Lots of good advice in this thread. Have you tried something like this to estimate your caloric needs?
Measuring your food is essential as is tracking it someplace like My Fitness Pal. The #1 answer to your question on their forums there is that you’re not measuring and thus are vastly underestimating how many calories you’re taking in.
I’m also a daily weigher. There are some cool apps where you can enter your daily weight and it will give you the general trend of your weight so if you’re trying to lose but are up a pound or two, you can look at the app and still see the downward slope. It puts the pound or two in perspective.
Diet is huge, but so is exercise. You need to build muscle, and you aren’t going to do that on the stairmaster or treadmill for very long. Burning calories while working out aerobically is fine if you want to burn 100-200 extra calories a day. If you want to burn 800-1000 extra calories a day, you can either run 20 miles a day, or pick up a barbell and increase your muscle mass (or, once you have the ability to squat more than your bodyweight, high intensity interval training will increase your BMR).
Also, I hate to make assumptions, but if you’re a man over about 165cm, 75kg is just too low a weight for you to realistically achieve, and 2000kCal is probably just not enough food. You’re not a teenager anymore, do you really want to look like one?
My guess is that if you thought about it for a while, you would realize you don’t really want to lose weight. You want a lower bodyfat percentage, and probably to be more physically fit and just more useful and healthy feeling in general. And that can be achieved far more easily for a grown man by building muscle in the gym, rather than by dieting down to a teenage beanpole bodyweight and running a lot.
Here’s a few motivational/informative links that might change your perspective on these things:
But koolaid, milk and soda all have calories, too. The only caloric beverage I drink is milk. Otherwise, it’s unsweetened coffee, tea and diet soda sparingly, and lots of water. Stick with drinks that don’t have calories (like water and diet soda) and when you drink a caloric beverage (milk, beer, protein shake), make sure you include that in your food diary.
Ryan_Liam, keep in mind that the number of calories reported by manufacturers are just estimates and thus there is some “slop” to them. Apparently, here in the US, manufacturers are allowed to a 20% error in their caloric estimates. So when looking at the information printed on pre-packaged items, I’d bump up the calorie number by a bit. Say an item supposedly has 100 calories. I’d assume the true number is more like 125. I know it doesn’t seem like much, but all the errors can add up.
You really haven’t been doing your regime for very long, so don’t be discouraged!
um, well, leaving aside the fact that you probably should never eat anything that has calories per portion listed on the package, do you actually EAT the one portion? I ask because many packages are extremely misleading. You’ll buy a package that is clearly packaged as “one portion” and only if you use a magnifying glass to read the tiny fine print will you find out it actually contains 2.5, 3, or even 10 portions.
If you’re eating nothing but packaged stuff, you’re eating all of the wrong foods. The majority of your diet should be fresh vegetables, which don’t come in labelled per-portion packages.
What a ridiculous statement. Bagged salad (for example) lists the calories per serving on the package. Mini carrots too. Fresh fruit, like blueberries, often has calories per serving on the package. I could go on.
I have no idea what’s the law in the US, but there are locations where listing amounts per serving is actually a legal requirement. Some companies which make products for international markets have just chosen to list contents by whichever amounts are required in every country where they sell: it’s easier to print the same table in all the combinations of language+units in which it’s needed than to have different tables for different locations.
Ryan_Liam, I’ve corrected that last quote in post #20 to be attributed to SeaDragonTattoo—you had it attributed to Nava. As far as I can tell, it was just an accident; just try to be careful.
There are some cool apps where you can enter your daily weight and it will give you the general trend of your weight so if you’re trying to lose but are up a pound or two, you can look at the app and still see the downward slope. It puts the pound or two in perspective.