If you’re actively trying to lose any amount of weight, the first step you should take is to create a calorie deficit in your daily diet. This may sound intimidating, but it’s really quite easy if you follow our easy tips for creating a calorie deficit!
In this article, we’re going to go over a couple of simple ways that can help you lose weight and keep the weight off all while having fun in the process! Following these easy steps are the key to finally getting your ultimate dream body. Make sure to take notes while you’re reading and to save this article for easy access later if you want to come back and read it again. Enjoy!
What Is A Calorie?
It would be silly to try to create a calorie deficit if we don’t know what a calorie is! A calorie is a unit of energy that our bodies get when we consume food or beverage.
Without any calories, our bodies would cease to function at peak proficiency, With too many calories, our bodies begin to store the excess energy as fat cells throughout the body.
One easy way to think of calories is like fuel for your car. Giving your car just the right amount of clean fuel will help it run faster and longer than if you gave your car no fuel or the wrong type of fuel. Your body works in a very similar way, and it will use the food and drink you consume as fuel for your daily activities.
What Is A Calorie Deficit?
A calorie deficit may sound intimidating, but it’s really quite simple and easy to achieve! A calorie deficit may be easier to understand if we talk about what a calorie surplus is first.
A calorie surplus is when a person consumes more calories at the end of the day than what they burned. A calorie deficit then is when a person consumes fewer calories at the end of the day than what they burned. Essentially, a calorie deficit comes down to an easy math equation: calories in must be less than calories out.
So, in order to create a calorie deficit in your day, you’re going to need to know two things:
- How many calories are you taking in each day?
- How many calories are you burning?
Once you know these two variables, then you can find out how many calories you should remove from your intake to create a calorie deficit.
How Can I Find Out How Many Calories I Using Each Day?
Now that we know how easy the math is to create a food deficit, we’re going to need to know how many calories we are burning each day so that we can reduce our food intake to numbers below our daily calorie output.
One factor that you need to take into consideration is your metabolism. This can range considerably based on age, weight, sex, daily activity, genetics, and more. Typically, an adult human’s resting metabolic rate will range from 1200-2000 calories per day. Check out this WebMD article to learn more about your resting metabolic rate!
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Tips for Creating A Calorie Deficit
Now that we know what a calorie deficit is, we can now get into some of our favorite tips for creating a calorie deficit in our daily lives!
1) Keep a food & exercise journal
One simple way of keeping track of your calorie intakes and expenditures is by keeping a detailed food & exercise diary. You can do this by finding a new favorite journal or note-taking app so you can track what you’re eating and doing throughout each day.
This will give you a visual reference of where you are and what you will need to do. There are many fitness tracking apps available that can simplify the process for tech-savvy individuals, such as LoseIt and Cronometer.
If you would like to learn more about how and why having a food & exercise journal is important, check out our blog article on why you should keep a food journal!
2) Drink more water
A simple step to losing weight is to drink more water! It doesn’t have to be special or expensive water, so if your tap water is safe to drink, that is all you will need to get started.
A very important tip that we can give you is to start to replace some of the beverages that you might be drinking with water. Lots of soft drinks and hard drinks can be loaded with calories that you could not even be aware of! Many of those calories are often the bad types of calories, such as processed sugars, which is often the culprit of many people’s weight problem.
One of our favorite tips and tricks for drinking more water is to get a fun, large water bottle that you can bring with you whenever you go anywhere. It’ll allow you to accessorize your drinking habits too, which always makes things more fun!
If you’d like to learn more, make sure to check out our article on why water is important for weight loss!
3) Increase your activity & move more
Going to the gym is often seen as the first step to losing weight. After all, most fit people work out, right? The truth is, that if you’re only burning 300 calories at the gym and you’re still eating 1000 calories over your daily resting metabolic rate, then you’re still in a caloric surplus!
However, combining reduced caloric consumption with physical activity can make it much easier to create a caloric deficit. Not only that but going to the gym is fun! It’ll also let you tone and strengthen your body so that you’ll have some big muscles when you do reduce your weight.
4) Smaller portions
This is one of the most effective ways to cut calories. You don’t necessarily have to completely overhaul your diet, but if you just eat less of your normal food, you might see changes faster than you think. Of course, it’s still ideal to eat low-carb foods when trying to lose weight, but if you just cut your plates in half, you will greatly reduce your calories and set yourself up for success.
Eat out, and have them box up half of your food first. Meal Prep
5) Eat more plant-based foods
Reducing your calories is the ultimate goal to achieve when striving to attain a calorie deficit. While doing so, it may not be a bad time to start transitioning from unhealthy foods to healthy foods in the process!
Plant food is an excellent source of food for all of your essential nutrients. Not only that, but they are also much cheaper, healthier, will keep you full for longer, and are less calorically dense than many of the alternatives.
Speaking of eating healthy, some healthy foods are extremely healthy but should be eaten sparingly as they are often dense with calories. If you’re interested in learning more about which foods are calorically dense, check out this article on which calorie-dense healthy foods to watch out for!
6) Don’t overdo it
Once you start to see the benefits that living in a calorie deficit can do for you, it can be easy to get carried away and continue to reduce your calorie input in an effort to get skinnier and skinnier. However, as discussed earlier, your body is a machine, and without fuel, your body and brain cannot run at peak proficiency.
If your goal is to reduce your total weight, then a calorie deficit is most likely the best action you can take. But remember that you still need to eat in order for your body to perform the functions necessary for a healthy lifestyle!
Final Thoughts On Our Tips For Creating A Calorie Deficit
Creating a calorie deficit sounds a lot harder than it is, but after reading through our tips, we hope that we’ve shown that it doesn’t have to be very difficult at all! We recommend taking the smallest steps you can toward creating a better relationship with food as small changes are easier to make into habits than big steps are.
If you would like to learn more about calorie deficits, eating better, workout plans, or are just interested in learning more about your health, we recommend checking out our other articles on similar topics!
Also, don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like more assistance in achieving your fitness goals!