[BassMasterK]

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The simple fact is if you burn more calories than you take in, you lose weight. Simple. Period.

How do you calculate how many calories you burn?

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That's a very good question and I'm no expert, but I learned this much. First off, we burn calories all day long, even without doing anything special and each person has their own "internal furnace" that burns at slightly different rates although we are all generally within a few hundred calories of each other. When I would jog in the gym, there was a readout on the the treadmill for calories that was a generalization based on your weight and how fast you were running. I knew it wasn't super accurate, but would put me in the ballpark of how many calories I burned. This was a big eye opener. When I saw how long I had to run to burn off one beer....it made beer look much less desirable. I have no idea how much I burned during the weightlifting I did, but I knew that the more I converted fat into muscle, the more calories I burned even at rest.

So basically I figured more from the calorie intake end. I knew whatever working out I did was going to burn more calories than I normally did because I was only playing hoops once in a while and would probably be in the 350 - 650 calorie range depending on how hard I went at it. So by lowering the calorie intake, and knowing I had raised the calorie output from doing nothing to working out every day, the pounds started to melt off. It took a bit to really start because muscle weighs more than fat so at first it seemed like I was just stagnant, or even gaining a bit, but once the weight started coming off it just kept going and that was motivation enough to keep at it.

It's hard to describe how much better I felt, even within a month. My workouts got easier and easier to physically do just from not having the extra weight to move around. When I hit my goal I felt like I was back to being 21.