#3 Get a calorie counter tool
I hate math.
I hate counting calories.
I have done the whole calorie counting before. I have done the Weight Watchers with the points (that you still have to calculate or look up). I walked around with my little point calculator at the grocery. It took forever and I hated it. I had the little book too which wasn't very little and was equally annoying to use.
Life is busy and who has time to look at food labels, right?
You need to!
Why?
Well because if you are trying to lose weight or at least trying not o gain anymore weight, you have to follow some simple math rules. No calculus or anything just addition and subtraction. What goes IN has to be LESS than what comes OUT.
What does that mean? It means if you are burning 2000 calories a day and you eat 4000, you are going to gain weight. If you burn 2000 and you eat 1500 you create a calorie deficit and you should lose weight.
You can go online and find a calculator to let you know about the amount of calories that your body will burn naturally based on your sex, height, weight, age, and your lifestyle (sedentary, active, etc); find one such calculator here: http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4569300_calories-do-burn-day-exercise.html
Once you know what you burn you can start to decide what you should eat.
So, why do you count calories? If you don't know what you are putting into your body you are dooming yourself!
Look used to I would think nothing of going to The Cheesecake Factory and eating my meal and then getting a slice of cheesecake after we had had breakfast and maybe a quick lunch. We may get a piece of cheesecake to go and I would probably munch on it later in the day. We would go out and I would just order whatever I wanted off the menu and that would be that. I NEVER though to look and see how many calories these things have!
Here is a little story for you. There is a Cheesecake Factory near my house now. Well, still about an hour away, but that is near enough. We don't go often because it is kind of far away and a little expensive, but anyway. We were in the area and because of the long wait to eat there we ate at PF Chang's. I had pulled up the menu online and carefully planned my meal from the gluten free menu. I knew exactly how many calories I was eating and so I asked for my To Go box early to put the rest of the food in there because we planned on going to get a piece of cheesecake. I pull up The Cheesecake Factory menu to enter the slice into my daily calories and I find that most of the slices have over or about 1000 calories! That's ONE THOUSAND!!! That is half of what you should eat in a day (based on a 2000 calorie diet).
Needless to say I was FLOORED! You know what? That happened with a lot of foods at a lot of eateries. I really had no idea! Here I was always telling myself that I don't eat that bad and while I wasn't always snacking or eating like the people that you see on these TV shows, but I was eating things that were just way, way too caloric!
I know that you don't want to have to buy books to find out the calories in foods, you don't want to carry around a calculator and the good news is, you really don't have to. Most people now have an Android or iPhone and the good news is....there's an app for this!
I use the My Fitness Pal app. It is FREE, it has a HUGE database that you can use, it has a feature where you can put in the ingredients in a recipe and how many people it serves and it will give you the nutritional information per serving. I just really love it. It has a scanner tool as well. So if you are eating your Quest bar, and you want to log it, you just get out your phone, open your My Fitness Pal app, press the scanner and scan the barcode on the package and WaLa!
Not only is it free & easy to use. It also syncs with other fitness apps that you may use (discussed later) so that you can keep better track of what you burn and what you take it. Another thing I like is that you can link to your Facebook or other social media and find friends who also use the MFP and add them as friends. You can even see a feed like in Facebook. It is nice to have friends that keep you accountable and such (again, discussed later).
Now if you don't have the ability to do this with your phone then buy a small notebook and pen or pencil and do it manually. Again, it really IS ESSENTIAL.
Calorie counting, as I said before, sucks. But I promise you that once you get into it, it will not seem like a big deal anymore. Give it a month. I'll take 2 weeks even. 2 weeks when you really look at how many calories you are eating and track them and really become aware of how many calories you are taking in a day. Once you get used to logging that meal, it will become second nature...you will be so used to how your app works that it take but seconds.
Seconds to have a profound effect on your life.
Get something, SOMETHING to use as a calorie counter tool. It is essential and really quite necessary.
PS. I passed on the cheesecake that day and instead got Starbucks!
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