Carbs? Calories? I don't get what to watch when trying to lose weight.?

Question

I'm starting a diet (or lifestyle change i supose) this week and I'm very confused by all the different diets. Any tips?

Answer 1

Both, use low carb foods and still count the calories.

Answer 2

No carb or even low carb diets are bad. The body NEEDS carbohydrates. Simple carbs like white bread, white rice, sugar.. they are not very good for you, and complex carbs like brown rice, whole wheat things, stuff like that..anything that says "whole grain" are great for you. They're still carbs, and have more carbs per gram than white bread/rice.

You should watch calories. Eat a lower calorie diet. I suggest between 1200 and 1600 cals a day. Most people eat well over 2000 a day... If you want a good site to help you track calories, sparkpeople.com and fitday.com are great :-)

Just remember to drink lots of water, and it's not only the eating healthier that will help you lose weight. You need to exercise as well. I suggest getting some exercise tapes and a treadmill and dumbells.

Just don't eat food just cause it's low carb. Low carb stuff can still have plenty of calories.

I wish you good luck!!!!!! :-)

Answer 3

To lose weight you need to burn more calories than you take in -- period. Short term diets are useless. Successful weight management requires a lifestyle change. If you eat healthy and exercise regularly you will succeed. If you starve yourself or seriously limit your caloric intake you will fail. I find that a low carb/no sugar diet works perfect for me. Good luck!

Answer 4

The simplest thing about dieting is to realize that there is no pill, no drug, and no fast way to lost weight. You didn't put it on overnight, it's not coming of overnight.

A good basic formula is to make sure that no food (except heart-healthy oils) contains more than 30% of its total calories from fat. Then, limit your caloric intake, and you'll limit your fat. Depending on your height, age and gender, you should get about 1200 - 1500 a day while trying to lose weight.

The goal is to expend more calories than you take in. Everything else is a fad. Low carb, low protein - these are all fad diets that haven't been shown to be effective in the long run and might actually do damage to your body. The truth is that 1 gram of protein and 1 gram of carbohydrates both have 1 calorie. (1 gram of fat has 9 calories).

For a balanced, healthy diet, try these basic guidelines:

6-8 oz of lean protein every day (chicken, fish, lean beef, lean pork)
8 oz skim or 1% milk
6-8 servings complex carbohydrates (go for whole grain pastas, vegetables, beans, etc. Your heart will thank you for it.)
2 servings of fruit (small apple, half a banana, a cup of grapes or other small fruit)
4 servings (or more!) of vegetables (corn, potatoes and peas count as carbs, not veggies)
6-8 8oz glasses of water every day.
2 tsp of heart healthy fat (even when dieting you need fat in your diet)

Avoid fruit juice, as they don't have fiber, which will fill you up, and are mainly sugar. (Even if they are fruit juice only, with no added sugar, they are fruit sugar.) Stick to whole grains, which have more fiber, more vitamins, and are better for you in lots of ways.

Lean meats include: chicken/turkey breast, light, or white fish (shellfish, tilapia, orange roughy, etc), lean pork (loin cuts are good), lean beef (same as with pork, stick to loin cuts). Trim all visible fat.

Heart healthy fats include olive oil, safflower, and canola oil, among others.

Limit sugar, processed food, and alcohol, and you'll be well on your way to a healthier (and more slender) you!

Good luck!

Answer 5

It's different for everyone. I think the most important thing to do is to watch portion sizes and eat healthy foods.
I watch calories, and that works for me, because the foods that are bad for you - ice cream, candy, etc are high in calorie...and the good foods - fruits & veggies, etc are low in calorie. Am I making sense here?
The link below is a site that helps you with diet/exercise/lifestyle changes (because that's really what you want) and it's free to sign up & everything.

Answer 6

Go to sparkspeople.com it is a free and terrific site that will help in healthy living and losing weight the right way. It will let you know how many calories and how....a fabulous site! Don't start a diet, start eating right!

