Counting Calories - Best Way to Lose Weight

One of the best and most reliable ways to lose weight is by counting the calories in the foods you consume. A calorie is a unit of energy measuring how much energy the foods we consume provide to our bodies. A certain amount of calories are necessary for the body to function properly. As you eat food, your body turns that food into fuel and burns it, producing calories, or energy.

As we all know, there are three different types of foods, all of which have different caloric amounts: carbohydrates, proteins and fats. One gram of carbohydrate contains 4 calories. One gram of protein contains 4 calories. However, one gram of fat has 9 calories, more than twice the amount found in protein or carbohydrates. This may be part of the reason fatty foods seem to fill us up so quickly. Unfortunately, it's also the reason fatty foods make us gain weight faster.

The full name for calories are "kilocalories." When calorie calculations are made, it is assumed that everyone knows that calories = kilocalories. For example, if something on a menu is listed as having 500 calories, it really has 500 kilocalories. A calorie is the amount of energy it takes to increase the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. It takes 3500 calories to equal one pound of body weight.

All of these numbers and calculations may be making your head spin. Just remember, all you really need to know is in the last sentence of the last paragraph. If you want to lose one pound of stored body fat, you must burn off 3500 calories. When you're relaxing, doing absolutely nothing at all, scientists say that most people burn just 50 calories an hour. So it naturally follows, then, that to make a real dent into your body fat, you must combine counting your daily calorie intake with exercise.

Some people eat different types of foods on a diet, thinking that will help them to lose weight faster. Low carbohydrate diets are popular, as taking in less carbs will cause the body to burn more protein by converting protein to carbohydrates in the liver. This can also cause more fluid to be lost from the body, however, faking dieters into thinking they're losing massive amounts of weight when, in actuality, they are just losing fluid and not making a noticeable, permanent reduction of all of their stored body fat. This is why diets that restrict only certain types of foods usually don't work.

Experts say that the only way to lose weight is to increase one's basal metabolic rate, usually through aerobic exercise. When a body is at rest, the body's oxygen supply is sufficient to burn up to 90% of its energy as fat.Therefore, if you increase your resting metabolic rate, you will actually burn more calories at rest than the person next to you. This will help you to dramatically increase your fat loss and you should see the numbers on the scale decrease as well.

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Article by: John Cleric