? Simply reduce the amount of calories, even by a little bit, and you can begin to see weight start melting off.
