When people first join 'Team Achieve', I tell them not to worry about calories and to focus on eating predominantly 'Real' food.

When you are mainly eating foods without bar codes, you can actually get quite a lot of food in before you hit your daily allowance.

The daily allowance is really where the calorie confusion starts.

The government guidelines are 2000kcal for a woman and 2500kcal for a man.  

They then tell us to reduce this by 500kcal per day to lose weight.

I'm sure you have spotted a flaw in this guideline though.

I'm 30kg heavier than my friend, which one of us is this guideline for?

One of us is potentially going to be starving, the other potentially piling on the pounds.

It's also easy to hit these numbers when you eat 'crap' non-nutrient rich foods.  a bag of hob nob mini's you're looking at close to 1000kcal and as I was reliably told yesterday, you can inhale those in a few minutes.

Which is another reason to eat mainly real food.  You can have loads of it and still be down on your total, I'm not going to add to the confusion today and talk about the break down of carbs etc.

I'll get to that later in the week.

How do you know if you are eating the right amount of calories?

There are three results from consuming calories.

1.  Your weight remains the same - you are eating the right amount of calories for you.

2.  You're gaining weight / fat - you are eating too many calories for you.

3.  You're losing weight - if you feel good and you still have energy, you are eating the right amount of calories to promote weight loss.  If you feel crap and your weight is dropping rapidly, you may be eating to few calories.

It's good to monitor your calories for a few days so you understand what you're consuming but I don't really think you need to on a long term basis.

Listen to your body and monitor how you're doing, it's that simple.

Looking at the numbers can add to the confusion.  Sometimes your body will burn less calories, certain medical conditions, medications etc, you simply have to regulate intake to suit.

I'll cover the exercise side of calories tomorrow.

Darren 'option 2 is me at the minute' Checkley