A calorie counting approach to weight loss requires you to have an understanding of the calories you consume and the calories you burn. Maintaining a food journal is an good way to count the calories in the foods you consume and you can total the calories of the foods in your journal to see the the total calories you are consuming. To get an approximation of the calories you burn there are a number of approaches.

A weight loss calculator will give a good initial indication of the of the total calories you burn. To get a basic idea on how many calories you’re typically burning on a given day, you can enter information about your body size and your estimated average amount of daily activity, and the program will calculate the calories you are burning. It caln also be useful to be able to see the calories burned during any given exercise or activity. An estimate of this can be computed through the use of a calories burned calculator by using the time it takes to do the activity and your weight.

The calculations are on the basis of a metric called the activities MET (Metabolic Equivalent). The MET indicates the calories burned by an exercise as a multiple of you resting metabolic rate (RMR) which is the typical number of calories you burn at rest. Lets have a look at a some examples of this.  The MET value of sleeping is 0.9, and as such burns less calories than rest. A moderate pace walk is considered to have a MET of 3.3, and therefore burns approximately 3.3 times the calories than in a resting state.  Running up stairs has a high level of calorie burnage and has a MET of approximately 15. You can use an online calories burned calculator to convert an exercises MET value to an approximation of the calories burned during the activities. These calculators operate by multiplying an your weight in kilograms by the exercises MET value and its duration in hours to get the calories you have burned.

If you are counting calories it is beneficial to become familiar with the typical calories burned in your common activities.  The calculated calories burned in an activity should not be added to the more general calculation of your total calories burned by a typical weight loss calculator, as such calculators already include you activity level and provide an estimate for a twenty-four hour period. Alternatively, you may want to add the calories you burn in your total activities over a twenty-four hour period to give an alternative estimate of your total calories burned for a day.

Calories Out

To start this process it is useful to see an indication of the daily number of calories you are burning. In order to do this, you should take a look at a calorie calculator that will compute an estimate of this. A weight loss calorie calculator will be able to compute your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR), indicating an estimate of the calories you burn in a resting state with no digestion occurring. This can be estimated be a weight loss calculator by inputting some basic details about yourself such as you gender, age, weight and height. Your Basal Metabolic Rate is then adjusted by a multiplier based on your general level of activity to compute an estimate of the actual number of calories you burn a day.

This will provide a basic indication of the calories you are burning, and to gain a better understanding, you can also look at the typical number of calories burned during different exercises and activities. An exercise calorie calculator will let you see this information by simply inputting you weight and your gender. It is useful to sum the calories burned in your activities in a 24 hour period to see another estimate of your calories burned at a finer granularity.

Calorie In

The next step in calorie counting is to then look at how many calories you are consuming a day. Useful tools for this are online calorie counters that allow you to search for foods and see the number of calories in standard servings. A good habit to get into here is to maintain a food journal where you keep a record of the foods you are consuming. You can then total the calories of the foods in your journal to see how many calories you consume.

The Overall Picture

Many sources indicate that creating a calorie deficit of 3500 calories over a period of time will result in about one pound of weight loss. To achieve such a deficit you may need to consume less food or simply replace some of the high calorie foods in your diet with lower calorie alternatives as well as exercising more to burn more calories.

While engaging in a weight loss program you should only maintain a basic calorie deficit rather than attempting to introduce too large a calorie reduction. Many people suggest that introducing a too severe calorie deficit can result in your system reducing the number of calories it burns, and is therefore unproductive for weight loss. It is fairly widely recommended that you should ideally aim for approximately one to two pounds of weight loss per week to be sustainable.

It is important to maintain a well balanced diet with all the necessary vitamins and minerals as you adjust your diet for your weight loss process. You should also involve your doctor in your weight loss process as this will ensure you adopt a healthy approach and have professional advice that may be unique to your own situation. Some good resources relating to this stuff are the weight loss sections of About.com and WebMD.

Additionally, if you want to get right into tracking your diet and exercise with calorie counting, you should take a look at Weight By Date.  This program will allow you to journal your diet and exercise along with their calories and nutritional information on your PC and it also includes PDA integration to keep your tracking going while out and about.

