Successful Dieting
For me, successful dieting is all about a long term approach. There is no "quick" diet formula that won't pile the pounds back on after you finish. You have to want to be slimmer, and you have to know what that entails.
The easy rule for a long term diet is : Don't eat more calories than you need each day.
The hard part is understanding what amount of calories you can actually eat per day to sustain, or gradually lose weight.
What follows next is my approach to my successful diet. Everyone will be slightly different, but I feel the principles are the same. I lost just under 10kgs in about a year by doing this (from 102kgs to 93kgs) and you can do the same. All the advice on this site is free - I hope it inspires you to be healthier long term, just as it did me!
How many calories do I need per day?
For an average man it should be roughly 2,500 calories per day to maintain your weight. For a woman it should be roughly 2,000. About.com can help you calculate exactly what it should be.
You then need to factor in how much exercise you do. If you don't do anything, then it stays at 2,500 calories per day for a man.
If you do regular exercise and burn 200 calories per day, then you would need 2,700 calories per day to maintain your weight.
The Daily Plate will show you how many calories certain types of exercise will burn.
Once you have established your daily calorific baseline, you can then calculate how many calories per day you will need to be able to start losing weight.
How many calories do I actually eat per day?
This is the next thing to understand. How many calories do you actually eat per day normally? You would be surprised.
I used The Daily Plate and Calorie Counting websites to help calculate the amount of calories in the food I was eating. Try keeping a diary of what you eat each day, and then totaling up the calories. My advice would be to keep a food diary each day for a week, and then total it up at the end of the week. That way you don't start changing your eating habits straight away (its a long term diet after all!). Do this for two weeks or so, and this should give you a good average figure.
You will soon start to see if you are eating more calories than you actually need.
Losing Weight
Once you understand your calorific baseline, and your daily calorific intake, you should set yourself a goal.
This is where it gets personal.
Ideally, you should set your goal as anything "sensible" under your calorific baseline. By sensible, I wouldn't try and reduce your calorific intake by more than 500 calories below the baseline. If you do, then you run the risk of under nourishing your body, which will make you tired, ill, and it won't be sustainable. After all, this is a long term sustainable diet.
Just for info, if you do go 500 calories below your normal level, after a week you should technically have lost just under half a kilo (about 1 lb). I would recommend trying to lose a kilo per month for long-term sustainable weight loss.
But if you are eating way more than your baseline, then be sensible. Try and reduce your intake over a few months to just get to your baseline level. This will ease you into a new routine, and you are more likely to stick to it. When you are happily maintaining your weight instead of putting it on, you can then start reducing it.
I found out that I was generally eating about 2,500 calories per day (which is what my baseline should be), but I was binge eating at the weekends and at other odd times. This meant that I had slowly been putting on weight over the years. I set my goal to 2,000 calories per day - a big target, but I had my wedding coming up that I wanted to look good for (and it also gave me a big incentive). By eating about 500 calories under my recommended baseline I found that I was losing about 1kg per month (some months were static, others months I dropped a couple of kilos).
The next few pages detail how to start your long term routine, and a load of hints, tips, and tricks.
