Quote:
Originally Posted by Kp33
Wow way to scientific so it easier terms do I just cut my calories based on what a label says nothing on a label says kcal. So if I’m taking in 1500 calories a day based on the labels of the food I’m eating try to cut down to 1200 for example?
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Sorry. I get that way.
Yes. Use the calorie content on the labels (which is ALWAYS in kcal -- notice that the labels say "Calories" and not "calories", though often at the bottom they say that the info is based on a 2000 calorie a day diet, and this is not correct, but even engineers are usually sloppy with units and this is a pretty fine distinction) and control the total calorie content over the course of the day.
You might start off by just logging everything you eat and then counting up what the total calories works out to be. To do this, you have to be able to know how much you eat and what the calories (and fat, protein, carbs, fiber -- known as the "macro" content, for "macronutrients") are for it. The simplest way to do this is to just limit yourself, for a couple weeks, to food that has nutrition labels and is in easy to identify units.
The next step up is to weigh your food and, where necessary, look up the nutritional content online, which is pretty easy to do these days. You can get a halfway decent food scale for about $15 in lots of places. They don't tend to be terribly accurate, but they are accurate enough. There are also numerous sites where you can enter your food and select from a huge list of available food choices and it will track not only the macros, but also lots of micronutrients from a very large database of foods. But you still have to know how much food you are consuming, which brings it back to either pre-portioned packaging or weighing. The more you can rely on package weights, the better, because these tend to be very close. Manufactures don't want to give you free product, but they get in big trouble if they are caught not giving you everything they say they are, so they go to pretty great lengths to give you exactly what you are paying for.
You can split the difference here. If you buy a pack of steak that totals, say, 1.54 lb on the label and split it into four roughly equal portions, then call each one 0.35 lb and call it good. If you make sure that YOU eat the entire package, even if it is over several days, then the average will work out just fine.
There is uncertainty here. When you buy a dozen eggs, the nutrition info is for an "average" egg of that size. The actual size of each egg varies and also the nutritional content of two eggs the exact same size also varies. This is true for just about everything. Also, manufacturers round the numbers to the nearest gram for most of the macros and to the nearest five kcal for the calories. The smaller the serving size, the more error this represents. But your numbers don't have to be exact, just reasonably close, to give you the information you are looking for.
Once you know how many calories a day you are consuming, on average, and if this amount is keeping your weight steady, then a decent place to start (and it's only a start) is to reduce it by roughly 100 kcal/day for each pound you want to lose a month, being sure not to get carried away. The closer you are to goal, the slower you want to lose the weight. If you want to lose 2 lb/wk, then shoot for a reduction of 800 kcal/day and stick to it for a minimum of a month and see what happens (the CICO model would actually call for more like a 933 kcal/day deficit, but you're just trying to get in the ballpark). Make adjustments from there.
The human body is a LOT more complex than either calories-in-versus-calories-out or control-the-carbs-and-ignore-everything-else and this is FAR from an exact science. You have to be patient and let nature take its course. The goal is to chart a path that lets you make more-or-less steady progress in the long run -- and there WILL be significant variations in the short term -- by making deliberate changes, giving it enough time to see the results, then make deliberating adjustments to try to move things in the direction you want to go. You also have to accept that there's a limit on how fast you can make progress. You didn't get where you are overnight and it will take time to get where you want to be. Give it the time that it takes.