Lose Weight with a Free Calorie Counter

Losing weight can be made a whole lot simpler if a free calorie counter is used to track calories taken in during each day. What many people don't realize is that you can lose weight by just changing your diet. Exercise contributes to toned muscles and increased endurance but if you cut calories, the weight will come off.

A food calorie counter is very helpful for those who don't wish to track calories manually by writing down everything they eat by looking at the nutrition information on the packaging of all foods eaten. What makes it difficult is when fast foods are consumed and they aren't recorded properly or the calorie information is unknown. All restaurants are required to make their nutrition information public and it can usually be found on their website, but not everyone will want to do this because it can be so time consuming.

How to Begin Using a Free Calorie Counter

Before you begin to track calories with a free calorie counter, you need to find one of these calorie counting websites online. There are a lot of free ones. MyFitnessPal is my favorite. To get started, you'll need to set up an account and fill out your profile, including information such as height, current weight, age and weight loss goals. It's recommended to set a goal of losing .5 to 2 pounds per week. Anything more than that can be unhealthy depending upon your current bill of health. Those who are really overweight or obese can often times lose a lot more weight during the first few weeks after cutting calories.

Once you enter all of the required information, you will be shown how many calories you need to consume to maintain your current weight, and also how many calories you need to take in to meet your weight loss goals. The programs will also keep track of how much fat, protein and carbohydrates you are taking in.

Is Exercise Required to Lose Weight With a Free Calorie Counter?

Exercise is absolutely NOT needed to lose weight, but it will speed up your results and help the weight come off a lot faster than if exercise wasn't a part of your lifestyle.

3,500 calories is equal to 1 pound. So to lose 1 pound of fat in 1 week, one would need to cut 3,500 calories per week, or 500 calories a day. So without doing anything else other than cutting 500 calories a day for 7 days, a person would lose 1 pound of fat. Repeat for 20 weeks and 20 pounds would be lost.

Does a Free Calorie Counter Allow Tracking of Physical Fitness?

The good ones absolutely do. In fact, when you enter your physical activity, including the activity you did and the length of time you did it for, it will show you how many calories you have burned along with how many calories you have earned back for the day. That means you can eat more and still lose the weight. Although, if you just workout and then not eat the calories you have gained back, the weight will just come off faster because you're not only eating less calories by following your required daily caloric intake, you're burning more calories by doing physical activity.

Losing weight really isn't rocket science, but it does require some effort on your part. There is no miracle diet out there that will work for the long term. As long as you don't go over the calories you are supposed to be eating on a daily basis, according to a free calorie counter, you will start to lose weight and it won't come back unless you start eating more calories than you're 'supposed to'.