Your weight is determined by the calories in the food you eat minus the calories your body expends keeping itself running plus activities and exercise. In order to lose 1 pound per week, you must expend 500 calories more than your body needs by eating less food and exercising more.
How did you determine how much food to eat? Sometimes people either underestimate or overestimate the number of calories their body needs in order to achieve weight loss. Try my Healthy Body Calculator® and just add your activities so you don’t overestimate your calorie needs. Choose to lose 1 or 2 pounds per week. HBC will not calculate a Calorie Daily Value goal of fewer than 1,200 calories to ensure you meet your RDA for protein, vitamins, and minerals. In order to meet your RDA, you need to eat a wide variety of foods – meat, poultry, fish, dairy, whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and healthy fats.
Then add your Calorie Daily Value result from HBC to HELP Healthy Eating for Life Plan® which will create a personalized healthy eating plan for you. On HELP, choose the type of milk, meat or not, beans or not, and snacks or not that you want. On your HELP customized eating plan, there is a small food database linked from each food group at each meal so that you can create menus. Planning what you are going to eat ahead of time helps to stick to your plan long term.
About exercise, make sure you can carry on a conversation when exercising. Otherwise, you are just burning the glucose in your blood and muscles while not burning any body fat. If you are hungry after exercise, then you may have been breathing during exercise or exercising at a high heart rate. In order to burn body fat completely, your body needs oxygen and you need to be exercising for approximately 20 minutes for your body to convert from burning blood sugar to burning body fat. Second, include weight lifting exercise every other day as that will help maintain your muscle mass while you lose weight. People often lose muscle mass during weight loss because they do not lift weights and their body doesn’t need as large a muscle mass to move a smaller body mass.