Kat & Tshepi

Hi There,

Welcome back, we hope your week went according to your plan, if not, don’t despair, there is another week coming up to try again, a clean slate to write your life. Our week was a good one, we managed to tick-off most of our planned tasks and goals. Our mindset was unwavering regarding our 6 months goal, the goal is becoming a central domain where all other actions are spiraling from, it is becoming our daily obsession, how else can we achieve it without being obsessed about it? We also managed to commit to our training programme, this was the second week in a row that we trained as planned, and we increased some of the weights in our resistance training as we are doing progressive resistance (but let us not start with the muscle soreness 🙂 whew), but it is a good feeling to achieve this task, 8 workouts in 6 days.

In this week, we also continued to stick to our meal plans by preparing our meals in advance and disciplining ourselves to eat only the prepared meals. It was not perfect though, it never is, we digressed a few times from our plan because of unplanned snacks. Snacking is our number 1 culprit in derailing us from our plans and we mostly fall for this trap on weekends (what a battle), but when it does happen we try to be reactive and counter the effects of the committed crime. This would mean that we have to relook at the calories left for the day and take out some of the foods that equates to (or close to) calories from the snacks we just consumed. It is not an ideal way to live but there must be some sacrifices to be made in order to achieve a goal, especially if it is very important. Tshepi would say “How badly do you want it” 🙂 ,  I believe we want it badly and the sacrifices are worth it.

This brings us to this week’s topic “Counting Calories”. Calories, that dreaded word that everyone who is trying to loose weight and get fit is bombarded with, the word seems to be the password to get into fitness. But love or hate the word, there is a good reason why the word features so much in the fitness and nutrition jargon. In time you do realise why this word means so much in the fitness industry and why you should care a bit about it if you are trying to achieve any fitness goal.

1. Counting Calories.

Without being technical about the term “Calorie”, it simply means the amount of energy that is contained in a particular food item being referenced. Foods have energy and we as humans need energy to survive, we get this energy from the foods we eat in order to function at least normally. This energy that we get from foods is measured in calories. When we eat food, we can either eat to get just enough energy that our bodies require to function well, or we can eat more or less than what our bodies require. The main interest in calories comes when we consume more or less energy than our bodies require. Either option leads somewhere, if we consume more, we gain weight and if we eat less, we lose weight. If you are trying to achieve a fitness goal, it therefore makes sense to know a bit about the effects of calories you consume and to make efforts to consume calories in line with your fitness goals.

Counting and tracking calories gives you a better chance to succeed on your fitness journey, it gives you a chance to be precise about what you are trying to achieve. Without counting and tracking your calories you might be shooting in the dark and wonder why you are not hitting the target and why your efforts are not yielding the desired results. Counting calories also provides you with education about foods, especially your particular food choices. You get to know the exact amount of energy in foods you consume and you start to be aware of the high/low calorie foods that are favorable to you and those that are better left alone (and these are those we like the most 🙂 ). With this knowledge, you end up making better food choices and the decisions that are in alignment with your goal and this can boost your efforts drastically.

Counting calories has enabled us to avoid consuming excess food and only consume what is necessary for our bodies on daily basis, and we have managed to lose weight as desired each week because of this. We count and track calories by firstly setting up our calorie goals, this can be done by using any free calorie calculator on the internet, a search on google results in many available calculators. The calorie calculator gives you a good idea of how much calories you require to maintain, lose or gain weight. Once we know our calorie goal, we set the goal on MyfitnePal app, then we start measuring the foods we eat and log them on the app. Each food item is then subtracted from our daily calorie goal. In this way we are able to see how many calories do we still need for the day, as well as to determine which types of foods (Carbohydrates, Proteins or Fats) we should be focusing on. This helps us a lot in advancing to our goal, it may seem and feels confusing at first and takes a bit of time to get used to, but eventually it becomes a new habit and its benefits starts to surface in a very good way.

This is all we have for this week. We are happy that in counting and tracking the calories we consume, we are not shooting in the dark and relying on guesswork but actually aiming for a tangible target and working at precision. In the coming week, we will be measuring progress for the 2^nd Month of our 6 months’ weight loss and fitness journey. We are feeling confident that we will achieve this month’s target and we are looking forward to that day. We also hope to build from the success of this past week by continuing to train and eat as planned, as well as to stay consistent with tracking our calories.

Wishing you a great week ahead, until then, stay blessed.

Kat & Tshepi