Last week we asked you about your BMI. About 30% of the people who answered were overweight. This article will tell those of you who are overweight, as well as anyone interested in losing a few pounds, how to do it using free resources on the Internet.

First things first: Where do you stand?

The first thing you need to ask yourself is whether you’re indeed overweight. As we’ve mentioned before, a good tool for that is your BMI, which stands for Body Mass Index. Calculating your BMI will tell you where you stand.

An easy way to do that is to go to Wolfram Alpha, the new search engine, and enter “BMI” (without the quotation marks) followed by your height and weight. Like so -

(You can enter your height in feet or in meters, and your weight in pounds or kilograms).

You will get a graph showing you exactly where you stand:

If you fall within the orange (overweight) or red (obese) zone, it’s recommended that you lower your weight.

Second stage – It’s all about the (simple) math

Losing weight is very simple math. We all know that if you want to end the month with money left in the bank you need to spend less than you earn. Spend more money than you’ve got, and you’ll start losing your savings.

Losing weight isn’t different, only instead of money you earn and spend calories, and instead of a savings account you have fat. If you spend more calories (=money) in a day than the calories you eat you’ll start losing the money in the bank (=your fat).

But how can you tell how many calories you ate each day? There are a lot of websites which can help you with that. Here are a few examples:

1. Gyminee – Gyminee offers a wealth of features, both to track down how much you eat and to track your exercises. In the food department, you start by telling Gyminee your goals (such as – I want to lose 5 pounds). You’ll get recommendations on how many calories you should eat daily, and it will allow you to track down what you eat easily by picking what you ate out of a huge database of more than 80,000 foods. You can add your own foods if you can’t find what you ate there.
   Other features they offer is an iPhone version, weight loss challenges and competitions to help you with motivation and more.

   
   Gyminee will tell you how much you ate and how much you have left.

2. Tweetwhatyoueat – Twitter is all the rage these days (don’t forget to follow us!). Instead of just sending links and details about your encounter with Aunt Nellie, why not use it to track down what you eat. You simply send a message to them through Twitter (don’t worry, no one will see your message, since it’s a direct message) telling what you just ate and how many calories it has. If you don’t know the calories, a service called CrowdCal will help you. On their website you’ll see a diary summing up what you ate during the day.
3. SparkPeople – SparkPeople, like Gyminee, offers tools to track your fitness and nutrition. It also has an emphasis on community, where members support each other. Once you sign up you get to calculate your BMI from within the site and to tell them your target weight, as well as the date you wish to reach your new goal. After that the site offers you goals to choose from (fitness, nutrition and motivation goals) to help you with motivation.Much like in Gyminee, SparkPeople lets you enter the foods you ate during the day. It also builds you a daily menu which it thinks will fit your goals.

   

4. The old pen & paper way (+ the help of the Internet): If you’re not much of a tech junkie and you think the plain old pen & paper way is enough for you, you can simply track down what you eat on a paper and sum it up at the end of the day or as you go. The Internet can help you in two ways:
   a. Figuring how many calories you need to eat – There are many calculators on the Web. One example is this. Enter your details and it will tell you how many calories you need to eat each day.
   b. Figuring out how many calories are in each food you eat – Website nutritiondata.com is an excellent resource for finding out everything about the foods you eat, from the amount of calories, down to how much fat there was in it and how much salt it contains

The last ingredient – Exercise

You don’t HAVE to exercise in order to lose weight. Eating less than you spend is a very good start. But exercising has its benefits:

1. It can help you spend calories – Which means it will be easier for you to keep a negative daily balance of calories and lose weight.
2. Muscles you build burn calories when you rest – So that you get thinner even when not exercising actively.
3. It can improve your overall health
4. It will improve the way you feel

In a future article we will cover some Web based tools to help you with tracking your exercise routine and keeping to it.

Know any other tools to help you lose weight? Had any success with the ones mentioned here? Let us know in the comments.

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