For Dummies: Understanding Calories & Weight Lost

I hope this day finds you in a peaceful and resting state of mind. If not, why? Are you wanting to be doing something else? Are you multitasking, and at the same time feeling like you’re not doing much or that there is too much to do? Have you had a good day at work? Was it a busy work day/week? Are you not looking forward to work tomorrow? Did you sleep well last night? Did rush hour traffic bother ya? Did some person give you a wonderful compliment today? Have you complimented someone today? Did you have to stand in line for an hour while trying to accomplish some form of transaction? Did you hit up the gym or go for a walk or jog recently? Did you participate in some sensual healing last night? Or, are you frustrated that you didn’t?

What does all of this mean? Well, who knows, lol. However, many of these activities have weight control and weight lose implications! The human body as we know it, is a vastly complex and self regulating phenomena. When I hear someone say that the body is a temple, I take that literally. Many high level scientist cannot phantom that One Man could create such machinery mostly because of all of the intricacies and co-dependent functionings of the body. Hey, I digress.

This post is to shed light on just how many calories we’re burning on any given day. The human body burns between 1400-2500 calories per day, simply without doing much at all. To find out what your body burns per day, you’d want to use a bmr(Basal Metabolic Rate) calculator. Your score is the amount of calories you need per day to sustain itself.

Your Metabolic Rate(metabolism) is the rate at which the body burns up calories in your body without doing anything. Its results tells you how many calories it takes to maintain your weigh daily. [BMR Calculator<<<click] In other words, if you intake 2500 calories a day, you’d have to burn less calories than that in order to lose weight. So, a body that consumes 2500 calories a day, and burns 2500 calories a day will stay at the same weight. A body consuming 2500 calories daily and burning 3000 calories will lose weight at the rate of about 1 pound a week. Sounds simple right? No? Well peeps, I’ll tell ya. 😉

One pound of fat is equal to 3500 calories. <<<Understand this fact right there for the rest of your life! Whether your goal is to maintain a good weight or lose weight, knowing that fundamental truth is your first step toward your goal! So, if you’re burning 500 calories less than your overall intake daily, in 7 days, you will have burned 3500 calories and 1 pound. Eating 500 less calories daily is not a difficult task at all!!! Remember, the way I just explained in how to lose 1 pound a week and totally WITHOUT doing any physical exercises. For a healthy person, you shouldn’t be losing more than 7 pounds in one week, which is supported by many nutritionist! And again, it’s very important to know how many calories your body needs daily to maintain itself at a normal baseline of functioning.

Katherine Goodwin[TheDietChannel.com] states, “when you lose weight rapidly, your body is typically only losing glycogen (carbohydrate) and water weight, not fat. Your body thinks that it’s starving and reduces its metabolic rate, which makes it harder for your body to burn each calorie (they burn at a slower pace than they normally would). Then when you start eating normally again, your body stores as much food as it can into your fat cells in case of another “famine.” If you’re not losing more than 7 pounds a week, you’re doing just fine!

Some people, myself included, believe that counting calories is dumb and monotonous and hard to follow. What I do here to compensate for this is that I  started studying how many calories are in specific and popular food items, particularly restaurant bought items. Also, look up the calorie content of random items. You can’t count [estimated] calories if you don’t know how many calories are in that cheeseburger or apple or steak soft taco or soup or veggies or chicken breast sandwich. Note: with calorie counting, in my opinion, you can eat not-so-good things as a cheeseburger(minus cheese) or a hotdog here and there. However, you must know how many each carries in calories so that, one, at the end of the day you can have a “rough estimate” of knowing how many calories you ate…and how much harder you should work the next day to burn off a few more calories.  And two, you can calculate in my head whether you burned more calories than you consumed on that particular day.

Right off the top, I know that a regular sized chicken breast(boneless/skinless) is roughly 250 calories. If I put myself on a daily calorie intake(bmr) of 2200 calories, that means that I have roughly over 1950 calories to intake for that day.

How many calories did I burn today? This is your next reference point to losing and maintaining weight. After you have learned how many calories that are in some foods, you’ll want to know how many calories you’re burning with certain activities. A key to losing weight is to increase your physical activities!  And you should know of roughly how many calories certain exercises and non-exercises are  burning.  For example, walking for an hour burns around 250-350 calories.  Or, how one hour of playing basketball can burn up as many as 600-800 calories.  Or simply, standing for an hour burns 150 calories.  What I don’t do is this:  on a given day, I do not exercise(calories burned) to subtract(calories consumed) from what I ate that day.  These two entities, I keep separate.   Calories consumed is for me to not overeat.  And calories burned is for me to help gauge my weight maintanence/loss.

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