You’ve had it! You’ve tried every diet in the book – South Beach, Atkins, Ornish, the Zone, Cabbage Diet, Grapefruit Diet, the Master Cleanse. I’m sure there are hundreds more that I’m missing, but you get the idea.

Anyway, you’ve run the gamut, but you still aren’t the trim, svelte individual you have in your mind’s eye. Believe me, been there, done that!

There is a simple (but not easy) weight loss plan that:

• Lets you eat what you want when you want.
• Has just one rule.
• And is GUARANTEED to work.

At this point I bet you are thinking, awesome someone else that is just going to tell me, “consume less than I eat and it will all work out in the end. Fantastic, I need that advice like I need a hole on my head.”

Yep, sadly that actually is the rule, but, I have a new twist on it that will give you a FOOLPROOF way of figuring out what your caloric target should be. And, wait for it, some structure so that you really can have your cake and eat it too.

Here are the magical steps:

1) Compute your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate). BMR is the number of calories your body absolutely NEEDS to get through the day. It does not account for exercise, activity level, or bodyfat.

(I am using the Harris-Benedict Formula, as that is currently believed to be the most accurate)

Women: BMR = 655 + ( 4.35 x weight in pounds ) + ( 4.7 x height in inches ) – ( 4.7 x age in years )

Men: BMR = 66 + ( 6.23 x weight in pounds ) + ( 12.7 x height in inches ) – ( 6.8 x age in year )

2) Decide how many pounds per week you want to lose. It takes a 3500 calorie deficit to lose a pound, so choose carefully!

Weekly Deficit = pounds per week * 3500

3)     Compute your Weekly Caloric Total. It is a simple formula. (BMR * 7) – Weekly Deficit

Let’s look at a 40-year-old female that weighs 170 pounds, is 5’7” tall and wants to lose one pound a week.

BMR = 1,524

Weekly Deficit = 3,500

Weekly Caloric Total = (1524 * 7) – 3500 = 7,186 calories

4)     Divide those calories out through the week. If I divided the 7,186 by 7, I’d get 1,024 calories per day. But, daily totals, while very popular with weight loss programs DO NOT really work in real life.  I know you know that, I don’t know why diet “gurus” don’t.

Precise daily numbers look good on paper, but looking good on paper and working in the real world are two very different things. Being hungry all the time SUCKS, never feeling like you have a choice SUCKS, and having to perpetually turn down dessert, eating out, or even a BITE of your favorite chocolate SUCKS. So, this is why I’m a big fan of weekly averaging.

So, if you like your Friday lunch with your co-workers, go for it. In figuring out your week, start by deducting Friday lunch, and then spread your remaining calories out throughout the week.

The way I have made this program work for myself is that I prefer to have one large meal mid-afternoon, and then I eat very little in the morning and very little in the evening. My BMR is around 1550, so at 1 pound a week, I get to average about 1050 calories a day. That is what I shoot for, and then if I end up going out, I cut back a few hundred calories a day for the next few days.

Now, I’ve been a semi-professional dieter for probably close to 30 years, so I have a freaky knowledge of calorie counts all stored up in my head. You might not be able to get away with this. If you want a tracking tool, I highly recommend Lose It! if you have an iPhone. The Daily Plate at LiveStrong is a great online resource.

I’ve had to learn that hunger does not equal harm, and keep fresh veggies all cut up in the fridge at virtually all times. Some chicken or steak on a bed of spinach with some goat cheese is a fantastic, low-calorie meal that I’ve come to embrace.

Why Didn’t I Include Bodyfat?

Unless you are doing hydrostatic weighing, bodyfat is nothing more than an educated guess anyhow. Bodyfat scales have an error rate of +/- 8%. They are great for identifying trends in bodyfat if you are really consistent about the time of day and hydration levels in using it (most research indicates that your most accurate result is going to be mid-afternoon).

So, I’m simply eliminating that variable. The BMR is very accurate for all but the really lean (but then you probably aren’t reading this anyhow) and the very obese (BMR is still probably close enough to get you started).

What About Exercise?

Much like bodyfat, it’s all just an educated guess, and most modern research indicates that most solid 60-minute training sessions don’t burn more than 400 calories.

The way we ended up with such a discrepancy between what you find in calorie calculators and what we find in the real world is complicated:

• We get efficient the more we do any activity. Being more efficient means we burn less calories doing the same exercise at the same intensity for the same amount of time. So, what happened when researchers went and computed calories burned during exercise, they measured someone who is brand new to that exercise, but you aren’t.
• Body weight and body fat. We burn calories differently based upon our weight and bodyfat levels.
• Metabolism. Everyone burns calories at a slightly different rate.
• Marketing. The people who have those machines that tell you how much you burned on the treadmill have a stake in fudging the numbers a bit in their favor.
• Intensity. The more intense the activity, the harder it is to maintain it for any length of time. So, while kettlebells, for example, may burn 1200 calories per hour, I don’t think I know anyone who can swing a kettlebell for a full hour without setting it down.

Not counting exercise also gives you a bit of wiggle room because calorie counts aren’t as accurate as we’d like to believe, and you probably don’t weigh and measure everything you put in your mouth. A little bit of undercounting here and a bit of overcounting there, and everything works out in the end!

Isn’t My Daily Caloric Limit Too Low or Unsafe?

As long as you play by the rules outlined above, no. BMR goes down as we age and with loss of lean body mass (which is why this program isn’t great for super-lean people). 70% of our calorie expenditure typically comes from BMR, so doesn’t it make sense to use it as our baseline?

That gives us another 30% for fudge factor in both calorie counting (we tend to underestimate) and exercise (we tend to overestimate).

As I said, simple, but not easy. This is hard work, and isn’t for everyone. Or, email me, and we’ll figure out a way to work together to achieve your weight loss goal. Everyone does better with a coach!