Weightloss is a science and a bit heavy on math. I never realized it I just thought “eat healthy” meant eat less but here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Some foods are calorie dense and some aren’t. The ones that aren’t are pretty much my freebies. I figure no one in the world ever got overweight through eating celery all day long and neither will I, so they don’t count. However, people HAVE gotten fat eating too much bread, too many high fat meats and too much candy so those are things I’ve cut down on or eliminated completly.

Some of us are fast oxidizers and others aren’t (Something I started reading about after going through Jillian Michaels website).

I am a fast oxidizer, and because of that I crave salty foods, cheese and meats. The term explains my metabolism. I burn through the nutrients in my food really quickly and produce energy instantly. Now what I had to realize is that if I don’t USE that energy it gets stored as fat. Carbs speed the oxidation process up, so to best serve my metabolism I need foods with less carbs and more proteins and healthy fats. So I have to have protein in everything I eat and my ideal plate is 50% protein, 30% healthy fat and 20% carbs. This is going to be hard for me, but if I think about it the last time I lost weight and worked out, that’s EXACTLY the diet I was on. A lot of meat, a lot of veggies and only the minimum carbs my body needs. This just could be the chemical foods that my body wants and if I don’t give it to my body, it won’t behave the way I want. I was right to cut out all sugars from my life, because sugars will hold me back due to my metabolism.

Creating the right calorie deficit for your body is HARD. One of my friends is learning this right now. I weight 360 pounds at my current weight I can eat 3300 calories a day and maintain my puffy exterior. (Use THIS CALORIE DEFICIT CALCULATOR TO FIGURE OUT YOUR NUMBER) Who in the hell wants that? Not me. In dropping my calorie intake from 1200-1400 a day, I have already created a calorie deficit of anywhere from 1900-2100 a day. That is pretty awesome for me, but my goals is to lose 5 pounds a week. So here’s the math.

1 pound of fat is 3500 calories. You cut 3500 calories, you lose 1 pound.
To lose 5 pounds a week, I need to have burned or not eaten 17,500 calories in a week.
That’s a calorie deficit of 2,500 daily.
Now at 1200 calorie diet for MY body as it is right now? I start my day with a calorie deficit of 2100 but that’s not enough so I fill the other gap with working out.
Aerobic dancing? - 500 calories in an hour if you stay moving the whole time
Power walking? - At a steady 4mp that’s 250 calories an hour
Running? - At 5mp you can lose 400+ in an hour.

Now I’ve met my calorie deficit to lose the right amount of weight… now the test is to figure out how to spread out those 1200-1400 calories in a way that my body never feels like it’s being starved. Our bodies have been the same for thousands of years, and 1000 years ago we needed to be able to withstand famine and hard winters with little food so we learned how to store fat to survive, however our bodies aren’t AWARE that we now live in a world full of plenty where there’s food around 24\7 (for many of us) so it still acts like it has to save fat for hard times. When the body does not get enough it will flip the starvation switch on and anything you eat will be stored.

Since you’ve figured out what’s good for your metabolism… you shouldn’t have a problem here. It’s figuring out with your schedule and what you can and can’t eat and spacing it properly, also eating things that fill you up (like veggies instead of bread) and putting loads of them in your diet. Now after all that… we know what to do to lose weight.

Oh but wait… once you lose a significant amount of weight… these numbers will have to change. You’ll need to replug in your new weight, your new activity levels and figure out whether you should eat less (in the case of most of us, going under 1200 calories is dangerous and BAD) so then you’ll need to increase your workouts to get the same kind of weight loss. You’re body might sit at what it feels is an ideal weight why you think you have another 50 pounds, then you’re fighting your genetics and will need to DO MORE to get your results.

On top of figuring out the confusing math of it all, you’ve got to listen to your body. It will tell you when it wants more food and it will tell you very seriously. When my body craves sustenance I get headaches and feel tired, that’s the real time that I MUST eat. Its times like these you must remember what you’re doing on your journey and not gorge yourself on the first thing you see, think and say “what is best for my body” usually in these situations I pull a piece of 4oz grilled chicken (that I cook in the beginning of the week) out and eat it. That stops my craving instantly and it’s not but 100 calories.

This is WHY it’s so hard. Some diets like weight watchers or jenny craig, do all the math for you and even prepackage your food but I chose not to go that route because I can’t eat Jenny meals forever and I can’t count numbers for the rest of my life. So I chose the more difficult path of learning what calories are in my every day foods and referencing books and iphone calorie databases when I get stuck, and learning what a portion size is on my own because 10 years from now… I need to be doing the same thing I’m doing now.

What I’ve detailed here is what I am doing right now, and in a week I’ll see whether it’s working, but if it’s working for my male friend I can’t see why it won’t work for me. This is why they say the numbers don’t lie.