Every time you feel the urge to eat stop for one moment and not the time, the place and the circumstances that made you feel this way. Writing down the circumstances, emotions and outcomes will allow you to go back and examine each incident. It is through this examination that you will discover the patterns and emotions that pushed you to become an emotional eater. This is a long process and you must follow through over a period of days and weeks. If you do you will gain insight and understanding into your eating patterns and will have the knowledge to change these patterns and gain more control over your life.

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The only manner in which to solve this eating pattern is to raise our awareness of every aspect of food. Any time we eat, if we are hungry or not, we must be aware of exactly why we are eating. Is it actually time to eat? Are we eating more than we should? What foods are we craving? What emotions are we experiencing while we are eating? What thoughts are racing through our minds as we eat?  What foods do we gravitate to when we begin emotion charged eating? When you find yourself in an emotional eating “moment” take a second to write down the answers to these questions as well as any other information or responses that come to mind. By writing down this information you will be able to see the “trigger” moment to your eating. Learning what “triggers an eating episode will be an incredible help because when you understand your emotions you be able to control your responses better and avoid emotional eating your. One of the insidious aspects of emotional eating is that you eat to feel better but the more you eat the worse you feel so you eat more to feel better……..

I know it is difficult, when you are in an emotional eating “moment”, to pick up a pen and paper instead of a piece of cake but if you take that one second to stop you will see huge rewards. The driving force is our emotions and as soon as we begin to understand  why we feel what we do we will be able to control our eating more and more. This is a long process and will not change overnight however, if you take the few simple steps we have talked about you will see progress. Life will never be perfect, there will always be good days and days that are not as good but on the days in which we have to deal with struggles we shouldn’t be a “slave” to food. Begin to deal with the emotions that drive you to food and you will find that your life will become more manageable, relaxing and enjoyable. Begin today to set your new course with the knowledge that every day you get closer and closer to mastering your emotions and mastering food.

The next post will discuss keeping an “Eating Moment” journal.

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This eating pattern puts you on a continuous roller coaster. You try to lose weight but you are constantly being sent messages from your mind that you need food to help you through situations. All your efforts to reduce calories, change your diet and be focused get overturned. But there are steps you can take to change all of this. First you must take the time to think about the past. When you found yourself eating what emotion(s) caused you to turn to food? Think back and remember how you felt and recognize that even now your mind is telling you to eat. To break this cycle you must learn to understand your emotions and separate your emotions from food. Food might make you “feel better” but it will never help you understand and deal with the emotions in your life.

If you are an Emotional Eater you find yourself in a very destructive cycle: you experience an unpleasant event or emotion. This event or emotion leaves you feeling bad. The result is you eat to make things better but you end up feeling bad that you were eating. This leads to eating more to attempt to try to feel good etc. This is a cycle that just keeps going and never ends until you stop and examine the events and emotions that push you into emotional eating. Here is a partial list of how to start to change this eating pattern:

1)      The first step is to recognize that this behavior is a problem.

2)      Begin to maintain a journal or notebook in which you describe any event or emotion that made you want to eat

3)      Begin to understand how your emotions influence you and begin to see how you can be the “master” of your emotions.

4)      Every time you are feeling “driven” to eat stop for one second, take a deep breath, and ask yourself, “Why do I want to eat right now?” Just interrupting the thoughts and emotions for a brief moment is enough to stop you from reaching for food. In that brief moment tell yourself that you are in control and that food is not the answer.

I know this list sounds very simplistic however when you begin any significant change in your life it is always best to start with simple, manageable steps. If you are an Emotional Eater then you know the struggles you have with food, you know the emotions and the roller coaster effect food has in your life, you know that you want to lose weight but you just can’t seem to ever make progress. Begin, right now, the journey of understanding your emotions. This is your life, this is the moment to begin the change you have wanted for so long. Take small steps, celebrate all your successes, and realize that you are not perfect so you will have bad days but do not let those days deter you from your goal. Everything worthwhile takes effort so start right now and begin to move forward.

More tomorrow night on how to combat and control emotional eating.

· TIME Reuters – Thu Aug 6, 5:35 am ET As I write this, tomorrow is Tuesday, which is a cardio day. I’ll spend five minutes warming up on the VersaClimber, a towering machine that requires you to move your arms and legs simultaneously. Then I’ll do 30 minutes on a stair mill. On Wednesday a personal trainer will work me like a farm animal for an hour, sometimes to the point that I am dizzy – an abuse for which I pay as much as I spend on groceries in a week. Thursday is “body wedge” class, which involves another exercise contraption, this one a large foam wedge from which I will push myself up in various hateful ways for an hour. Friday will bring a 5.5-mile run, the extra half-mile my grueling expiation of any gastronomical indulgences during the week.

