weight loss diet

I've been slowly losing weight since the summer and I've just been doing a couple of things. When eating meat and you see a giant chunk o' fat, cut it off, and throw it out. When eating KFC or any kind of chicken, try your best to rip off the skin and not eat it. At dinner, eat enough, you don't need to feel bloated at every meal. When coming across snacks like chocolate bars, think to yourself whether you really need it or not. Drink water instead of pop, and if you're really in need of something sweet, drink some juice or milk. Indulging yourself is good but keep it to a minimum. Go to the gym, do some cardio. I go to the cross trainer, put it on max level and in 30 minutes that's 500ish calories. But you always have to remember that muscle mass is greater than fat mass so even though you're doing all of this, you might gain weight or stay at the same, but you now have good weight instead of fat weight.

While I was bored one day I read the following on howstuffworks and it kinda allows you to set a frame for yourself. I am burning this much, how much should I consume. What is my daily quota.

But when losing weight, never starve yourself, its unhealthy for both mind and body.

Good luck!



The following is from Howstuffworks.com
http://health.howstuffworks.com/diet1.htm

Your Body's Efficiency
Have you ever wondered why, for so many people (and especially for anyone older than 30 years old), weight gain seems to be a fact of life? It's because the human body is way too efficient! It just does not take that much energy to maintain the human body at rest; and when exercising, the human body is amazingly frugal when it comes to turning food into motion.

At rest (for example, while sitting and watching television), the human body burns only about 12 calories per pound of body weight per day (26 calories per kilogram). That means that if you weigh 150 pounds (68 kg), your body uses only about:

150 X 12 = 1,800 calories per day

Twelve calories per pound per day is a rough estimate -- see How Calories Work for details.

Those 1,800 calories are used to do everything you need to stay alive:

* They keep your heart beating and lungs breathing.
* They keep your internal organs operating properly.
* They keep your brain running.
* They keep your body warm.

In motion, the human body also uses energy very efficiently. For example, a person running a marathon (26 miles or 42 km) burns only about 2,600 calories. In other words, you burn only about 100 calories per mile (about 62 calories per km) when you are running.

You can see just how efficient the human body is if you compare your body to a car. A typical car in the United States gets between 15 and 30 miles per gallon of gasoline (6 to 12 km/L). A gallon of gas contains about 31,000 calories. That means that if a human being could drink gasoline instead of eating hamburgers to take in calories, a human being could run 26 miles on about one-twelfth of a gallon of gas (0.3 L). In other words, a human being gets more than 300 miles per gallon (120 km/L)! If you put a human being on a bicycle to increase the efficiency, a human being can get well over 1,000 miles per gallon (more than 500 km/L)!

That level of efficiency is the main reason why it is so easy to gain weight, as we will see in the next section.

The Idea Behind Dieting
Let's imagine that you are overweight and you would like to lose several excess pounds. To lose 1 pound of fat, what you have to do is burn off 3,500 calories. That is, over a period of time, you have to consume 3,500 calories less than your body needs. There are several ways you can create that deficit. If you assume that you weigh 150 pounds and that your body at rest needs 1,800 calories per day (150 * 12 = 1,800) to live, here are several examples (some realistic, some not):

* You could lie in bed and starve yourself. Since you are lying in bed, you are consuming 1,800 calories per day. Since you are starving yourself, you are taking in no calories. That means that, every day, you create a deficit of 1,800 calories and, approximately every two days, you will lose 1 pound of body weight.

* You could consume fewer calories than your body needs. For example, you might choose to consume 1,500 calories per day rather than the required 1,800 by controlling what you eat. That creates a 300-calorie deficit every day. That means that approximately every 12 days, you will lose 1 pound of weight (12 days x 300 calories = 3,600 calories).

* You could consume 1,800 calories per day and then choose to jog 2 miles (3.2 km) every day. The jogging would burn about 200 calories per day, and over the course of 18 days you would burn about 1 pound of body weight (18 days x 200 calories = 3,600 calories).

* You could consume 2,500 calories per day and run 10 miles per day. You will burn 1,800 calories per day at rest and then 1,000 calories per day running, for a total of 2,800 calories. You are consuming 300 calories fewer than you need, so you would lose a pound every 12 days or so (300 calories x 12 days = 3,600 calories).

As you can see from these examples, the only way to lose fat is to consume fewer calories per day than your body needs. For every 3,500 calories that your body takes from its fat reserves, you lose 1 pound (0.45 kg) of body fat. You can create the deficit either by monitoring and restricting your intake of calories, or by exercising, or both.

The idea behind most diets -- everything from Weight Watchers to the grapefruit diet -- is simply to help you somehow lower the number of calories that you consume each day. That's all they do.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Will

You're not going to build any muscle on the cross-trainer, sorry. All you can do during cardio is try not to lose muscle. And the best way to do that is brief, high intensity interval training. You should also perform resistance training. Both of these will continue to burn calories after you're done.

You know what's better than eating KFC and tearing the skin off? Not eating KFC! There's nothing wrong with fatty meats; fat is damn good for you. It's the damn breading on the outside and all the trans fats that'll kill ya.

You want something sweet? Eat a piece of fucking FRUIT. Don't even think about calorie-containing beverages. Yes, you do get used to the taste of diet soda, and no, it probably won't give you cancer.

Doing the cross-trainer is good for burning calories, but I never said that was the only thing I did. Seeing as this was a weight loss thread I didn't post about weight training.
Yes, not eating KFC or chocolate is the best but sometimes it's hard to say no. Not in terms of willpower but in terms of you're at a friends and everyone pitches to get KFC. If everyone agrees on it, you might not want to be a dick and order something by yourself.

There's nowhere I can't reach.