The whole goal of weight loss is to put your body into a position of metabolizing your fat and using it as energy. Most people don’t know that water helps with this process. As you drink more water, it allows your body to run much more efficiently and can metabolize fat much easier. Anything that makes the process of using fat easier is something you should be using.

Somewhat of a Appetite Represent

I won’t lie to you like some other people will, water won’t take your cravings away, but water can help you deal with those cravings that are really bad. I know you’ve probably been in the position of feeling really really hungry and water is good to help repress that hungry feeling a bit, so you don’t end up cheating.

Helps With Digestion

If you’re on a diet, than you should be eating every few hours. This means your digestive system is going to be much more busy than it usually is. Water and weight loss are linked together. Water will help you digest food much more efficiently, which will keep your metabolism much more balanced.

Removes Toxins

Anytime you workout, your body will end up dumping toxins into the water supply of your body. The way it works is that when you drink water, this toxin filled water will be pushed out of the body through urination. If you’re not drinking enough water, you’re going to leave these toxins in your body that will make the weight loss process less efficient.

Negative Calories

Anything you consume that requires more calories to digest than you get form it is going to give you negative calories. Water has no calories, so you can always be sure that you’re burning calories by drinking it. Don’t go overboard because drinking too much water can be quite unhealthy.

Workout More Efficiently

A well-hydrated person is going to have a much more productive workout. Your body will lose a lot of water while you workout and you don’t want to run into a dehydrated mode because that can be unhealthy. All your ligaments and organs will remain well hydrated and you’re less likely to run into an injury.

Although you get fat all around your body (that’s why it’s called ‘body fat’), the fat you get on your stomach is the most noticeable and, for most people, the first place for fat to develop. It’s also the toughest area of your body to shed fad.

Because your abdominal area (belly) is the nearest area of your body to your stomach, it’s the first place that fat cells develop which means that if you’re putting on weight, you’re bound to start seeing a layer of soft belly fat developing before anything else.

Now, over the years, really useful weight loss facts have been diluted and changed so much that so much BAD advice is given to people looking to lose stomach fat…

We’re going to set the record straight with this article about losing belly fat.

The absolute key point you need to remember about losing belly fat is that you cannot burn fat from specific parts of your body. It’s just not how your body works - you need to lower your body fat instead. This will allow you to reduce the amount of excess fat you carry around in total which will reduce your stomach fat too.

Because ‘abs exercises’ (such as sit ups and crunches) just get you to sit down and flex your abdominal muscles, you are only working to tone those muscles and NOT to burn the fat around them.

To turn your body into a fat burning machine, you need to do two things when exercising. The first is to increase your heart rate so that your muscles receive the most amount of oxygen possible. This will boost your metabolism because your body will believe that you’re getting plenty of food.

The second thing is to actually exercise as much of your body as hard as possible. Going on a long run, doing an intensive cardio routine, going for a ride on your bicycle are all top ways to get your muscles into “overdrive” mode which then encourages your body to burn more fat.

To lose belly fat, you need to make sure that you do these intensive workouts at least 2-3 times a week so that you can enjoy the benefits of a body that’s constantly in ‘fat burning mode’.

However, there’s also another side to the story. Your diet.

Our bodies store fat on our belly because it’s the quickest place to put it. Fat is just energy that the body can burn later and the amount that’s stored depends entirely on your ‘metabolism’.

Now, without getting into too much detail about metabolism and how you can control it, the key point you need to remember about losing belly fat is that you need to burn more energy than you consume.

Your body stores fat because it wants a safe place to get energy from in the future, if you can’t find anything to eat. To burn your excess fat, you need to be able to deprive your body of enough energy to warrant the burning of fat.

My reasoning is simple - each year, we’re ’sold’ diets as the perfect solution to our weight troubles. Although they do help us reduce our waistlines in the short term, in actual fact - all they do is put your body under a lot of stress which we need to sooth after the diet has finished (hence the reason why we put most of the weight back on when it’s done).

