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Healthy Diet Plans >>  Calorie Intake >>  Calorie Intake to Lose Weight

Calorie Intake to Lose Weight

Your weight plays an important factor in determining the state of your health. It is vital to maintain your weight in a healthy bracket, which is determined on the basis of your height and build. If your weight is not within such limits; either by being more or less than required, it is unhealthy and can eventually lead to numerous complications.  Monitoring and regulating your calorie intake to lose weight is the most direct and straightforward way to lose weight.

Monitoring your daily calorie intake to lose weight is not as difficult as it may seem at first. You need to get used it. First, you will need a daily calorie log book.

Plan your meals well. Moderation is an important factor. You should look to eat a well balanced meal and not avoid any type of food completely, such as meat or dairy. There numerous books available that will provide the calorie count of each food. You can use these to keep a tab on your calorie intake using the information available there. The same information is also pretty easily available on the internet. Also, calorie intake calculators to lose weight are available on the internet. They are very helpful as they can determine your body’s approximate current calorie requirement as per your height, weight, activity level, age and sex. It is important t remember that as you lose weight your body calorie will begin to reduce and you need to consume lesser calories in order to lose more weight. If you have a plan to lose a certain amount of weight within a certain period, you will also be able to prepare a calorie intake chart to lose weight. Such a chart will help you monitor your calorie intake accurately as you lose weight. If you are not comfortable with any of these options, you can seek help from a professional dietician as well. An important thing to note is that the balance between the intake of calories and the usage of calories the key factor. Merely reducing your calorie intake is not going to help if your calorie expenditure increases. It is important to create a balance between your calorie intake and usage so that you use more than you take in. Approximately 1 pound, or 0.45 kg, of stored body fat contains about 3500 calories. Therefore you need to ensure that the difference between the calories you take in and those you use up is about 3500, in order to lose that 1 pound of weight. Similarly, in order to lose 2 pounds of weight, you need to create a deficit of 7000 calories and so on. Reducing a pound of weight does not mean you lose only fat from your body, you also lose muscle. One pound of weight corresponds to approximately one quarter lean tissue loss and the rest of the three quarters is fat loss. You can create this deficit through of one 3 possible ways. You can reduce your calorie intake while maintaining your calorie usage. Such dieting will help you reduce calorie intake to lose weight without exercise. While it is essential to reduce your calorie intake, you should remember that it is dangerous to do so indiscriminately.

On an average, you should reduce your calorie intake by about 500 calories below your calorie requirement. You should ensure that the deficit does not increase to more than 1000 calories. An important thing to note about dieting is that there is no ideal calorie intake to lose weight as the resultant deficit is what matters. However, as a general rule of thumb, it is recommended that you should never allow your daily calorie level below 1800 calories for men, while the minimum calorie intake to lose weight for women is 1200 calories, which is relatively pretty low. While dieting, you should be wary of weakness setting in. Another method is to exercise so as to create the calorie deficit needed to lose weight. You can maintain your calorie intake, as the calorie usage is increasing. This method, can however, be quite strenuous or time consuming. The third way to create a calorie deficit is the best method of doing so. It is simply a combination of both diet and exercise. In this way, you get both the benefits of dieting and exercising, plus you are able to do both in moderation. Successful and continuous weight loss is best achieved through a combination of diet and exercise. Do not try and overdo either of them. Reduce your calorie intake slowly and regularly and gradually intensify your exercise regime to achieve and maintain healthy weight loss. See also average calorie intake

There are serious health problems related with being underweight, such as malnourishment, weakness, hair fall, weakening of the immune system and so on. However, the health concerns related to being overweight are more in comparison and can be quite alarming. Sadly, they are also the more common among the two. While television, newspapers, magazines, the internet and all other mediums of mass communication today tend to propagate the skinny, size zero phenomenon, simply maintaining a healthy weight is quite different. You merely need to maintain your weight in a healthy bracket and keep yourself physically and mentally fit so as to be sustain an all round state of well being. Today there is a sizeable and thriving industry dedicated to the business of weight loss. Weight loss gadgets, weight loss pills, herbal teas, exercise equipment, diet programs, fitness regiments, health magazines and scores of weight loss articles, are all dedicated to providing the perfect, easiest, cheapest weight loss methods. Clearly, there is no dearth of information or research on the matter. What matters most is simply implementation.  It is only possible to successfully implement your weight loss program if you are able to see regular results. Every plan, gadget, formula and method that is used to lose weight eventually boils down to the same logic: that you need to take in fewer calories than you expend, in order to lose weight.

Submitted on January 16, 2014