Food Addiction Recovery – #25
In Food Addiction calories do count even though some fad diets said otherwise. When counting calories, seek the advice of an expert. Want to know how much you should cut back in terms of calories to lose some weight? A pound of fat on your body represents 3500 calories. If you want to lose weight at the rate of two pounds per week (which is what experts recommend at most per week) then you will need to decrease your eating by 1000 calories per day, or 7000 calories a week for two pounds per week. If you have a food addiction and need to lose 50, 75 or 100 pounds you will likely cut more calories per week than 1,000 and you will lose faster than 2 pounds per week. Currently I am allowed 2060 calories per day. If I wanted to lose two pounds per week, I would eat 1060 calories per day (that is 1000 calories below my current allowable of 2060). If I wanted to lose one pound per week, I would need to eat 1560 calories per day or 500 less each day. Most expert say don’t go below 1500 calories per day though.
In Food Addiction What About Exercise?
You can also gain some ground by burning calories from exercise. For example, instead of decreasing your calories by 1000 per day, you could decrease them by 500 per day but add in 500 calories worth of exercise per day, for a total of 1000 calories. More details on exercise later. If you want to peek at how exercise can help fight food addiction click now.
Remember you might want to purchase a calorie counting book of some type – paperback will do just fine. You could look up individual food items calorie count at the Calorie Control Council site, which has some other interesting features so look around while you are on their site. If you want to look up some of the calorie counts on your favorite franchise food outlet menu but prepare yourself since the numbers are quite frightening by clicking here now.
You can figure your numbers now for yourself, I am sure. If not, go ahead and give me a call. We can sort it out together. I might also add that calories are a useful tool, not the whole story in food addiction of course. Some people can gain weight on a low-calorie diet. How does that happen? Well, that has to do with the body’s “set point,” or what I call the famine mode. Don’t be concerned with that for now is my recommendation since it is not here now. It can be dealt with when/if it happens.