Better Than Calorie Counting?

 

If you have been frustrated with the calorie counting diet, take heart, for you are not alone. To be honest, I haven’t seen a more bogus dieting method in my life. If you really wish to achieve any significant loss results with this diet, you would have to:

a) Hire a chef who would count the calories of each and every food before and after cooking them.

OR

b) Have a calculator beside you every time you eat, be it at home or a restaurant.

OR

c) Keep eating the same “low-calorie” foods day after day, month after month, and year after year, until one day you become so bored with your diet that you quit it altogether, thinking that life with a fat belly would be much happier than this.

In fact, you cannot imagine what funny and stressful situations this diet would land you in. Imagine that you are sitting at a restaurant with your sweetheart next to you. After thinking long and hard about the calorie contents of certain foods, you order them, praying at the same time that their calorie contents don’t go over the ‘limit’.

Once the foods are served to you, you take out your pocket calculator and the calorie chart immediately, excuse yourself to your sweetheart, and start counting the calories of each of the food items served to you. What could have otherwise become a romantic dinner ends up being a stressful and unhappy dinner. I won’t be surprised if your better half takes you for a mad man and dumps you.

The stress of counting the calorie contents of each and every morsel you eat would definitely curb at least half of your appetite, if not more, not to speak that this added stress would hamper proper digestion of the food. Even if these things don’t happen, there is a chance of making wrong calculations, as revealed in a recent study done on a few city-based top dieticians.
The dieticians were asked to count the calorie contents of five restaurant meals. And what do you think the results could be. On an average, the dieticians undervalued the fat content of the meals by almost 49-50% and the calorie content by about 36-37%. Now, if dieticians are prone to making such wrong calculations, then where do we ordinary people stand?

 

I would offer you a simple advice. Don’t follow this calorie counting method because it is only a matter of time before you quit it unhappily. Keep in mind that there are much better diet plans out there. To be honest, you really don’t need to follow another diet if you keep these five simple rules in mind:

a) Eat small meals: If you currently eat two or there large meals, split them into five or six smaller meals. Eat each of these small meals every two or three hours.

b) Exercise religiously: It takes hard work to gain anything in life and exercising is the hard work you need to do to lose weight. There is no second opinion about it; if you don’t exercise regularly, you wouldn’t achieve permanent loss, no matter what diet program you follow.

Exercises not only help you burn fat during the workout session but also after it. Besides, exercises build muscles for you, and muscles help you burn fat even when you are resting. As such, you don’t need to depend on your diet program alone for loss. Even if you quit dieting at some point of time, you still won’t gain if you eat right and workout regularly.

c) Eat right fats and carbs: It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the right and wrong carbs and fats. The wrong fats and carbs are contained in junk and fast foods; these “bad” carbs and “bad” fats are what made you over. Instead of consuming them, try to have natural fruits and vegetables for carbs, and fishes and olive oil for fats. You would be happier that way.

d) Increase your protein intake: When you increase your protein intake and combine that with regular workout, you would build more lean muscles than you would without protein. Keep in mind that muscles not only strengthen your body but also help you burn fat; therefore, you should make sure to build lean muscles on a continuous basis.

e) Increase your water intake: To ensure that your muscular tissues don’t become weak at any point of time through dehydration, you should drink adequate water daily. An adult needs to drink at least 8-10 glasses of water every day. Water keeps you hydrated, strengthens your muscle tissues, detoxifies your body and also boosts your metabolic rate. A boost in metabolic rate would in turn accelerate the loss process for you.

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