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The best way to do this is to set up an account on MyFitnessPal, or to use the option to input your food on S Health, the Jawbone app or whichever app came with your device.
Now you'll be able to more easily and quickly track what's going into your diet and total up the calories. Not only will you see the total but you'll also see where the biggest culprits lie when it comes to the amount that you're taking in.
What you'll find though, is that this process of tracking your calories is quite a slow going one. It won't take long before you start to get tired and bored of it.
Fortunately, you don't have to keep it up forever. As long as you keep doing it for a while you should be able to get an idea of the average calories you're consuming each day and where the most are coming in.
Take this figure and then subtract the calories out from the calories in. This is your surplus/deficit. Now how to lower it without tracking every last thing you consume?
The solution is simple. Firstly, aim to go about 250 calories below the AMR. This means that you'll have some 'wiggle room' so that if you make any mistakes, you'll still be under and you'll still be losing. So this is now your target caloric intake.
The next step is to try and keep your diet as consistent as possible. This might mean having the same packed lunch at work every day and the same breakfast. A bit boring? Sure. But it also makes life much easier and helps to reduce the amount of variables.
Now make sure that the combined total of your breakfast and your lunch is around half of your target. That way, when it comes to dinner, you can be a bit more relaxed, not have to calculate anything, and still be safely under. Nice right?
Of course if you're currently 500 calories over your target (hopefully not...) then that's a lot of calories to cut out of your diet. This is where you need to get creative and look for ways to remove calories that you won't notice and to start working out just the right amount (and efficiently enough) to burn those extras.
So how do you cut calories from your diet? Here are a few easy tips:
Have a black Americano instead of a cappuccino. This will cut about 100 calories from your diet right away!
Stop drinking soda drinks which are packed with sugar. Drink water instead.
Get off a stop earlier on the bus and walk
Stop spreading butter on your bread
Stop adding sugar to your tea and other foods
Replace crisps with popcorn
Look for the least calorific sandwich at your local sandwich shop
The last tip? Work out more efficiently. When you do that, you'll be able to burn more calories in the same amount of time and this will also be better for improving your overall fitness.
And that's what we're looking at next.
HOW TO WORK OUT MORE EFFICIENTLY WITH FITNESS TRACKERS
As well as helping you to lose weight more efficiently, trackers also help you to train more efficiently.
Some do this in a very obvious way. For instance, the Microsoft Band 2 has the ability to let you train using 'guided workouts'. These are routines written by professional coaches and personal trainers that will optimize the amount of weight you lose or perhaps the amount of muscle you build, depending on the goal you're going after.
Better yet is the option to combine the Band 2 with Xbox Fitness. Here, you can then do things like the Insanity Workout while the app measures your precise performance and helps you to train more efficiently while staying within the best levels of intensity.
Of course something like the Atlas, which we looked at earlier, is also particularly great for talking you through specific moves.
But if you want to generally train more efficiently, then all you need is the ability to monitor your heartrate. Even if you don't have a fitness tracker, a lot of CV machines at the gym have this capability and use sensors in the handles in order to measure your bpm.
This then allows you to know precisely how hard you're pushing your body, which in turn will allow you to train in the perfect 'fat burning zone' in order to lose the most weight.
So what is the 'perfect fat burning zone'. That all depends on who you ask and actually the concept is quite controversial.
Traditionally, it was said that the fat burning zone was 70-75% of your MHR - your maximum heart rate. To find your maximum heartrate, you simply look at the highest your heartrate gets during the most intensive exercise.
The logic was that when you trained at 70-75% of your MHR, you would be training at the optimum rate to burn fat stores. If you train less than that, then you won't tax your body enough and the fat burning will be slow. If you work harder than that though, then you'll be in an 'anaerobic state' meaning that your body won't have time to find the fat stores and will have to burn glucose for energy from your blood instead.
So 70% burns fat, 90% burns carbs. Makes sense to go at 70% right?
Well not necessarily. That's because going at 90% still burns more calories overall because you're training faster. And when you burn all the carbs from your blood stream, this has a very positive effect on your fat loss for the rest of the day. This is what some fitness gurus call the 'after burn effect'. In other words, if you burn up all the energy that's in your blood, then your body is forced to look to other places - such as fat stores - when fuelling activities for the rest of your day.
And actually there is an even better way to train that utilizes both these zones to maximum efficiency. Unfortunately we do have to save that one for the main eBook as we're all out of time.