 I have exercised like this – obsessively, a bit grimly – for years, but recently I began to wonder: Why am I doing this? Except for a two-year period at the end of an unhappy relationship – a period when I self-medicated with lots of Italian desserts – I have never been overweight. One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. But I exercise all the time, and since I ended that relationship and cut most of those desserts, my weight has returned to the same 163 lb. it has been most of my adult life. I still have gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn’t all the exercise wiping it out? (See TIME’s A-Z Health Guide.)

It’s a question many of us could ask. More than 45 million Americans now belong to a health club, up from 23 million in 1993. We spend some $19 billion a year on gym memberships. Of course, some people join and never go. Still, as one major study – the Minnesota Heart Survey – found, more of us at least say we exercise regularly. The survey ran from 1980, when only 47% of respondents said they engaged in regular exercise, to 2000, when the figure had grown to 57%.

And yet obesity figures have risen dramatically in the same period: a third of Americans are obese, and another third count as overweight by the Federal Government’s definition. Yes, it’s entirely possible that those of us who regularly go to the gym would weigh even more if we exercised less. But like many other people, I get hungry after I exercise, so I often eat more on the days I work out than on the days I don’t. Could exercise actually be keeping me from losing weight?

The conventional wisdom that exercise is essential for shedding pounds is actually fairly new. As recently as the 1960s, doctors routinely advised against rigorous exercise, particularly for older adults who could injure themselves. Today doctors encourage even their oldest patients to exercise, which is sound advice for many reasons: People who regularly exercise are at significantly lower risk for all manner of diseases – those of the heart in particular. They less often develop cancer, diabetes and many other illnesses. But the past few years of obesity research show that the role of exercise in weight loss has been wildly overstated. (Read “Losing Weight: Can Exercise Trump Genes?”) “

In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless,” says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn’t as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser – or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

 The Compensation Problem

 Earlier this year, the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE – PLoS is the nonprofit Public Library of Science – published a remarkable study supervised by a colleague of Ravussin’s, Dr. Timothy Church, who holds the rather grand title of chair in health wisdom at LSU. Church’s team randomly assigned into four groups 464 overweight women who didn’t regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for 72 min., 136 min., and 194 min. per week, respectively, for six months. Women in the fourth cluster, the control group, were told to maintain their usual physical-activity routines. All the women were asked not to change their dietary habits and to fill out monthly medical-symptom questionnaires.

 The findings were surprising. On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised – sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months – did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. (The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts.) Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each.

What’s going on here? Church calls it compensation, but you and I might know it as the lip-licking anticipation of perfectly salted, golden-brown French fries after a hard trip to the gym. Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both), most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started the experiment. Or they compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home. (Read “Run For Your Lives.”)

The findings are important because the government and various medical organizations routinely prescribe more and more exercise for those who want to lose weight. In 2007 the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association issued new guidelines stating that “to lose weight … 60 to 90 minutes of physical activity may be necessary.” That’s 60 to 90 minutes on most days of the week, a level that not only is unrealistic for those of us trying to keep or find a job but also could easily produce, on the basis of Church’s data, ravenous compensatory eating.

It’s true that after six months of working out, most of the exercisers in Church’s study were able to trim their waistlines slightly – by about an inch. Even so, they lost no more overall body fat than the control group did. Why not?

Church, who is 41 and has lived in Baton Rouge for nearly three years, has a theory. “I see this anecdotally amongst, like, my wife’s friends,” he says. “They’re like, ‘Ah, I’m running an hour a day, and I’m not losing any weight.’” He asks them, “What are you doing after you run?” It turns out one group of friends was stopping at Starbucks for muffins afterward. Says Church: “I don’t think most people would appreciate that, wow, you only burned 200 or 300 calories, which you’re going to neutralize with just half that muffin.” (Read “Too Fat? Read Your E-mail.”)

You might think half a muffin over an entire day wouldn’t matter much, particularly if you exercise regularly. After all, doesn’t exercise turn fat to muscle, and doesn’t muscle process excess calories more efficiently than fat does?

