Maximize Your 3 Day Diet Results

I thought I'd share a few tips that I think are very important regardless of what diet you are doing but especially for your 4 days off.

First figure out how many calories you need to eat to maintain your weight. Meaning how many calories do you burn in a day for your daily functions. To do this you need a BMR calculator (which can be found here). Input your height, weight and age and it will give you your BMR number. You then take that number and use the Harris Benedict Equation (which can be found here) to figure out your daily calorie needs based on how active you are.

There is a good chance you are taking in too many calories, especially if you have a desk job. For me I'm sitting quite often since I go to school online and work on the computer as well. You metabolism will slow and you don't need as much as you initially think.

When I first began trying to lose weight the dietitian at sparkpeople told me I needed to be taking in between 1600 and 1900 calories to lose weight. WRONG! Based on my lack of exercise I only need 1800 to maintain my weight. Even though I was exercising I didn't have an active lifestyle so you can't tell yourself your active and calculate your calories that way if you are only active a few hours out of the day.

So with that in mind if you were to have a medium sonic blast on one of your days off that around 1500 calories. For someone like me that's almost my entire daily intake just to maintain my weight. I'm a firm believer in indulging so I eat what I want but in moderation. In a typical day (without the 3 day diet) I only consume 1200 calories and still eat things like Gelato and wonderful carbs. I don't snack or binge eat and seriously think about what I'm going to eat and then enter it into my calorie counter every single day. After doing this for some time I've lost a lot of my cravings because I'm eating the right foods like oats, whole wheat, quinoa, protein, veggies, fruit, etc.

Something you should be taking away from the 3 Day Diet is that it is balanced. It may not be all the calories you need in a day but your getting protein, dairy, vegetables, and so on. Its something you should strive for on your days off as well. sparkpeople monitors your calories along with your fat intake, carbs, and protein. I work very hard to fulfill each of those requirements because you really shouldn't eliminate an entire food group with hopes of gaining results.