The term ‘yo-yo dieting’ has been coined to describe this effect - where you use diets as short-term fat burning furnaces which do very little to help you in the long term - leading to rapid weight gain after you’re finished with the diet. The fact is that although diet change is a key component to successful weight loss, you need to be able to maintain your new weight after you’ve finished on the diet in order to be truly successful.

No matter how many diets you endure, you’re still going to become a lot more ‘relaxed’ after you’ve achieved your target weight and with a more relaxed attitude comes less restraint and less regimentation.

I want to introduce you to a ’system’ which I believe is the main reason I stay a constant weight all year round - consistency. Consistency is the art of keeping your diet and routine more of less the same every day of the week and it’s a concept which I feel is extremely powerful in keeping a lean figure.

We get fat because our body burns less calories than we consume. We have more left-over energy than we are burning which means that our metabolism sends it to be made into fat. Now, the reason why you have left-over energy is because your body holds back the amount that is burned because it doesn’t know how much you’re going to have to eat and how much energy it has to play with.

Our brain is not the same as our body - in that although we know we’re going to get fed tomorrow - our metabolism doesn’t. It just goes by what we ate and did yesterday… Which means that in order to keep your weight constantly low, you’ve got to give your body little reason to store extra fat.

Of course you could have “treats” each week (like on Sunday) but overall, you need to be keeping you daily intake of food the same…

Everloss is a new type of weight loss program that puts ease into the process. The process of weight loss is extremely complicated. Anyone that has taken on the challenge knows that there is that initial period where you feel like you can conquer anything, than you have the crashing lows where you think to yourself “why bother?” This is a cycle everyone goes through and the people that end up successful are the ones that can effectively ride the highs and keep pushing through the lows. This is what the Everloss system is designed to help you do.

This program is designed with one thing in mind; the long-term, which is why I like it so much. A lot of programs out there are only concerned with the short-term. They want you to buy, lose a few pounds and you’re less likely to ask for a refund because of it. The reality is that weight loss is a life long thing and you need to be prepared with the right information and tactics to be successful over the long-term.

Another great aspect of the Everloss program is that it is so focused on teaching the fundamentals of properly eating. The biggest problems with a lot of programs are that they designate specific foods that will work for the program, but do they really apply to your real life? We all have different tastes and food is probably where we have the greatest diversity. With all this diversity, there is no single program that can suggest to you what to eat. You have to learn the skills to determine if a specific type of food is going to work to your advantage or against you. Everloss will teach you this very specific and important skill.

What I’ve found about this program is that it is designed with simplicity for the reader. Sometimes it can be difficult to understand the more scientific things about a program. A lot of the words and concepts will just go over the average Joe’s head. Obviously any program that does this will be detrimental to the whole weight loss process. It comes down the psychology of weight loss. When you think things are complicated, you instantly think it is hard and you’ll eventually give up. When you keep it simple, you will instantly think it is easy and you’re probably going to end up being quite successful at this.

I think when you get right down to the fundamentals of the Everloss program they’re solid. This is what you need as a person looking to lose weight. You don’t need a gimmick that is only going to help you in just one area. You need something that is going to give you the overall success you’re going to need.

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Being “lean” is that weight loss nirvana that many aspire to enter, whereby your body loses most of its body fat and replaces it with muscle. Being “lean” is similar to having an “athletic” figure, whereby you don’t look like a bodybuilder but do have muscles…

Leanness is one of the primary goals of many people looking to lose weight. Not only is it a body image that many of us aspire to attain but it’s also popularized in the media with many models adopting the look.

To achieve leanness, here are 6 simple tips you can use:

1. Have different size meals at different times of the day
Eat a large breakfast in the morning. Eat small meals frequently, during the rest of the day. Eat a very small meal at night.

2. Don’t eat late at night
Try not to eat during the 2 hours before you go to bed. Why should you not eat late at night? Your body isn’t going to use the energy; it is going to store it as fat.

3. Follow the 90% rule
If you eat 7 meals a day, 7 days a week, for a total of 49 meals, you are allowed 5 cheat meals during that week. Any meal you missed, where you did not eat every 2-3 hours, counts as a cheat meal.

