The fastest healthiest way to lose weight has everything to do with your diet. It is essentially all about what you eat, when you eat and how much you eat. Monitoring those three facets of nutrition will help you reach your weight loss goals. Exercise does play it’s role in weight loss and overall heart health and muscle strenth but when it comes right down to it, losing weight is about burning more calories than you consume.

To find out your daily caloric expense account, first you need to know how many calories you burn in a day. This number does fluctuate dependant on your lifestyle. Are you physically active or a sedentary person? The more active you are, the more calories you need to keep your engine running. The site, www.mypyramid.gov, is a terrific site for helping with this calculation.

The second step in this process is to determine the number of calories you consume in a day. Again, mypyramid.gov has a food tracker tab to assist with this. For the most accurate number, be sure to include everything from your daily consumption.

Substract the number of calories burned from the number ingested. A negative result should allow for a pat on the back and congratulations are in order. A positive result means you have an excess of calories and they are most likely being stored as fat. The ultimate outcome would be weight gain. Fluctuation of similar positive and negative numbers through the course of time simply means a maintenance of the current weight you are sitting at now.

Some tips to help you with your caloric intake and expenditure:

A. Keep a food journal and write everything down, including spreads on your sandwich, sauces and dressings to top your food, gum you chew, etc. Sometimes this alone is a big eye opener.

B. Start an exercise plan if you don’t already have one and note not only the type and length of the activity but the intensity as well. No sense working out if you’re not putting any effort into it. The effect of no effort means no results

C. Avoid late night snacking binges.

D. Avoid using modern conveniences such as automatic doors and open them manually when possible.

E. Only eat when you are hungry.

F. Avoid using food toppings such as mayo, A1, sour cream, etc., or at least cut down on the amount used or use reduced fat forms.

Eating right is the fastest healthiest way to lose weight. And there are many things you can do to assist in healthy eating habits and achieve your weight loss goals.

To your highest success,
Jo Chris
www.squidoo.com/fastesthealthiestwaytoloseweight