Diet is the second most important part of weight loss with mindset being the first. Without mindset, one would not have the discipline to eat clean on a daily basis. Food is meant to be your body’s fuel. This was something I had to realize.
When I first started I was lost on where to begin. I sat and thought about what were the larger things I could change immediately. I looked at my daily eating habits and tried to identify where I was overeating. I was really bad at eating sweets and eating large meals with getting seconds. I cut out almost all sweets and decreased my meal size while completely eliminating seconds. I cut out all sodas and drank only water. I started to notice weight loss after this alone fairly quickly.
Caloric Needs
As I did more research into nutrition I came across something called BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) which is the amount of calories you burn just by existing without taking exercise into account. The BMR is based on your weight, height, and age. You can find a good calculator here. Once you calculate this, you can then calculate something called the TDEE (Total Daily Energy Expenditure). This takes your BMR and uses this to give you how many calories you would burn when adding exercise to maintain your current weight. In other words, if you eat that amount of calories a day, you would maintain your weight. This can also be used to for weight loss. Let’s say your TDEE comes out to 2300 calories. This says you’ll need to eat 2300 calories a day to maintain your current weight. In order to lose weight you need to be in a caloric deficit so you will need to eat less than 2300 calories a day to lose weight. You can calculate your TDEE here.
Once you figure out your TDEE, you can then identify what daily caloric goal you want to meet. You do not want to be extremely below your TDEE as you can drop weight too rapidly. Research has show to be around 75% of TDEE for weight loss. This will yield around 1-2 pounds per week of weight loss.
You can then use a calorie tracker such as MyFitnessPal. This is extremely helpful and will help you learn how to keep your daily caloric intake in check. This is the tool that I used with great success.