Calories and Protein

Be it just a little notebook you use to count calories or extensive computer software which tracks every nutrients for you, tracking your diet can help you greatly in reaching your goals. It’s main advantage is that it lets you stick to your schedule more strictly, thus making your goals achievable in a shorter time. By tracking your diet you can learn more from your progress and identify patterns more easily. After a few weeks, with your new experiences, you will be able to calculate your needs and progress more accurately by knowing how you progressed with the given calorie intake and exercises in the previous weeks. You can read a thousand pages on diets, get advice from hundreds of people but in the end your progress will be the most accurate measure of your efforts.

The very first thing you should track is your daily calorie intake. It is the most important aspect of your diet, it determines whether you lose, maintain, or gain weight. It doesn’t really matter how and when you track you calorie intake, the only thing that matters is to do it accurately. It really makes things easier if you buy a set of standard measurement units and a food scale, as these will allow you to measure the exacts amounts you consume. And remember it is always better to count every calorie source and exceed your daily plan than to cheat yourself and fail your long term goals, by knowing exactly how many calories you consume, you will know when you can go more easy on yourself and when you have to tighten your diet.

Calories are the most important part of your diet if you are planning to alter your weight, but they are not the only aspect worth paying attention to. Daily protein intake is one of the other important things you should consider counting. Eating a healthy amount of proteins, can not only help you maintaining your muscle mass while dieting, but it can aid you in losing weight too due to it being harder to digest, thus making your body work more for the same amount of calories it could get more easily from other sources. At a minimum you should eat at least the same amount of protein in grams as your body weights in pounds. Easy sources for protein are milk, eggs, fish and meat, count your approximate daily intake and if it’s lower than the desired amount try to eat more of these foods or eat them more regularly.

These two are the most important aspects of a general diet, and their counting is easy even if you do it manually, a quick search on the internet will almost always give you the calorie and protein values for most of the foods. Counting calories only is enough to change your weight, counting protein too can help you in keeping your current muscle mass while you are on a diet or gaining more muscle mass when you exercise, but to fully maximize the benefits from your diet you should definitely consider using one of the more professional diet and nutrition tracking websites or softwares, of which i will write about in my next post.