Yes, although the muscle-fat relationship is often misunderstood. According to calculations published in the journal Obesity Research by a Columbia University team in 2001, a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to muscle – a major achievement – you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight. Good luck with that.

Fundamentally, humans are not a species that evolved to dispose of many extra calories beyond what we need to live. Rats, among other species, have a far greater capacity to cope with excess calories than we do because they have more of a dark-colored tissue called brown fat. Brown fat helps produce a protein that switches off little cellular units called mitochondria, which are the cells’ power plants: they help turn nutrients into energy. When they’re switched off, animals don’t get an energy boost. Instead, the animals literally get warmer. And as their temperature rises, calories burn effortlessly.

Because rodents have a lot of brown fat, it’s very difficult to make them obese, even when you force-feed them in labs. But humans – we’re pathetic. We have so little brown fat that researchers didn’t even report its existence in adults until earlier this year. That’s one reason humans can gain weight with just an extra half-muffin a day: we almost instantly store most of the calories we don’t need in our regular (“white”) fat cells.

All this helps explain why our herculean exercise over the past 30 years – all the personal trainers, StairMasters and VersaClimbers; all the Pilates classes and yoga retreats and fat camps – hasn’t made us thinner. After we exercise, we often crave sugary calories like those in muffins or in “sports” drinks like Gatorade. A standard 20-oz. bottle of Gatorade contains 130 calories. If you’re hot and thirsty after a 20-minute run in summer heat, it’s easy to guzzle that bottle in 20 seconds, in which case the caloric expenditure and the caloric intake are probably a wash. From a weight-loss perspective, you would have been better off sitting on the sofa knitting.

Self-Control Is like a Muscle

Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower – that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog for an hour, your self-regulatory capacity is proportionately enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad, you’ll be more likely to opt for pizza.

 Some of us can will ourselves to overcome our basic psychology, but most of us won’t be very successful. “The most powerful determinant of your dietary intake is your energy expenditure,” says Steven Gortmaker, who heads Harvard’s Prevention Research Center on Nutrition and Physical Activity. “If you’re more physically active, you’re going to get hungry and eat more.” Gortmaker, who has studied childhood obesity, is even suspicious of the playgrounds at fast-food restaurants. “Why would they build those?” he asks. “I know it sounds kind of like conspiracy theory, but you have to think, if a kid plays five minutes and burns 50 calories, he might then go inside and consume 500 calories or even 1,000.” (Read “Why Kids’ Exercise Matters Less Than We Think.”)

Last year the International Journal of Obesity published a paper by Gortmaker and Kendrin Sonneville of Children’s Hospital Boston noting that “there is a widespread assumption that increasing activity will result in a net reduction in any energy gap” – energy gap being the term scientists use for the difference between the number of calories you use and the number you consume. But Gortmaker and Sonneville found in their 18-month study of 538 students that when kids start to exercise, they end up eating more – not just a little more, but an average of 100 calories more than they had just burned.

If evolution didn’t program us to lose weight through exercise, what did it program us to do? Doesn’t exercise do anything?

 Sure. It does plenty. In addition to enhancing heart health and helping prevent disease, exercise improves your mental health and cognitive ability. A study published in June in the journal Neurology found that older people who exercise at least once a week are 30% more likely to maintain cognitive function than those who exercise less. Another study, released by the University of Alberta a few weeks ago, found that people with chronic back pain who exercise four days a week have 36% less disability than those who exercise only two or three days a week.

 But there’s some confusion about whether it is exercise – sweaty, exhausting, hunger-producing bursts of activity done exclusively to benefit our health – that leads to all these benefits or something far simpler: regularly moving during our waking hours. We all need to move more – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says our leisure-time physical activity (including things like golfing, gardening and walking) has decreased since the late 1980s, right around the time the gym boom really exploded. But do we need to stress our bodies at the gym?

Look at kids. In May a team of researchers at Peninsula Medical School in the U.K. traveled to Amsterdam to present some surprising findings to the European Congress on Obesity. The Peninsula scientists had studied 206 kids, ages 7 to 11, at three schools in and around Plymouth, a city of 250,000 on the southern coast of England. Kids at the first school, an expensive private academy, got an average of 9.2 hours per week of scheduled, usually rigorous physical education. Kids at the two other schools – one in a village near Plymouth and the other an urban school – got just 2.4 hours and 1.7 hours of PE per week, respectively.