Answer 7

low carb diets are the stupidest diet you can do. If you want to lose weight burn more calories then you eat, and eat a balanced diet.

Answer 8

you dont want too low carbs or too high carbs

you want:
a miniumun of 10 grams of protein per serving

maxuim 10 grams of carbs per serving and

maxuim of 10 grams of fat per serving

try this site for a good menu : http://www.foodanddiet.com/

Answer 9

For all of the quick weight loss diet pill suggestions, remember, if something sounds too good to be true... it probably is. Here are some aggressive but realistic ideas that include a discussion of diet.



On Yahoo!Answers I find certain questions being asked repeatedly which is simply a reflection of new people participating. A couple of common question amounts to "How do I lose weight," or more specifically, "How do I lose abdominal fat?" I have gotten very positive responses from my answers when I paused to reply (and now beginning to get "It works!" emails that are very gratifying. I like helping people)... so have recently decided to put a good solid answer on my Yahoo!360 Blog (September 10) that I can point people to. These are my thoughts as a physician and athlete.

Don't target losing more than about 2 lbs per week. If you try to lose faster, your body will go into "starvation mode" and get very stingy about burning calories while at the same time very efficient about storing any calories that you do provide. And it will make you feel awful.

There is no site specific way of losing fat... the old myth about working your abs to burn belly fat isn't true. To get rid of love handles, you need to lose overall fat. That happens with exercise and watching your diet. More on that below.

The most effective way to lose fat is aerobic exercise in the "moderate" fat-burning range, ideally first thing in the morning before you eat. When you wake your body is ready to burn fat and your levels of growth hormone are highest at that time. Later in the day it can take up to 30 minutes just to put your body into a fat-burning mode.

Another overlooked way to burn fat is by lifting weights. Skeletal muscle has very high caloric needs... almost twice that of adipose (fat) tissue. Put on a little muscle and you will burn calories all day even at rest. Be aware that skeletal muscle weighs more, so with this approach you may see your weight increasing while your body fat is melting away. Not realizing this often stresses folks who think they should be losing weight as a measure of fitness. Forget the scale, look in the mirror and you will be happy.

To lose a pound of fat, you need to eliminate about 3500 calories. You can do this by burning more with exercise or by modifying your diet to reduce intake. If you do a Google search on say, "swimming calories" you will quickly find a website with tables of calories burned for a given exercise. You can use such lists to estimate how many calories you are burning up with your routine.

For diet, keep a diary for a couple of weeks counting calories, grams of protein, and grams of fat intake. It is easy with online sources of nutritional information (type the name of the food and calories into the Google search engine) and packaging labels. That will let you quickly figure out where the fat is coming from in your diet.

Fat gives you 9 calories per gram. So take the number of grams of fat, multiply by 9, then calculate what percentage the fat calories are of your total daily calories. Restricting the calories from fat to about 20% of your total intake is ideal for a maintenance diet... that isn't overly restrictive. Of note, you need some fat in your diet. For instance, the body uses fat to produce hormones. Once you have a picture of how to modify your diet, you can drop the diary and just go back to it occasionally if you are wanting to tweek things further.

There is a subset of questions that goes further and asks about "How to get a six-pack?" The answer is the same. Six-packs are 20% abdominal exercise and 80% diet. There is one caveat... abdominal muscles will form in the position that you work them, so be certain to pull them tightly toward your spine while doing crunches, etc. Also, during most lifting, the "core is active" which means that you should be stabilizing with contracted abs then too. Fail to do this and the abs will form, but bulging outward and the result is not attractive.

If you are trying to build muscle as a way to lose fat, then you may need to increase total calories and specifically your protein intake. I target about 0.8 g of protein per pound of body weight each day when actively building. That is far more protein than most people need in their diets.


Aloha

Answer 10

What does your diet plan say ?

How much exercise are you planning to take ?