How to Project Weight Loss

In our culture, weight loss can be a very confusing task. Television and film stars constantly appear on your television screen, urging you to try a particular fad diet, lose weight and get in shape. Many assure you that simple fixes like popping a pill, restricting your diet to one food group or switching to an all-organic menu will put you on the fast track to weight loss. At the same time, however, you are bombarded with advertisements for fattening foods that are not only delicious, but also filling and easy to prepare. In reality, healthy weight loss is a fairly simple formula: Ingest fewer calories than you burn on a day-to-day basis. Keeping this in mind, you can determine how much weight you can lose in a specific amount of time.

Things You'll Need

• Calorie-counting armband
• Food journal

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Instructions

• 1

  Purchase an armband that is able to estimate the number of calories you burn each day. These should be available online or at your local sporting goods store. Right after you wake up, secure the armband around the top of your arm and make sure that it is turned on. Over the course of the day, the armband will be able to estimate how many calories you are burning through its calorie-counting monitor. Leave the armband on for the rest of the day to estimate how many calories you burn while performing everyday functions.

• 2

  Begin to keep track of your food intake in a journal. Write down each food you eat, the serving size and the number of calories in that serving size. Do this even for small items like snacks or beverages. They can add up over time.

• 3

  Compare the number of calories that you consumed versus the number of calories that you burned in a day. To maintain your weight, they should be roughly equal. To lose weight, nutritionists estimate that for every 3,500 more calories that you burn than take in, you will lose one pound. To begin the weight-loss process, start by ingesting 500 fewer calories per day than you are burning.

• 4

  Keep track of your food journal and armband calorie monitor daily for a few weeks, making sure to accurately record all information. After a few weeks of recording calories consumed and calories burned, you can calculate the number of pounds you are losing per week and project future weight loss.