Tip 1. It’s All About Calories

BY Ayoub Oubarka 


First, the bad news. Weight gain and loss is directly tied to the amount of calories you eat versus the

calories you expend through exercise. What’s a calorie?

A calorie is a unit of heat energy. Specifically, it's the amount of heat energy required to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. How this relates to your body is that when you eat food, the food molecules are broken down chemically and that energy is either used by your body to perform work (like building muscle, or constructing new cells) or is stored (as fat). If you take in more calories than you burn, you will start to get fat.

Now, in the world of calories, it takes 3500 calories to equal one pound of body weight. So, if you take in an extra 3500 calories in your diet this week without exercising,
congratulations... you've just gained one pound (probably all body fat). The good news is that you can lose one pound of fat by either removing 3500 calories from your diet, or adding 3500 calories of exercise to your weekly schedule, or a combination

of the two.

What's 3500 calories? It's actually not much if you're eating the wrong kinds of food. You can consume 3500 calories in one meal if you eat two Double Whoppers (1010 calories each), a King Size order of french fries (590), a King Size onion rings (600), and a chocolate shake (440). Don't laugh... this is what I used to eat for dinner if my family went to Burger King... or something similarly outrageous.

So the bottom line here is that if you want to lose weight, you have to create a calorie deficit. That means you have to burn off more calories than you eat. You had to eat more calories than you burned to get fat... now you have to reduce the calories to get lean. It's that simple. In order to know how many calories you're taking in and burning off, you need to write them down.

We have a calorie counting database available for free on our Web site at RicksWeightLoss.com.
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