Daily Burn Has Helped me Cut Calories and Lose Weight
I have been on a weight loss and fitness program since around July 2009. At first I was intensely focused on ensuring I was getting enough cardio and exercise into my day. However, after regularly reading blogs like Fitness Black Book, Adonis Lifestyle, Mark’s Daily Apple, and Brad Pilon I have begun to realise that although exercise is important, it is the food I eat that makes the difference.
About 1.5 years ago I moved from Canada to Norway on an expatriate assignment with my employer, and have been able to enjoy the benefits of riding my mountain bike to and from work every day. It is a 24 kilometer round trip and takes a combined total of about 60 – 65 minutes. Even with a pretty diligent running program as well, I was only able to take my weight down from around 200 pounds (I didn’t actually measure because I was in denial) to 170 pounds. This weight dropped really quickly, but I was not able to break that 170 pound barrier. I realised that I had to do something different to break that “plateau”.
Using blogs like the ones mentioned above, it was clear that what is more important than all the cardio and exercise in the world was the food I put in my stomach. More importantly, it was all about calories and keeping them LOW. In fact, I have been able to cut about 10 pounds since realizing how important calories are to the weight loss and fitness equation.
Being the digitally focused guy that I am, I knew I needed to find a tool that would help me keep track of those calories electronically. At first I was using an iPhone app called Tap & Track. It was doing the job, especially because it was the only iPhone app I found that didn’t require a Wi-Fi connection to get food details. However, over time it was clear that the app was not enough as I wanted more functionality in the tracking of my food intake.
In early March, even before I seriously started tracking calories I signed up for a site called Gyminee. I used it only to try it and keep track of my biking and running progress. I gave up using it because it was really not doing anything for me at that time. As I realised that Tap and Track was not working as well as I wanted, I remembered Gyminee and reading somewhere that they had changed their name to Daily Burn and had also started to include nutritional tracking. This has been a godsend and has allowed me to diligently and accurately track exactly how many calories, carbs, and proteins I consume each and every day. The overall results have been very positive. Here is a chart from Daily Burn that shows my progress:
Here is some details on how the nutrition details I track look. In my opinion, the best part is that I can set limits (high and low) and the system alerts me to when I am in our outside of this limits. The only way to really know how much you eat is to really track it. How I track it will be a topic of another post.
I also have the companion app on my iTouch so I am able to be mobile with the tracking. So far so good on this weight loss digital tool. I will continue to let you know how it goes.
How Much Cardio Do I Need To Do To Lose Weight?
I just read an article in a fitness magazine that was titled “How to walk away the pounds”.
While this particular article had good intentions, I don’t think cardio (especially walking) is an effective tool for weight loss. Consider this, if you are of average weight, you would have to walk 5 miles to burn an extra 500 calories a day. Even at a fairly fast pace, it would take you about an hour to walk 5 miles. That’s a lot of work just to burn 500 calories.
If you kept your calorie intake exactly the same over the course of the week, and managed to walk for an extra hour a day at a fairly fast pace, you may be able to burn of an extra pound of fat per week.
This is assuming that the amount of calories you eat over the course of a week is EXACTLY equal to the amount you need to stay at your current weight. If you were overeating even slightly during this week, then the extra walking would have even less of an effect.
7 hours of exercise for a maximum of 1 pound of fat loss is not a very efficient use of anyone’s time! And, while walking 7 days a week may be possible now, think about what it might feel like during the winter months!
This is why I believe that eating for weight loss and even using short-term fasting for weight loss is much more effective than trying to ‘sweat off’ the pounds.
With the proper nutrition plan reducing the amount of calories you eat by 500 calories can be almost effortless.
I have found that the very best, most efficient way to lose weight is to combine a solid weight loss nutrition program with a resistance training program. The nutrition program helps you lose weight by creating a caloric deficit and the resistance training preserves your muscle mass and metabolic rate.
Once you have these two “pillars” in place then you can sprinkle in a little bit of extra walking, but think of this as more of a recovery exercise that helps you clear your mind and de-stress (with a bonus of being able to help burn some calories), rather than counting on it to really make ‘you shed the pounds.’
