Counting Calories

It's frustrating but not as bad as you think!

The process of counting calories is essential to any fitness goal you have. Losing fat, maintain weight, and building muscle mass all require that you pay attention to how many calories you're consuming. If you want to lose fat and you're consuming more calories than your body burns, it'd be impossible for you to shed those pounds. Most people view the idea of counting calories a tedious effort that takes a long time, but it's really not once you just force yourself to do it. It's also something that you don't have to do every day, because once you know generally how many calories the usual food you eat contains, you won't have to bother with finding the nutritional values again.

It's all about reading food labels. Reading food labels is easy, they put a lot of stuff you really don't need to pay too much attention to, but you certainly do need to pay attention to more than just how many calories there are. There are three macronutrients; protein, fat, and carbohydrates. It's in your best interest that you give regard to the amount and type of macronutrients a piece of food contains, because although something might be low in calories, it might contain bad calories.

There are 4 calories in 1 gram of protein and carbohydrate, there are 9 calories in 1 gram of fat. So you can see why it's important to try and avoid foods high in fat, although there are certain foods like nuts which are notably high in fat but not in the type of fat that is bad for your body. Saturated fat is the culprit, therefore if the food label you're reading states that there are 10g of fat (90calories alone from fat) and 7g are saturated, then consuming that piece of food through multiple servings would probably be a bad idea. As far as carbohydrates are concerned, you will notice that most junk foods and processed foods contain a lot carbohydrates. There are two types of carbohydrates, one good and one bad. The good form is complex carbohydrates and the bad form is simple carbohydrates. Most natural foods contain the complex carbohydrates and you want to eat more of those, while you will notice when reading a food label of a processed food it will be notably high in carbohydrates and probably the bad form.

If you know how many calories you need to consume per day in order to reach your physical goal, then it is only a matter of counting calories to reach that goal. Visit our free physical analysis page, it will give you an estimate on how many calories you should consume depending on your body and your goals. If you're interested in becoming a HealthyGo member, browse our tour page to view a list of our features which include customizing a full fitness plan (workout and diet) within 24 hours.