How I Lost 80 Pounds: The Most Practical Way To Lose Weight

I know that losing weight can be a difficult and arduous task if you don’t have the right facts. There’s so much information out there but most of it is either misleading or fails to get to the point. Eating less is good but how do you measure how much less to eat? Exercise is beneficial but what if you’re counteracting its affects without you even knowing it?

Basically, above all else, there is only one way to lose weight: Consume less calories than you burn. That is numero uno. Any diet plan that deviates from this basic point will inevitably lead to failure. And fortunately, there are only a handful of things you need to do to achieve that basic goal.

Losing weight is easier than most people think. And this article will cover how I lost 80 pounds and why anyone else, no matter who they are or how their life situation is, can do the same thing.

Use a Calorie Calculator

There are three basic questions you need to ask yourself if you want to start losing weight. If you can answer these three questions, your chances of losing weight are greatly multiplied:

1. How many daily calories should you consume to maintain your current body weight?
2. How many daily calories should you consume to lose one pound a week?
3. How many daily calories should you consume to lose two pounds a week?

The easiest way to answer these questions is to use a Calorie Calculator:

It was this tool and my knowledge of calories that helped me lose 80 pounds more than anything else. It is imperative that you use this tool because without it, your chances of losing weight are greatly diminished.

This tool requires you to enter and specify your age, gender, weight, height, and exercise level to accurately assess the approximate number of calories you need to eat to maintain your body weight or lose weight. After you enter that information and press the calculate button, it will generate three calorie ranges: Maintenance, Fat Loss, and Extreme Fat Loss.  If you eat the number of calories next to the Fat Loss field, you will lose about 1 pound a week and if you eat the number of calories next to the Extreme Fat Loss field, you will lose about 2 pounds a week.

You can use this tool to calculate how much weight you can lose per week because each pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories. If you eat 500 calories less than your weight maintenance level each day, that subtraction will add up to 3,500 fewer calories a week—one pound.

It is extremely important that you use this tool so that you can accurately define how many calories you should eat each day to further your weight loss. This valuable and important tool can be found here:

http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm

Learn how to read and use Nutritional Labels to count your calories

When it comes to the subject of reading Nutritional Labels, you need to remember 5 basic points:

1. Calories are measurements of food energy available for digestion. The most common organic compounds that consist of calories are carbohydrates, fat, and protein.
2. One gram of carbohydrates equals 4 calories. The most common foods in nature that contain carbohydrates are vegetables and fruits.
3. One gram of fat equals 9 calories. Fat is more than twice as dense in calories as the other two digestible compounds. The most common foods that contain fat are animal fats and vegetable oils.
4. One gram of protein equals 4 calories. Protein can be found in all types of meats, eggs, and vegetables such as nuts.
5. On every Nutritional label, the grams of fat, carbohydrates, and protein add up to a little less than the total number of grams of the serving size at the top of each label. The grams left over are basically indigestible compounds and water weight.

If you eat at restaurants where Nutritional Labels aren’t provided with the food, you can easily look on company websites or somewhere else on the internet to find the nutritional information of what you eat.

Don’t worry about the difficulty of counting the calories of everything you eat, because over time, you’ll be able to look at any food source and accurately guess how many calories it contains.

Avoid the diet myths

There’s a common misconception which states that what you eat will determine how much weight you will lose. This has some merit of truth but this notion is more misleading than it is true.

When it comes to losing weight, it doesn’t matter what you eat or how unhealthy it is. If you plan to eat less calories than you’re use to consuming, you should focus on healthier food to enjoy the same nutritional benefits as before or better. However, simply eating healthy is not most important idea to focus on when it comes to burning fat. An average person who eats 5,000 calories of healthy food per day is still going to be overweight.

If I were to give an educated approximation based on years of personal experience and observation, I’d say that 98% of the time, consuming fewer calories than you burn (or burning more calories than you consume) is the main thing that matters when it comes to losing weight. That is the root of all weight loss. It’s all a numbers game—either you are gradually subtracting calories from yourself or you are adding them to you. If you consistently consume less calories than the calorie range that will maintain your current body weight, you will lose weight.

Another common misconception states that if you do sit-ups or some other exercise that focuses on a particular muscle group, you will lose fat in that particular area of the body. This is false. Fat doesn’t burn in only one area of the body all because you’re exercising a muscle group closest to that fat. Fat always burns indiscriminately throughout the entire body no matter how you exercise or what parts of the body you exercise the most.

Focus only on useful information

To be honest, losing 80 pounds 5 years ago was one of the easiest goals I ever accomplished. I wish every other endeavor in life was that easily achievable.

I studied how to lose weight for at least 3 months before I started to really lose weight. Because of that prior research, I knew exactly what I was doing. I narrowed down the most important information pertaining to weight loss and separated that from the information that wasn’t important until I accumulated a concentration of high-quality information originating from various sources.

My weight loss was rapid at first (around 10-12 pounds a month) but it slowed down gradually a few months afterwards as I was approaching my baseline. Within a year, I lost 80 pounds with far less effort than I previously expected.

If you want to lose weight, you can get the exact same results that I achieved as long as you rely on the facts and only the facts.

In summary, here’s what you need to do to lose weight:

1. Use a Calorie Calculator.
2. Count your calories on a daily basis and eat fewer calories than the calorie range for your weight maintenance level.
3. Exercise on a normal basis to burn more calories but keep track of how many calories you are burning.
4. Eat natural foods rich in fiber, protein, nutrients, protein, and omega fats because they usually have fewer and more substantial calories than processed food.
5. Continue educating yourself on the subjects of calories and losing weight. The links provided below will give you a fresh start.

http://www.nutritiondata.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutrition

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_energy

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If you have any weight loss stories to share or you need advise on how to shed a few extra pounds, you’re more than welcome to leave a comment for us.

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