Food for Thought

In my last post we talked about BMI, or Body Mass Index, and how we can see where we are and where we want to be.  This tool gives us a rough estimate of what percentage of our body weight is fat.  When setting our goal we want to stay between a BMI of 19 and 24.  If you have a later goal of putting on muscle then we will lose weight to get us to 24 and if we are just going for weight loss then 21 or 22 will be where we want to set our sights.

To do this we need to start counting our calories.  Don’t worry, after about a month you will be able to estimate them better and you won’t need to be so exact.  The first week you won’t even need to change your eating habits.  That’s right, eat what you normally do all week but now start keeping track of it all.  Here is where honesty is the most important aspect.  You need to be true to yourself when tracking this.

This is one of the few times I will ever ask you to buy something.  A food scale really comes in handy and allows you to be accurate with your recordings.  You would be surprised what a serving of the foods you eat really are.  Again, don’t change a thing with what you eat, you are just going to weigh it now and track the calories.  After about a month of this you will be able to skip this step as well because you should be able to gauge serving size much better by then.

I like FatSecret.com, it is free to sign up.  They have a large number of tools you can use on your journey.  From a very large food database to diaries for food and exercise to a great community, you can’t go wrong with this site.  The food diary really is awesome.  I use it on my android phone to scan the items I eat and it pulls up nutritional information and breaks it down so you can see exactly how many calories you are taking in and saves it for you for your own tracking.  You can even do this on the site or synch your phone to the site to make it easier.

So, your homework for the first week is to eat as normal and just track everything to give you a beginning picture.  Next post we will talk about the diet and what we should be and shouldn’t be eating.

I won’t lie to you.  If you want to lose weight you have a little work ahead of you before you even begin to change your diet.  The easy part is that it isn’t hard work and it doesn’t cost anything unless you want it to.

The first thing you need to do is set a goal.  How much do you want to weigh?  Be honest with yourself and realistic.  Looking to weigh what you did when you were in high school?  Diet alone probably won’t get you there.  The first thing we want to do is assess where we are and then where we want to go.  The National Heart Lung and Blood Institute has a handy chart that we can see both items at the same time.  Throughout we will be using my stats as examples.

I am, as of this writing, 6’1” and 207 pounds.  The chart in the above needs us to convert our height to inches so that puts me at 73”.  Once I have found my height on the chart I will scan to the right and find what range I fall in.  I fall between the 204 and 212 category so my BMI is 27.  My goal should be 24 or below.  For those in question, BMI stands for Body Mass Index.  This is a guide that most people can follow.  Athletes, the elderly and children are those that should not rely too much on this as the numbers can be skewed.  Athletes will often have more muscle compared to fat and the elderly will often have higher fat compared to muscle yet still look a healthy weight so this chart is for the rest of us.

Back to the chart we will see that a BMI of 24 for me is 189.  This will be my initial goal and in the next few posts we will see what needs to take shape for me to get there.