Lose Weight Program > Reducing Calorie Intake to Lose Weight

Suppose you fit into the second division: you do some brisk housework, climb a few stairs, whip up lunches for your bridge dub, and cart the children to school. You'll therefore adopt 2,500 calories a day as your maintenance figure. If you actually require a few more or a few less calories, it will all come out in the diet as checked by your trusty scales.



Now take your maintenance calories and subtract 1,000 therefrom. Easy, on paper; 2,500-1,000 = 1,500. This figure of 1,500 calories is the number you are allowed in a diet that will reduce you safely. The rule of thumb that makes involved mathematics unnecessary is this: A reduction of 1,000 calories a day from the total calories required to keep your weight stationary (your maintenance calories as given in the above table) should bring about a weight loss of from one and a half to two pounds a week.

Another way to estimate tbe proper number of calories in your reducing diet is to take your basic calories - 2,500 is the example we have been using - and slash them from 30 per cent to 50 per cent. This would give you a reducing diet of between 1,750 and 1,250 calories. The smaller total naturally will reduce you faster than the larger one.

Not very difficult arithmetic, is it? You can be even more simple about it. Just decide arbitrarily that you will adopt a reducing diet on one of three levels: 1,000 calories, 1,250 calories, or 1,500 calories per day. Continue on it until you have reduced your weight about twenty pounds, or brought it down to the ideal level. Then step up your intake until you hold your weight stationary for a few weeks. Repeat the process if you desire further reduction.

It is possible, if you are truly overweight, to lose pounds much faster by restricting yourself to 600 or 700 calories a day. This can be accomplished safely if you have the approval of your physician and if you follow a diet providing the essentials your body needs.

It is always unwise to lose weight faster than would be compatible with intake of calories inseparable from foodstuffs absolutely necessary to supply body essentials. If it were possible to get all these essentials in some magic capsule, then an obese person could reduce beautifully without taking any food at all, but this bright therapeutic day has not arrived. Assuming, however, that your slimming diet provides all essentials, then you may reduce with great speed as well as safety. Reducers are sometimes warned that if they Jose weight too fast, wrinkles will appear when fat no longer pushes out wrinkles from behind. When fat is withdrawn, the skin does lose some of its support, and the shrinking integument, having no place to go, folds up like an accordion. But this may follow whether fat is lost rapidly or slowly.

Whether or not wrinkles will appear depends not only upon the amount of fat lost (anyone not grossly overweight won't have much wrinkle trouble), but upon the elasticity - which is to say youthfulness - of the skin. A young person ordinarily has a skin that will snap back into place, but older folk have more resistant hides. The haggard look of some reducers is not a result of wrinkles, but is a real debility resulting from days on unwisely chosen diets that cause actual physical damage.

That's about all there is to the arithmetic lesson. Your scales will give you a constant check on your proficiency in the art of subtraction. If you adopt a 1,500-calorie-a-day diet and fail to lose about one and a half pounds a week, drop down to the next level and embrace a 1,250-calorie regimen. Or if, on a 1,OOO-calorie diet, you lose more than two pounds a week, you can step it up by adding 100 or 200 calories.


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