Lose weight By Keeping A Track of your Calories

At Intent91, a crucial tip for successful weight loss our clients use is tracking their calorie intake. Tracking your calories enables you to calculate a calorie deficit. There are a number of apps that help track your calories, but we recommend using MyFitnessPal.

Calorie Deficit

The science behind losing weight is simple – to lose weight. We must operate in a calorie deficit, aka we must burn more calories than we consume. This sounds simple, right? But of course, there are many barriers standing in the way of people achieving a calorie deficit. Therefore, the list goes on for tips to achieve weight loss. 

Of course, personal training is an excellent way to achieve structure and guidance with your workouts, yet training only gets you so far, and nutrition is just as important.

There are hundreds of ‘‘get lean quick’’ or ‘‘special juice’ juice’ diets, in the market, these diets are not sustainable and, therefore, in the long run, will not enable you to achieve your fitness goals.

However, I’ve found that keeping it simple works best; therefore simply tracking your calories into your daily routine will enable you to start to achieve a calorie deficit. 

Tracking your Calories 

Tracking your calories is extremely important for achieving any fitness goal, whether that be muscle gain or weight loss. And, when it comes to weight loss, tracking your calories can be the key to unlocking your weight goals. Especially during the initial stages when you are finding your feet with potentially new foods or a change in your diet.

As suggested earlier, losing weight requires a calorie deficit. And the easiest way to understand and set goals to achieve this, you must calculate how many calories you are consuming. Now, to effectively track your calories, there are some crucial factors to keep in mind.

1. Honesty

We’ve all been there, forgotten about that extra beer we had or that extra piece of cake just happened to slip your mind. However, for tracking to truly work and enable you to set goals whilst working out, you must be very honest.

2. Precise

Another important factor to consider when recording your food and drink intake is making sure you are precise and very specific. For instance, let’s say you record eating a slice of toast, which equals 75 calories but really you had a slice of toast with butter and jam, you could be looking at 200+ calories, almost double.

This example portrays how misconstrued your food consumption can be if you are not precise and very specific when using it.

3. Consistency 

Now, the good news is you do not need to keep tracking calories for the rest of your life! But we do suggest keeping it until you are consistently achieving a calorie deficit, which may take longer if you have completely changed your diet.

Alongside this, it is important to keep tracking for the full week – not just weekdays. We often let things go at the weekend, which is absolutely fine in moderation, but if you are drinking and eating lots every weekend and not recording this, then there is no point in tracking for the rest of the week.

Conclusion

Overall, losing weight can be a long road, but consistency and accountability is crucial. The tips for losing weight go on, but tracking calories can be a very effective way of achieving a constant calorie deficit to enable the success of losing weight.

Keeping a track of what you eat complements your personal training sessions and fitness classes very nicely and makes you achieve your personal fitness goals.

However, not everyone’s goal is to lose weight; therefore, if you workout for alternative benefits such as the positive mental side effects, then keeping track of your calorie intake is not necessary.