To understand just how much physical activity the kids were getting, the Peninsula team had them wear ActiGraphs, light but sophisticated devices that measure not only the amount of physical movement the body engages in but also its intensity. During four one-week periods over consecutive school terms, the kids wore the ActiGraphs nearly every waking moment.

And no matter how much PE they got during school hours, when you look at the whole day, the kids from the three schools moved the same amount, at about the same intensity. The kids at the fancy private school underwent significantly more physical activity before 3 p.m., but overall they didn’t move more. “Once they get home, if they are very active in school, they are probably staying still a bit more because they’ve already expended so much energy,” says Alissa FrÉmeaux, a biostatistician who helped conduct the study. “The others are more likely to grab a bike and run around after school.” (Read “Our Super-Sized Kids.”)

Another British study, this one from the University of Exeter, found that kids who regularly move in short bursts – running to catch a ball, racing up and down stairs to collect toys – are just as healthy as kids who participate in sports that require vigorous, sustained exercise.

 Could pushing people to exercise more actually be contributing to our obesity problem? In some respects, yes. Because exercise depletes not just the body’s muscles but the brain’s self-control “muscle” as well, many of us will feel greater entitlement to eat a bag of chips during that lazy time after we get back from the gym. This explains why exercise could make you heavier – or at least why even my wretched four hours of exercise a week aren’t eliminating all my fat. It’s likely that I am more sedentary during my nonexercise hours than I would be if I didn’t exercise with such Puritan fury. If I exercised less, I might feel like walking more instead of hopping into a cab; I might have enough energy to shop for food, cook and then clean instead of ordering a satisfyingly greasy burrito.

Closing the Energy Gap

The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself but the way we’ve come to define it. Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity – the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented – may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. “You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles,” says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. “The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don’t have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day.”

For his part, Berthoud rises at 5 a.m. to walk around his neighborhood several times. He also takes the stairs when possible. “Even if people can get out of their offices, out from in front of their computers, they go someplace like the mall and then take the elevator,” he says. “This is the real problem, not that we don’t go to the gym enough.” (Read “Is There a Laziness Gene?”)

I was skeptical when Berthoud said this. Don’t you need to raise your heart rate and sweat in order to strengthen your cardiovascular system? Don’t you need to push your muscles to the max in order to build them?

Actually, it’s not clear that vigorous exercise like running carries more benefits than a moderately strenuous activity like walking while carrying groceries. You regularly hear about the benefits of exercise in news stories, but if you read the academic papers on which these stories are based, you frequently see that the research subjects who were studied didn’t clobber themselves on the elliptical machine. A routine example: in June the Association for Psychological Science issued a news release saying that “physical exercise … may indeed preserve or enhance various aspects of cognitive functioning.” But in fact, those who had better cognitive function merely walked more and climbed more stairs. They didn’t even walk faster; walking speed wasn’t correlated with cognitive ability.

There’s also growing evidence that when it comes to preventing certain diseases, losing weight may be more important than improving cardiovascular health. In June, Northwestern University researchers released the results of the longest observational study ever to investigate the relationship between aerobic fitness and the development of diabetes. The results? Being aerobically fit was far less important than having a normal body mass index in preventing the disease. And as we have seen, exercise often does little to help heavy people reach a normal weight

When setting goals make sure that you establish easily attainable short-term realistic goals. By short-term goals I am talking about what you want to achieve by the end of next week. Once you have made the list of short-term goals write down what actions you need to take to make sure you achieve these goals. When you are making this list be as specific as possible. The clearer you can define your goal the easier it will be for you to achieve the goal. Planning how you attack the dieting process is crucial and setting realistic weight loss goals is fundamental to your success so make your goals detail rich, powerfully positive and very clear. What do I mean by powerfully positive. You could write as your goal, “I won’t eat out as much next week.” That is a goal but it lacks power, definitely doesn’t inspire you and isn’t positive. A better way to state the same goal is, “I WILL plan all my meals for next week and I look forward to each of them.” Another comparison would be, “I’m going to lose weight next week.” OK, that is great but how much weight? Stating your goal as follows is much more powerful and very positive,” I WILL lose two pounds in the next seven days!

I’m sure some people would see the goal of losing two pounds in a week as an insignificant goal however consider this, two pounds doesn’t sound like very much but to lose two pounds you must also make other changes in your life. You will find that you will change how you eat, when you eat, and what you eat. These are huge changes. The long-term goal is to lose weight, consistently through the achievement of short-term realistic weight loss goals.  Be smart, give yourself every chance to succeed and set goals you can achieve every week.

