Over the past couple of years of Personal Training in Manchester I have seen many radical diets. Modern day working environments and lifestyles have caused people to become increasingly sedentary. The quality of food intake has gradually decreased as processed and fast foods are increasingly available. This means that people are eating more unhealthily and moving less, causing a wide range of health problems. To monitor the intake of food it is usual for people to keep a food diary to keep track of it all.
Energy, commonly measured in calories, is required to maintain muscle muscular contractions to allow movement and carry out bodily processes that keep you alive, such as keeping your heart pumping. A typical male may require around 2500 calories per day and a typical female may require around 2000 calories per day. Weight loss simply requires you to create a deficit by reducing calorie intake and ‘burning’ more calories through exercise instead of storing it as fat.
You should reduce daily calorie intake by around 500 per day to achieve a healthy weight loss of around 1 pound per week. This may happen with diet only through the reduction, or by exercise only by increased expenditure. The best and healthiest way is to combine the two, which is what I do with my personal training clients.
A calorie food diary can help you keep track of how many calories you are having per day. You can calculate your BMR from your height, age and weight. This is the amount of calories you need per day to maintain your weight. This is a very useful number to know as you can then deduct your 500 calories off this. Different food contains a different number of calories as you can consume a large amount of some food without making the number of calories consumed too high.
A food diary will help you keep a record of your daily calorie intake to help you also identify foods that need to be reduced or cut out for example those which are too high in sugar as this will ‘damage’ your progress for a number of reasons. Swapping unhealthy foods for healthy foods will be a good practice that should come from keeping a personal training food diary. It will help with your preparation to help you keep on track.
A great way to maintain weight or create a slight deficit to achieve weight loss is through a calorie food diary. Record your intake each day with the number of calories per meal so you can total this up for the day.
Ben Hanbridge is a personal trainer in Manchester [http://www.personaltrainingmanchester.co.uk/]. For years Ben has helped clients achieve their weight loss goals to get the body they have always wanted. His weight loss and fitness training business is called bodyfit training which services personal training in Manchester and surrounding areas.
You can learn more about Ben at [http://www.personaltrainingmanchester.co.uk/]
Ben Hanbridge (BSc)