Cheat Meal Rules:

• Don’t go overboard
• If it is sugary, eat it right after a workout

4. Increase your NEAT/NEPA
Go for a fast paced walk, park your car farther away, and take the stirs are all examples of NEAT/NEPA.NEAT (Non Exercise Activity Thermogenesis) or NEPA (Non Exercise Physical Activity) can become a great fat lose tool and can help you to stay lean, since most of the calories that we burn during a day are lost when we are outside of the gym.

5. Eat Carbs in the morning, Fat at night
Your body tends to handled carbs better in the morning and fat at night, and vice versa. The exception to this rule being your post work out meal, as your post work meal should be high in carbs, because your body is going to put them to use.

6. Eat less on your Non-workout days
The title really says it all for this. If you’re not working out, eat less to match your lower energy requirements for that day. Play around with how much less you, but start with somewhere around 200-300 calories less on non-workout days.

Fat Loss 4 Idiots is an online diet program that has become quite popular over the internet.  I thought it would be useful to put together a post on what the diet is about in case anyone is considering this program.  The first thing you notice about Fat Loss 4 Idiots is that it is not a low calorie, low carb or low fat diet.  Rather, it is based on the notion of calorie shifting.

This is where you rotate the types of calories you consume from day to day.  The theory here is that when you follow a fixed diet regime, you system becomes used to what you are eating and you reach a plateau.  This is where your system adjusts to your standard diet and starts burning fewer calories to compensate.  The calorie shifting principle involves rotating the calories you consume from carbs and protein to prevent this plateau occurring.

Fat Loss 4 Idiots allows you to adopt one of two weight loss methods.  In one method, an online diet generator will generate an 11 day diet according to the calorie shifting principle.  This is then followed by 3 days off.  You are not limited in the quantity of food you eat but rather should eat four meals a day until you are just short of being full.  This first method is quite structured and allows you to adopt a specific plan and set of meals for your 11 day diet.

The other method, also based on calorie shifting, can be adopted if you want to follow a set of rules rather than having to stick to a fixed diet plan.  This method consists of 10 rules of fat loss.  These rules govern things such as the types of foods you should be rotating between the meals of your days, light exercise regimes and water consumption to name a few.  I actually prefer the idea of following a system like the 10 rules of fat loss as it allows more freedom in your routine and is based around consistent weight loss that should be relatively easy to follow.

The program then looks at what you should do once you have lost the weight you need to lose and gives you a set of rules for maintaining your new weight.

One of the big advantages of this program is the price point.  Many commercial weight loss programs end up requiring some sort of regular payment.  This may be in the form of pre-prepared meals, or in some cases, pills and what not.  Here you have a single payment and then it is up to you to try the program for as long as you like. There is also a a 60 day money back guarentee and a 50% discount available which makes the program come down to a fraction of the cost of some other weight loss programs.

Hope this helps.

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Here are 10 simple ways which you can be healthier in the office - and exactly how they will help your body!

However, there are ways which you can work around the inconvinient idleness of the office environment and actually become healthier in the office:

1. Drink Plenty Of Water
Hydration is probably the most important factor of survival. Not only do we depend on water to live but even if we have a small defecit of it, we can be bedridden thanks to the headaches and thirst that it brings.

But there’s a much more important reason to keep yourself hydrated (I.E drinking 4 pints a day)  - even if you are mildly dehydrated, your metabolism could be affected by as much as 3%! That means that it’ll be even harder for you to lose any weight in the future.

2. Walk Around. A Lot.
Office work, especially if you’re sitting down at a computer, is notorious for not giving you the chance to stretch your legs and do some much needed calorie burning. Take every opportunity you can - even if it’s to just head to the photo copier - to walk around and keep the blood pumping around your legs.

3. Take Fruit As Snacks

Ever been tempted by that delicious-looking cookie or those birthday cakes someone brough in? Forget them…. unless you’re taking a large dosage of fruit to keep the balance of “good” and “bad” foods Fruits not only keep your hunger under control but they also give our bodies much needed fibre which helps with your digestive system. It’s far more beneficial to eat an orange or banana than a dohnut or candy any day!