When writing your goals find a quiet place where you can concentrate fully on the task. Read your goals out loud. Do they sound realistic? Start out with simple goals. Through the process of writing a list of realistic weight loss goals you will clearly see your path to success. The one fact that is absolutely undeniable is the clearer and more precise you make your goals the more certain you will achieve all of your goals and more.

All the short-term realistic weight loss goals will lead you to long-term weight loss success.  For your long term goals think about what you want to weigh in one year? How do you want to look? How do you want to feel? Begin to create a vivid, rich vision of who you will be in one year. Think about what you will be wearing, what you will be doing, how you will be feeling, and how you look. All the incredible changes you visualize are possible but all the changes you desire start with your realistic weight loss goals. Take the time to create the powerfully positive, detail rich realistic weight loss goals that will propel you through the dieting process. As you begin this process spend a few moments thinking about this: if you change the way you think can you change your life?  I will explore that and more in my next article.

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Why does that help? Food not only feeds our physical hunger it also feeds and “nourishes” our emotional hunger. The emotional hunger drives us to seek comfort, satisfaction and a moment or two of contentment. But those few moments create a new set of problems….gaining weight.

I do not know how other people deal with this emotional “hunger” but I have developed a method that works for me. When I sense that overwhelming emotional desire to eat so that I will “feel better” I stop what I am doing and ask myself, “Is that donut, or soda or ice cream more important than maintaining my weight?”  “Is that food really going to solve anything?” “How will I be closer to my goals if by eating this food I will be moving away from my goals?” Usually this will get my attention off the food just long enough to strengthen my resolve. On those days that the “emotional hunger” is particularly intense I have to completely halt my thougths and do something that many people may think is strange. What do I do? I have to find a quiet place where I will not be disturbed. I sit down and close my eyes and think of a person who loved me and with whom I felt completely accepted and understood. That person is my sister. My sister, Charlotte, died in March 2003 from ovarian cancer but she remains a strong and powerful influence in my life. We had a special relationship in that we both could always go to the other for the “truth” regarding any situation in our lives. We saw eachother as people not just as siblings. So I go to a quiet place, close my eyes, and see Charlotte, I hear her voice, her laugh and I see the love in her eyes when we were together. This stops the feeling of “emotional hunger’ and put EVERYTHING into perspective for me. That donut means nothng, that soda wouldn’t taste good and that ice cream is better left in the store.

Emotions are such a powerful influence in our lives. If we can understand what we feel and why we feel it then we have a better chance of makng the right choices in coping with our emotions and our lives. It is a struggle, everyday , but in the end success will come. This I know and this Charlotte knew.

I hope you can find a place of solitude and quiet and bring someone into your mind that can comfort and direct you through all the difficult times we face while dieting, living and learning how to live the best we can.

www.mydietingresource.com

To get back on track I will do the following:

- Breakfast: egg white omelet and a side dish of fresh fruit

- Mid-morning meal (snack) No-Fat Stoneyfield yogurt

- Lunch: a protein such as grilled chicken or salmon with a sweet potato.

-Mid afternoon meal (snack): a small portion of unsalted mixed nuts or an apple

- Dinner: this meal will have some type of protein (about 4-6 oz) and LOTS of fresh vegatables.

Veggies are great becasue they are “free”…and free is good from where I”m sitting.

I needed to write this down so that I could see my plan.  The 4th was a small set back but I know I can get back on track…….

www.mydietingresource.com

It isn’t like there aren’t enough things to think about when dieting but the “BIGGIE” I always have to remember is just how much food am I really consuming. I found that there was a HUGE difference between what I thought I was eating and what I was really eating. It wasn’t until I began writing things down that I realized that my true food consumption was much more that I had thought. I had a tendency to forget those 3 or 4 small “snacks” during the day or OOOOOOPPPSSS, that can of soda!  I began writing EVERYTHING down but then I began obsessing over every calorie and this was time consming and stressful. I thought I was doomed to live in “calorie counting Hell” until I read the followng article. This article simplified my life and the process of gaining control of my daily food consumption. I hope you find this article as helpful as I did.

By Tom Venuto, NSCA-CPT, CSCS

www.burnthefat.com http://www.burnthefat.com

The Truth About Counting Calories And Weight Loss 

Do calories matter or do you simply need to eat certain foods and that will guarantee you’ll lose weight? Should you count calories or can you just count “portions?” Is it necessary to keep a food diary? Is it unrealistic to count calories for the rest of your life or is that just part of the price you pay for a better body? You’re about to learn the answers to these questions and discover a simple solution for keeping track of your food intake without having to crunch numbers every day or become a fanatic about it.

