"If a diet plan helps you lose weight, it is because it helps you to eat fewer calories." - Marion Nestle, What to Eat
The basis of The DIY Diet is simple math: eat fewer calories than the amount of calories your body needs, and you’ll shed pounds.
In order to lose weight, you need to first determine the amount of calories you should be eating each day, based on your activity level. When I got started on my weight loss adventure, I found out quite by accident how many calories I was eating per day. Since then I discovered better ways to make the calculation.
Accidental discovery
The fact is I hadn’t really been thinking about dieting at all when I first started The DIY Diet. I was trying to convince myself to accept my overweight body and go on with my life.
Because I wanted a break from cooking, I had simply decided I was going to try one of the commercially-available meal programs that provided three fresh meals per day.
If I lost a couple of pounds, that would be a bonus. I ordered the 2,000-calorie per day program. By day three on the meal program I knew it wasn’t for me - too much bread, too many unappetizing meals.
Still, I ate the remaining meals (except those I simply couldn’t stomach). After all, I’d paid for a week’s worth of meals so I was going to eat them. To my amazement, at the end of the week, I’d lost 3 pounds!
I was elated losing 3 pounds
I don’t have the words to tell you how elated I was about the 3-pound weight loss. It motivated me to start a diet, and I decided to prepare my own diet plan.
I believed I could do better than the commercial meal program, and I wanted to be able to lose weight while still eating the foods that I love.
I started doing research on weight loss. I found an immense amount of information available to me, especially on the Internet.
I wanted to know how many calories I should be eating per day in order to lose weight. In order to gain one pound you must eat 3,500 calories more than your body needs over a period of time (it can be a few days, a week or more) and to lose one pound you must eat 3,500 calories less than your body needs.
That’s important to remember. Logic told me that since I had lost 3 pounds over the period of that week on the meal program, I then knew my average daily intake of calories had been in the neighborhood of 3,500 calories prior to me starting the meal program. The 2,000 calories per day meal plan was 1,500 calories per day less than I’d been eating in an average day. That meant I ate 10,500 calories less than I needed over the period of a week and thus the 3-pound weight loss.
Find out how many calories to eat
The first step in determining how many calories to eat per day is figuring out your Basal Metabolic Rate. Do this right now. It’s easy, and it’s the first, most crucial step.
And now comes the hard part
The easiest part of starting The DIY Diet is finding out how many calories you should be eating per day. The hard part is sticking to that number. I’ve found that the best way to do that is to start a food diary that tracks the number of calories for each food item that I eat every day. Here’s how to keep your own food diary.
