One Pound Equals What?

I'm sure you've been wondering, what does it take to lose one pound a week? Well, I'm here to tell you. First, I want you to go to your fridge, and get one pound of butter or margarine. If you don't have that in your fridge, make a little trip to the store, and find a one pound tub of butter or margarine. What you will find, is that four sticks of butter or margarine is equal to one pound. That's our goal, at minimum, each week....to lose one pound, or four sticks of butter, each week. Think of that pound of butter as a pound of fat, which it is really. Pretty gross, huh? Does it help to motivate you to lose it a little more? I know it did for me. :)

Okay, so now that you're totally grossed out, let's get down to the mathematics of it all. According to Fitness magazine, to lose one pound each week, you need to lose 3500 calories somewhere throughout your week through diet and exercise. What Fitness magazine suggests, is to aim to eat 300 calories less (300 x 7 = 2,100) while burning 300 calories from exercise five times a week (300 x 5 = 1,500).  Since we've already learned how many calories we need to take in to maintain weight, we've already deducted at least 500 calories from that in order to lose weight. So if your daily calorie intake is 5,000 calories to maintain your weight, you should be taking in 4,500 calories in order to try to lose weight. While that alone is enough to lose the 3,500 calories, or one pound a week, we have also learned that the optimum combo to lose weight is watching what you eat, and exercising, too.

Last week, charts were put up to show us how many calories are burned per minute depending on what type of exercise you do, and at what intensity you do it at. So take a variety of exercises that you enjoy doing, whether it be walking, swimming, running, etc., and see how long you need to do each exercise in order to burn at least 300 calories per day. If it helps, split up the time that it takes. For example, if it takes 1 hour of swimming to burn 300 calories, do two 30 minute sessions in a day to burn the 300 calories.

Good luck on your goals this week, and remember, YOU CAN DO THIS!