Brad Pilon strength training and nutrition professional and is the author of Eat Stop Eat.
Brad’s goal is to help people navigate through popular nutrition fads and gimmicks to find real-world nutrition strategies that work.
Read more of Brad’s work at http://nutritionhelp.blogspot.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Brad_Pilon
Is Diet The Key to Burning Body Fat or Is Exercise the Answer?
So when it comes to losing unwanted body fat, is diet or exercise more important? If you were to ask me 20 years ago, I would have told you that exercise was the key to a sexy body. While exercise is important, I think the real key to burning body fat and looking great is the result of a clean diet. If people ate properly, there would be many more toned people in gyms all over the world.
The Best “One Two” Weight Loss Combo is Both Diet and Exercise
Everyone knows that exercise along with a good diet is a great approach to losing weight. The challenge with exercising is that often times life gets busy. There isn’t always time to exercise, but you always have time for a proper diet. My suggestion is to keep your diet clean at all times, and exercise when time allows.
“You Can’t Out-Exercise a Big Mac”
A Big Mac has 540 calories. Do you realize how much exercising it takes to burn those calories? Well about an hour on the elliptical trainer at a moderate pace would do the trick! So after an hour of boring cardio, you are back to square one. You probably won’t lose weight at all especially if you added the fries and soft drink. Large fries would be an extra 570 calories and a large non-diet soft drink would be an extra 310 calories. So how much exercise would you have to do to burn 1,400+ calories? Let’s not even go there!
It Is Much Easier to Create A Large Calorie Deficit With a Clean Diet
A simple approach to losing weight is to create a daily calorie deficit. Basically, the idea is for your body to use more calories each day than what you consume in food calories. So, there are two ways to create this deficit; either consume less calories or burn more through exercising. Each pound of fat on your body is 3,500 calories. So to lose 2 pounds per week, you need to create a weekly calorie deficit of 7,000or a daily calorie deficit of 1,000. In my opinion it is much easier to create this calorie deficit by not eating those calories in the first place. You would have to spend two hours at a moderate pace on a stationary bike EVERY day to accomplish this!
Fat Loss Is A Bit More Complicated
The body is actually much more complex than simply responding precisely to a calorie deficit. There are WAY more variables that come into play when it comes to fat loss; the type of food you eat, the timing of your meals, the metabolic effect of exercise, the muscle sparing effect of resistance training, etc. There are a lot of things that come into the fat loss picture that I’m not addressing here.
Diet Play a Bigger Role in Fat Loss Than Most People Realize
If you are eating a bunch of calories, a large part of your time spent in the gym is a waste. What is crazy is that over 80% of all articles in fitness magazines focus on exercise, while diet is the key to getting a great looking body. I am a HUGE believer in regular exercise, I just think that diet is what is holding most people back from hitting their goals.
Diet is What Makes Your Cardio Much More Effective
If you eat junk food or just an excessive amount of calories each day, you are sabotaging your efforts in the gym. A hard cardio workout can be tough. It should drive you nuts to know that a bad diet will negate any positive benefits you could have had from cardio. If you did that same workout on a low calorie diet, you would actually reach your goals and not struggle so hard with weight loss.
Bonus: Here is a Way to Increase Your Self-Discipline
Want to make sure you eat well as well as exercise? Plan to exercise later in the day and make yourself eat well to “prepare your body” to get the most out of your cardio workout. When you eat lower calories leading up to your workout, your body will burn fat for energy. If you eat strictly all day that workout will do wonders for you. So what happens if you don’t “feel like” exercising once the evening rolls around? Well, you just spent all day preparing your body to get the most out of exercising. It would be foolish to miss this great window of opportunity when it comes to burning off unwanted body fat. You will find that you will naturally find the self-discipline to exercise more, the stricter you are with your diet. This is how to truly transform your body!
About The Author: Rusty Moore is the author of the controversial fitness blog…The Fitness Black Book. Learn Fitness Tips that give you a Sexy Lean body instead of a Bulky one! Too much muscle is “cheesy”…find out how to look attractive instead! Visit his site today—> Fitness Black Book
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Rusty_Moore
