Kilojoule Intake

Weight Loss Tips and Understanding Kilojoule Intake

In order to loose weight, is it essential to understand your kilojoule intake, the measure of energy which you put into your body with food, and burn off during the day with daily tasks and exercise. Reducing the amount of kilojoules you consume, coupled with burning kilojoules off with exercise, can be an effective way to loose weight healthily.

• Weight Loss

Taking note of the kilojoules you consume should not be considered a diet, but a permanent way of keeping tabs on what you eat all the time for healthy living.

While it is dependent on a person's gender, height and weight, the total energy they need every day with regular exercise is around 8000-9000 total kilojoules (KJ). Check with your doctor or a dietician first to get an accurate gauge on what your energy intake should be to maintain weight, and if you are looking to loose weight, what you need to adjust it to.

Portion Size
Controlling how much you eat is essential for weight loss. Just because something is low in fat or low in sugar, doesn't mean you can eat as much of it as you want. Portion size is key to a healthy diet. It is important to understand than fat and sugar do not cause weight gain, excess consumption in kilojoules does.

This means you shouldn't eat four servings of whole-grain bread at once because 'it's low in fat and sugar', because the total amount of energy contained in these slices very high.

As a general guide, an 8000 KJ per day diet should consist of 6 meals, each ranging from between 1500 KJ (breakfast, lunch, dinner) and 1000 KJ (morning tea, afternoon tea, post-dinner snack). Read our diet food article for examples on what each meal could consist of. It is essential to stick to these energy amounts each meal, and not to snack outside of the meals.

Reading Nutritional Information
Learning how to read nutritional information is a key skill in keeping a healthy diet, however reading the total energy (kilojoule) content of every food is the real key to weight loss.

Eating lower kilojoule foods means you are putting less energy into your body, giving it less to use up. This means, when your body has used up all the food you've consumed with daily tasks and exercise, it will begin to burn your fat. Eating a large quantity of 'healthy' foods will still lead to a high energy diet, and excess energy means weight loss becomes impossible.

Understanding Servings
Once you've familiarised yourself with reading nutritional labels for a balanced diet, you can begin to look at them with weight loss in mind. This needs to be done by keeping to the serving size of each food.

Each nutritional label will contain the total servings per package, the serving size, and will break down the nutritional content by both per serve measures and per 100g measures. Looking at the per serve content can be deceiving, as often this serving size is much less than you will be planning to eat (unless the package is a single-serve item).

Most people underestimate how much energy is in a portion of food. Ideally, you will want to weigh your serving on the scales to correctly understand your nutritional intake - and then keep to that recommended serving size every time you eat that food.

Loosing Weight by Counting
In order to successfully loose weight, start by writing down every single thing you eat or drink (excluding water) for a couple of days. Most importantly, write down how much of everything you eat: e.g. one 400ml glass of trim milk; two pieces of toast with vegemite.

Work out how many kilojoules are in each thing you eat, based on the serving sizes of everything you have consumed. Then work out where you need to make cuts within your day based on the kilojoule reduction needed to loose a kilogram of fat:

One kilogram of fat on the body is equivalent to 15,000 kilojoules of food. Therefore, to loose one kilo per week, you must reduce your energy intake by 15,000 KJ per week, or around 2000 KJ per day.

This is considered an extreme weight loss method and should only be undertaken upon consultation of a doctor if you are already eating the recommended 8000 KJ per day and still want to loose weight.

Many people will find after writing down everything they eat that they consume 10,0000 - 12,000 kilojoules per day, so cutting this by 2000 KJ will put them in a healthy energy consumption range.

It is not recommended that men ever consume less than 7500 KJ per day, or women less than 5000 KJ. Lowering beyond this may invoke your body into starvation response and is potentially very dangerous.

The most recommended way to cut down by 2000 KJ in order to loose the desired 1 kilogram per week is to reduce your energy intake by 1000 KJ per day, and burn of the other 1000 KJ each day with exercise (a 50 minute brisk walk or 25 minute run will burn approximately this amount).

Try to gradually drop your kilojoule intake, rather than all at once. A drastic drop will wreak havoc on your system and will not be sustainable, however your body will accustom to a gradual drop and will be easier to stick to in the long term, making lower-kilojoule eating a way of life.

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Lifestyle images from Flickr: Diet Day One, Yoga and Wine.