In many popular diet books, “Calories don’t count” is a frequently repeated theme. Other popular programs, such as Bill Phillip’s “Body For Life,” stress the importance of energy intake versus energy output, but recommend that you count “portions” rather than calories…

 Phillips wrote, 

“There aren’t many people who can keep track of their calorie intake for an extended period of time. As an alternative, I recommend counting ‘portions.’ A portion of food is roughly equal to the size of your clenched fist or the palm of your hand. Each portion of protein or carbohydrate typically contains between 100 and 150 calories. For example, one chicken breast is approximately one portion of protein, and one medium-sized baked potato is approximately one portion of carbohydrate.”

 Phillips makes a good point that trying to count every single calorie – in the literal sense – can drive you crazy and is probably not realistic as a lifestyle for the long term. It’s one thing to count portions instead of calories – that is at least acknowledging the importance of portion control. However, it’s another altogether to deny that calories matter.

 Calories do count! Any diet program that tells you, “calories don’t count” or you can “eat all you want and still lose weight” is a diet you should avoid because you are being lied to. The truth is, that line is a bunch of baloney designed to make a diet sound easier to follow.

 Anything that sounds like work – such as counting calories, eating less or exercising, tends to scare away potential customers! The law of calorie balance is an unbreakable law of physics: Energy in versus energy out dictates whether you will gain, lose or maintain your weight. Period.

 I believe that it’s very important to develop an understanding of and a respect for portion control and the law of calorie balance. I also believe it’s an important part of nutrition education to learn how many calories are in the foods you eat on a regular basis – including (and perhaps, especially) how many calories are in the foods you eat when you dine at restaurants.

 The law of calorie balance says:

 To maintain your weight, you must consume the same number of calories you burn. To gain weight, you must consume more calories than you burn. To lose weight, you must consume fewer calories than you burn.

 If you only count portions or if you haven’t the slightest idea how many calories you’re eating, it’s a lot more likely that you’ll eat more than you realize. (Or you might take in fewer calories than you should, which triggers your body’s “starvation mode” and causes your metabolism to shut down).

 So how do you balance practicality and realistic expectations with a nutrition program that gets results? Here’s a solution that’s a happy medium between strict calorie counting and just guessing:

 Create a menu using an EXCEL spreadsheet or your favorite nutrition software. Crunch all the numbers including calories, protein, carbs and fats. Once you have your daily menu, print it, stick it on your refrigerator (and/or in your daily planner) and you now have an eating “goal” for the day, including a caloric target.

 Rather than writing down every calorie one by one from every morsel of food you eat for the rest of your life, create a menu plan you can use as a daily goal and guideline. If you’re really ambitious, keeping a nutrition journal at least one time in your life for at least 4-12 weeks is a great idea and an incredible learning experience, but all you really need to get started on the road to a better body is one good menu on paper. If you get bored eating the same thing every day, you can create multiple menus, or just exchange foods using your primary menu as a template.

 Using this meal planning method, you really only need to “count calories” once when you create your menus, not every day, ad infinitum. After you’ve got a knack for calories from this initial discipline of menu planning, then you can estimate portions in the future and get a pretty good (and more educated) ballpark figure.

 So what’s the bottom line? Is it really necessary to count every calorie to lose weight? No. But it IS necessary to eat fewer calories then you burn. Whether you count calories and eat less than you burn, or you don’t count calories and eat less than you burn, the end result is the same – you lose weight. Which would you rather do: Take a wild guess, or increase your chance for success with some simple menu planning? I think the right choice is obvious.

 For more information on calories (including how calculate precisely how many you should eat based on your age, activity and personal goals, and for even more practical, proven fat loss techniques to help you lose body fat safely, healthfully and permanently, check out my e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle at www.burnthefat.com http://www.burnthefat.com

 About the Author:

Tom Venuto is a lifetime natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer (CPT), certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS), and author of the #1 best-selling e-book, “Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle.” Tom has written more than 200 articles and has been featured in print magazines such as IRONMAN, Australian IRONMAN, Natural Bodybuilding, Muscular Development, Exercise for Men and Men’s Exercise, as well as on hundreds of websites worldwide. For information on Tom’s Fat Loss program, visit: www.burnthefat.com http://www.burnthefat.com

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