Stick to the Basics

For the most part, weight loss is basic science. It's a matter of calories in versus calories out. In order to lose weight you have to burn more calories than you consume.

I think one of the main reasons people can have a hard time losing weight is that they over-complicate things.

Eat less, move more. It really is as simple as that.

The tricky part is that we are not honest with ourselves. We do not hold ourselves accountable for what we are actually eating or the amount of exercise we are actually getting.

We estimate instead of actually tracking. We round down when it comes to calories consumed and we round up when it comes to calories burned. For this reason we are eating more than we are admitting and we are exercising less than we are admitting…and then we are shocked when we step on the scale at the end of the week and didn't lose weight.

I've been there and I've done that!

The most important thing you can do when it comes to weight loss is to just be honest with yourself.

Track your food. Track everything! That bite that you took to test the flavor when you were cooking…that has calories. Those few bites that were left on your child's plate that you couldn't bring yourself to throw away so you ate them…those have calories. There are so many free calorie trackers available online. You are really doing yourself a disservice if you are not tracking what you are eating to get a true and accurate reflection of the calories that you are burning.

Most of these free calorie trackers also allow you to track your exercise. The problem here is that they usually don't include all of the different types of exercise you do. For example, I take a boot camp class at my gym. It's a different class every time. It is a mix of cardio and weight training and it is very difficult to figure out how many calories I burned by just entering the number of minutes completed into a free tracker. I find that when I do this it is always an over-estimation. The smarter way to track calories burned is with a heart rate tracker that you wear throughout the day.

Once you get a true and accurate reflection of how many calories you are eating and how many calories you are burning you will be able to see exactly where you need to make changes to start seeing the weight come off.