Do You Believe the Only Way to Lose Weight is To Use a Food Calorie Chart To Count and Restrict Calories?Many people want to know if counting calories with a Food Calorie Chart is the best way to lose weight. The reason they ask this question is because we have all been brain-washed by the media to believe that counting calories or "energy in = energy out" is the only way to lose weight. This is a "one-size-fits-all" mentality! It may be true that using a Food Calorie Chart to count calories works for some people, but for the vast majority of people, it doesn't. Why? Mainly because these diets do not take into account your metabolism, nor do they take into account how your body processes food if you suffer from hormonal imbalances like Insulin Resistance & Diabetes, Estrogen Dominance and Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS). I have included below an excerpt from the "Diet Free ... At Last!" Weight Loss Program e-book to help to explain this in more detail.
For years, the main reason why people used a Food Calorie Chart to count calories was that if you burn more calories than you eat, your body would burn the excess body fat. In theory it sounds logical, but the body’s physiology is more complicated than that.It’s not only how many calories you eat, but also what you eat and in what proportions that makes all the difference. Let’s take an in-depth look at how the body really works... First, let’s look at the effect metabolism has on your weight...
Metabolism is the name given to the burning of
energy in order to run all the involuntary systems of the body.
The energy required keeping bodily functions running smoothly accounts
for over 70% of the calories we eat in a well-balanced healthy diet.
This energy is burnt in the muscles in a similar way that fuel is burnt
in a furnace.
Given
that muscles burn the majority of calories we take in, it stands to reason
that the more lean muscle tissue we have, the faster our metabolism and the
more energy we burn off. Yo-yo
dieting and low calorie diets have a tremendous effect on metabolism because each time you lose
weight on a restrictive low calorie diet, you lose muscle and when you gain the weight
back, you gain it back as fat, not muscle.
As time goes on, the more muscle you lose, the slower your
metabolism ... the slower your metabolism, the harder it is to lose weight and
the easier it is to gain weight! When you use a food calorie
chart to count and restrict calories, calorie intake is often much lower than it should be. Restricted
low calorie
diets don’t work because the body adjusts its
metabolism to match the lower calorie intake, thereby conserving energy.
So even though
Keep in mind that even though I don't recommend following low calorie diets, I am not advocating eating food without restriction because eating too much of any food, including healthy food, does inhibit weight loss. Even if you find that you don’t gain much weight, you won’t lose any either. This is especially true when eating some very innocent looking "low-fat" snack foods.
I truly believe that a great part of the obesity problems we are facing as a nation has to do with the tremendous increase of "low-fat" snack foods available to us. Research shows that we are eating a much higher percentage of low-fat food than we were 20 to 30 years ago, and yet obesity is increasing at an amazing rate. Why?
3 Reasons why diet "low-fat" foods cause weight gain:
Many people think that snacking on low fat diet food is the best way to lose weight. As a matter of fact, many of these low fat diet foods actually trigger food cravings. On top of that, it is easy to overeat these foods because we mistakenly think that "low fat" equals "calorie free" ...
4 Reasons Why Using a Food Calorie Chart to Restrict Calories Is Not Effective...Calorie counting and calculating the optimal number of daily calories is not an exact science because every person is unique and has a different metabolism. There are many different Food Calorie Charts, calorie calculators and formulas on the market for calculating our optimal daily caloric intake, and they usually produce very different results. There are a few reasons why a food calorie chart or calorie formula may not produce the results you are hoping for:
Rather than using food calorie charts to count calories, the "Diet Free ... At Last!" Weight Loss Program teaches you how to plan meals that will be directly targeted to supporting your specific hormonal situation. As you correct your hormonal imbalances, you will notice that your body will start to re-balance itself, and part of the re-balancing process includes losing weight and losing fat. If you try to lose weight by counting calories with a food calorie chart without taking into consideration the part your hormones play, you will not only find it very hard to lose weight, but you will be plagued with intense food cravings and when you give in to these cravings, the weight will come right back on. This is especially true if, by following these restrictive low calorie diets, you lose muscle instead of fat. In contrast, following this program will stop food cravings and help your body to re-establish it's natural state of health and fitness. My personal opinion is that rather than counting calories with a food calorie chart, it would be better to just keep track of your level of body fat % and watch your body fat % decrease as you lose weight. Previously, calculating fat % was quite difficult and costly, using various methods like fat calipers and Hydrostatic Weighing (submerging yourself in water). Thanks to technological advances, calculating body fat % is now easy, relatively inexpensive and can be done in the privacy of your own home. Introducing Tanita's Body Fat Scales: The Easy Way to Keep Track of Your Body Fat % ... (and your Body Fat % is actually more important than your weight)! Normal weight scales are fine if you are only interested in your overall weight, but weight is made up of water, muscle, bones and fat and when we say we want to lose weight, what we really mean is we want to lose fat. But how do we know how much fat we have and how do we keep track of it to see if we really are losing fat or if it is muscle and water we are losing. That's where the Tanita Body Fat Scale comes in. The Tanita Body Fat Scale successfully monitors both your body fat and your overall weight and is ideal for tracking your weight loss / fat loss and making sure you are on track with your personal fitness goals.
   
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