The Diet Logs

By now we should recognize that there’s no magic to any of the fad diets sweeping the world. Losing weight all melts down to expending more calories than you take in during the day. That’s why exercise is a recommended component to any weight loss plan that works. If you’ve already accumulated too many calories stored in your body in the form of fat, you have to start burning them in order to reduce your bulk. The other half of the equation, though, is the daily calorie input. How do you know how many you need?

The Baylor College of Medicine offers a neat, simple online calculator for your “Adult Energy Needs” and the dreaded BMI–Body Mass Index.

“It’s easier to get up the will-power to turn down a 900 calorie double-burger with cheese and sauce and opt for a 400 calorie chicken sandwich or salad when you know your entire daily needs are about 1600 calories,” says Joan Carter, a CNRC registered dietitian and instructor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

After filling in gender, age, height, weight, and a rough estimation of daily activity, the calculator returns a measure of your BMI and how many calories a day it takes to maintain your current weight. A BMI under 25 is a healthy weight and 30 or more is considered in the “obese” category. If you’re inbetween 25 and 30, you’re just “overweight”. How comforting. The web page also notes that “Between 20 to 50 percent of your daily caloric needs are determined by physical activity. The remainder are burned through basic body functions such as breathing, circulating blood and keeping cells functioning.”

If you play with the calculator and write down the results, you can see how much more activity you need to incorporate or how many fewer calories you need to intake in order to reach your ideal weight. Let’s see, if I ran around like crazy all day and became skinny as a twig, my BMI would almost be “healthy”.

Georganna Hancock wrote this on June 22nd, 2005 and filed it under Dieting, Weight Loss |