South Beach, Atkins, Carb Lovers, Mediterranean, grapefruit, Banana, Beverly Hills, and the Blood Type Diet... That was the result of a quick one minute Google search for diets on the internet. Seems there are as many diets out there as there are people looking to go on a diet. Many appear to be in direct conflict with each other. Two things they do have in common, they want to sell you something, and they often sacrifice a balanced diet for one that will help you lose weight. Let me say up front, this is not about the importance of eating well but about how and why we gain, lose, or maintain weight.

With the constant bombardment of advertisements, we start to think of a diet as something we need to get. The truth is a diet isn’t a commodity you purchase, consume and then toss away. We have one, if it’s not working for us, we can tweak it for free.

Two words we often hear joined together are diet and exercise. If exercise sounds like work, then let’s use the word activity. Diet and activity are bound together. The diet is the input, the activity is the output.

Everything we do from our beating heart, breathing, tapping our fingers, to mowing the lawn, dancing, and doing laundry burns calories. Our diet provides us our calories. If what we put in equals what we put out then our weight will stay the same. If we want to lose weight, we can eat less calories, increase our activity, or a little of both. It’s simple math --and it doesn’t take much to see change.
Then why is it so hard? Personally it was that I didn’t know what my baseline was. A 2000 calorie diet meant little if I didn’t know how much I was burning. If I burn only 1900 calories a day but consume 2000 then I’ll gain weight. Once I knew my “Resting Metabolic Rate”, (the amount of calories I burn doing nothing), then I knew what I needed to do to make a difference. It turned out; I could still eat pretty much anything I wanted to if I increased my activity to burn 400 calories more per day. One year later I had shed 55 lbs.

Once I started seeing results, I got more motivated. I wanted to eat better and I had more energy to do more. This, ironically, allows me to eat more.
Remember three things: Diet and activities are two sides of the same coin. Your diet is for life. It’s all about the math.

A pound of body fat equates to approximately 3500 calories. So if you have a calorie deficit of 500 calories (meaning that you burn 500 calories more than you eat each day) you would lose approximately one pound per week.