4. Get A Good Night’s Sleep
Being tired not only makes concentrating more difficult but it’s also been suggested that it doesn’t do much good for your metabolism. Getting a good night’s sleep (I.E going to bed EARLY if you need to) will not only make your office life much more enjoyable but healthier too.

5. Make A Point Of Going Outside For Lunch
If you’ve got a cafeteria or eat at your desk, it will be much more healthy to get some fresh air outside for obvious reasons - the first being that you can actually stretch your legs to get the blood pumping freely around them again. The second being that you’ll actually be able to give your eyes and brain a much needed rest from the stressful office environment. Believe me - it pays to get out at lunch time!

6. Have A Filling & Healthy Breakfast
There’s nothing worse than glancing at the clock, seeing the time’s 10:55 and feeling your stomach groaning and rumbling with starvation. It’s a fact that we need to eat every 3-4 hours which means that many people stick to having elevensies to keep them going mid-morning. However, this could have a diverse effect on your metabolism which means that you should always try and eat as much as you can for breakfast to keep you going until 12:00 or 13:00 (whenever you have lunch).

7. Don’t Skip Meals
Skipping lunch is commonplace and is possibly the worst thing you can do for your metabolism. Not only does it make your body cling onto every last ounce of energy but it also means that when you eat your next meal - it will hoard as much of that as possible as fat. In other words - you skip lunch and you put a huge spanner in the works of your metabolism.

8. Don’t Go The Gym At Lunch
This is on the same lines as the last point - whereby if you skip eating lunch and just go the gym to burn as much fat as possible, you could actually be doing more harm than good. Since your metabolism will think that you’re not getting a frequent amount of food, it will attempt to store as much of the energy you do eat as fat - meaning when it comes to dinner time - your waist line is going to expand instead of remaining the same.

9. Try And Walk To Work
Okay - different people have different circumstances - but if you’re lucky enough to live locally to your place of work, then the health benefits of walking will be profound. Not only will you be able to burn off some morning calories but you’ll also feel more awake and ready to go when you get to work!

10. Get Involved With (Or Start) Sports Clubs
Basketball, football, baseball - whatever tickles your fancy… get a bunch of the lads from work to get together one night and make a little social gathering of it. This will not only bond the team but it will also help you burn a LOT of extra weight. This point is possibly the most overlooked one which MILLIONS of people could be benefitting from right now!

So there you have it - 10 ways to stay healthy in the office!!

I play it quite a lot (normally as much as 5-10 hours a week) and love it… not only because it is fun but also because it’s very good at helping you lose weight.

I mean - if you look at ALL the soccer stars, none of them are fat, tubby or overweight in any way, are they? They all have  thin, lean and athletic figures and that’s because of the simple reason that playing soccer is an incredibly good way to burn excess fat and build “lean muscle”…

And here’s why:

As with most sports, you have to run quite a fair distance in soccer. Some of the professional soccer players can run as much as 5-10 miles in a 90 minute game, with what I’d estimate as 65% of that distance being sprinted.

This is important in the whole ethos about soccer being a great way to lose weight. We all know that jogging and running are good ways to drop the pounds, so if you introduce that into a competitive environment where you are encouraged to push your body, then you’ve got a perfect recipe for fitness.

If you’re playing with a group of people who are actually good at soccer, you can expect the game to flow. This means that there is very little “stop-start” type actions that you find with football, tennis and other sports… which means that you are actually running for longer.

Because you’ve got the combination of uninterrupted running & sprinting with a hugely competitive environment, you can be sure that you’ll subconsciously be pushing your body more and more - which will boost your heart rate, metabolism and lean muscle production.

Lean muscle is basically when your body just breaks down what substances it can (including muscle and fat) and then replaces it with pure muscle.

That’s why I think playing soccer is a great way to get fit. Not only because you are running further and harder than some other sports but also because if you can play the game well - you will be able to really burn a lot of fat quickly.