Managing your Calories to Stay on Track

Party season is now upon us, and we know what that means, lots of food and drink, fun and games. But what if you have a weight loss goal, how is this festive season going to impact on you. Fear not, if you can follow this strategy below this could be the key to you still hitting goals whilst having a great time. And for future reference, this isn’t just for the festive season.

A few tips

• Stop thinking of your calorie intake as a day to day thing and start to look at it as a week-long calorie intake goal. For example, most people will focus on a specific calorie goal for each day but that leaves little to no flexibility, whereas if you take your total weekly calories as your goal instead it makes the week a lot more flexible, and using Shape My Plan can really help you stick to your overall calorie intake.

Let us look at a normal person, who is coming into the party season but still wants to lose pounds before Christmas, but is worried about all of these things on but upon advice follows the strategy below:

They look at their overall calorie intake for the week that they need to ensure they are in a deficit across the week that still allows them to lose weight.

The target for is 1600Kcals per day for example, and by the normal routine would need to stick to that and not deviate above it. But this week this person has 2 nights out next week, how will they stay below 1600kcal? What they need to do is add up all the daily calories for the week and see what they need to be below to stay on a deficit, and come up with this total.

1,200kcals

Next, we need to look at the 2 nights out and allocate extra calories for those 2 nights. So Lets say allocates an extra 1400kcals for both days to 3000kcals (that would be about 6-7 Vodka/diet cokes and a nice burger out on both nights). For these 2 days that would equate to a total:

6,000kcals

Very simply we then need to do a quick sum:

11,200 – 6,000 = 5,200

So basically that leaves us with 5,200kcals for the remaining 5 days

5200/5 = 1,040kcals per day.

So by eating 1040kcals per day, it allows you to increase calorie intake on other days and therefore still hit your calorie goal for the week.

By taking this advice on board it will allow you to still have a great time over the festive period and also help prevent any unnecessary weight gain.