If you don’t know how much you are eating you won’t lose weight. Find out how many calories you are really eating.

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW MANY CALORIES YOU ARE EATING THEN YOU WON’T LOSE WEIGHT. Sorry for shouting, but this point deserves to be shouted because it so obvious people don’t pay attention to it.

In The Bad Estimation Threat we saw that people aren’t very good at estimating at how many calories they eat each day. You will be truly stunned once you start measuring. You will be shocked at your real calorie count. I know I was. As I’ve mentioned, my snack of a handful of peanuts turned out to have 800 calories! A small bag of croutons had 70 calories! What I thought was a normal-looking hamburger had almost 800 calories! A small package of salad dressing surprised me by having 350 calories. Oh my.

Calories are everywhere and you are probably eating a lot more calories than you think. If you aren’t losing weight, even when you expect you should be, the most likely cause is that you are eating more calories than you realize. Once you get control over those hidden calories, you will start losing weight. This isn’t magic. The problem is that most people simply don’t know how much they eat each day.

So, you need to begin by finding out where you are. You have to start somewhere and that somewhere is by getting a handle on how many calories you are really eating.

Track the number of calories you really eat for one week. Many people find that continuing to do this helps them stay on their diet. If that’s you, then please continue tracking your calories. Whatever works. If the thought of tracking your calories each day makes you want to jump off the top of a pile of day-old bread, don’t worry, you don’t have to count calories for long.

Counting calories is not practical for many people over the long run anyway. Later, you will learn to manage your weight by selecting the correct portion size to begin with and by using feedback to determine when you may be eating too much.

One unexpected problem may be to remember what you have eaten. You probably eat a lot of food you won’t remember eating later. You may think I’m crazy, but I’m not.

Have a meal with several people and then ask each person what they ate. The results will all be different and usually wrong. If you have an omelet, how many eggs did you eat? Did you remember the sour cream you dappled on the top? Did you remember to add the cheese? How much cheese was that? Did you forget the bacon bits? How many ounces of soda or juice did you drink? It’s so easy to forget that piece of toast with butter, but that will be 190 calories that won’t show up on your total.

The key to success for this strategy is to write down what you have eaten immediately. If you wait until the end of the day you’ll miss so many items that the whole exercise will be almost worthless.

Another interesting strategy is to take a picture of all the food you eat. Counting calories is easier when you can see the food rather than having to remember it.

Many computer programs are available now to help you track and count calories. You no longer have to break out a calculator and a giant food calorie book. Please visit http://YourDesignerDiet.com for a list of calorie counting programs and websites.

Tracking your calories accomplishes several goals:

1.      It gets you to be honest with yourself about how much you are really eating.

2.      It helps you build up in your mind the number of calories different foods have. This will be quite surprising in itself. Knowing the approximate calories in the foods you eat is a critical skill for portion control.

3.      It helps you figure out which calories are easy to eliminate. Calories are an investment that you need to spend wisely. Don’t waste calories on food that’s not worth it. In the next few strategies, you’ll be determining how many calories you need to hit your weight loss target. That means you will need to figure out how to reduce the number of calories you eat each day. Your job is much easier if you can figure out the junk calories in your diet. Save your calories for food you really want, don’t waste them on food that doesn’t matter to you.

4.      You’ll start to see the benefit of strategies that support portion control. It’s very difficult to know how many calories you consume if you are always eating at restaurants or picking up food on the fly. Without counting, there’s no way for you to know. By using strategies that help control portion sizes, you can know exactly how many calories you are eating and you can begin to control your weight and stay on a diet.