How to Cut Calories from Your Daily Intake

So you just decided that you want to lose some weight and start off with a healthy lifestyle! Wait, let me rephrase that, you decided on doing that a long time ago, maybe while drafting out your New Year’s Resolution and it’s only now that you decided to act on that resolution with some quick action. The allure and call of this scorching hot summer and the whimsical call of having that dream beach body probably prodded you to take action even further.

As you may have read in my other blog posts, I am a guy who loves science and I also am a big fan of making sure you take the approach of attacking something in a measured and sustainable manner. From my blogs on running your business to my passion on brewing coffee, you’ll notice I pay close attention to the inputs that influence and can predict the outcome with sheer accuracy.

If you wonder if I will ever get to the point of my title, well, here it is. The way our body works is very close to how a business runs or how you brew a cup of coffee. Just like a business we also have to take our intake into consideration and balance it with a sufficient output to maintain the equilibrium point, in this case, the beachbody we’ve always wanted. Our body’s shape and weight depends on two critical components. The amount of food we ingest and the amount of energy we burn to keep our body going. Though it may not be as simple as I outlined due to factors that may affect how our body burns calories like metabolism and conditions that impact digestion, the surefire way to lose weight and start that trip to Health Avenue is by reasonably limiting the intake or by upping the burn on the output.

Early human beings of the cave kind, also known as, Captain Caveman, never had this issue to deal with. They normally expended a lot of energy trying to hunt or gather their food and the amount of gustatory delights they ate were severely limited, not by choice of course. There wasn’t really a Muscle Cave workout area during that time. Of course, this kind of lifestyle meant that a whole amount of time was expended on the hunt and less on creating fancy new inventions and innovations. But that’s a story for another of my historical fun fact blogs. So how do you limit the amount of food you ingest? Here are some tips to help you get by.

Substitution Not Deprivation

Deprivation may have some amazing effects on once-in-a-lifetime great people like Gandhi or Siddhartha Gautama allowing them to accomplish feats of greatness but it is not really a great experience for your body. Depriving yourself of food forces your body to slow down your metabolism. It also anguishes your mental state and pushes you into a bout of depression. Normally depriving yourself of food results in binge attacks or deciding to screw the diet and gobbling everything in sight.

Look at substituting your intake with items that contain less sugar, less fat or promote metabolism. Several fruits can help you accomplish this feat along with vegetables. Put more vegetables on the plate and for every bite of meat try chomping down on 3 bites of vegetables and soon you’ll realize you had your share of meat and feel full but your calorie intake count went down.

Slowly But Surely

A drastic shift towards calorie reduction is not the key to ensuring a sustainable diet. This produces shocks in your system and prompts your brain to reject the diet and return back to the normal binge routine. This is probably why your diet failed in the first place because your mind was not fully cooperating and your mind controls the all-important willpower factor of your body. Slowly weaning in a new diet will help your body cope with what is needed to get you back on track. So for example if you want to take pork completely out of your system, make sure you cut the portions slowly and appropriately to ensure the avoidance of deprivation-related shock in your system.

Measure Your Calorie Reduction and Celebrate Milestones

One of the most important things is to reward yourself for achievements and milestones. When the brain is onboard, then it is possible to accomplish anything. Make sure you make a visual graph or scoreboard of your achievements and milestones that you update daily. Write down a list of accomplishments as far as calorie reduction and follow the slowly but surely strategy to get there. Once you make a simple achievement, celebrate it, but don’t celebrate it by gorging on food. A little taste of something you took out will help your body cope and get used to rewarding itself.

Follow these tips and you are on your way to a healthier and better you. Once you get over that initial hump, this should become natural and inherent and your body has the amazing capability of getting used to something easily and sustainably.