The key to weight loss lies in the kitchen: diet management is more important than exercise.

How Many Calories Did You Consume?

Calculating your basal metabolic rate (BMR) is simple. The second key aspect of the BMR diet is understanding your daily calorie intake. Only by knowing your calorie intake can you equate it with your BMR and truly implement the BMR diet.

The specific methods aren't difficult either. However, before explaining the methods, I want to share a quote: The secret to weight loss is in the kitchen, not the gym, and certainly not the pharmacy. In other words, for weight loss, the most important thing isn't medication or exercise, but diet management.

Let me give you another example.

I have a 48-year-old female patient who, in order to lose weight, exercised for 4 to 5 hours every day from the beginning of the year to the end, but her weight remained unchanged. She was very puzzled: Does she have to exercise for 12 hours a day?

She came to me, and I told her, "You're going in the wrong direction. The core of weight loss should be diet control, not frantic exercise."

Then, I customized a plan for her, teaching her how to control her diet and instructing her to reduce her exercise time by at least half. She should use the saved time to properly plan her meals and cook for herself.

After one course of treatment (6 weeks), she lost 15.8 pounds, of which 12.7 pounds were fat, a fat loss rate of over 75%. This was much more time-efficient and visibly effective than her frantic exercise. Of course, I'm not saying exercise is useless; exercise has benefits. But without diet management, it's "wrong direction, wasted effort."

The foundation of diet management is understanding the food you eat every day.

Why is eating takeout unhealthy and prone to causing weight gain? Because you don't know what seasonings are added to takeout, and you have no idea how it's made. So, if you really want to manage your diet, for the month before you start your weight loss journey, don't do anything else. Don't exercise, don't get a gym membership. Just stay in the kitchen and figure out exactly what ingredients you used in every meal, what seasonings you added, and how much seasoning.

For example, for a simple stir-fried green peppers with pork, how many grams of green peppers and how many grams of pork did you use? Was the pork lean or pork belly? How much oil and salt did you add? Did you thicken it with cornstarch? Weigh all these ingredients and seasonings, and then look up their calorie content online. Only by figuring all this out will you know exactly how many calories you're consuming.

After you've done this, you'll find that the foods you thought you knew so much about are actually quite unfamiliar to you. Therefore, for the month before you start your weight loss journey, you should focus all your attention on the kitchen. All the calories hidden in the kitchen may turn into fat and "fly away" with you. Especially cooking oil; many people use it more like washing the pan than cooking. They pour the entire pan full of oil when stir-frying a single dish. Keep in mind that cooking oil can even have more calories than fatty pork. Similarly, various salad dressings and chili sauces are easily overlooked – these are hidden fattening condiments. If you spend a month in the kitchen calculating the calories of all the foods you frequently eat, you'll have an 80% understanding of their calorie content. From then on, you'll develop a conditioned reflex – no matter where you eat, when faced with high-calorie food, your first thought will be: this food is high in calories, I need to eat less.

Of course, understanding food calories is only the first step. In the following chapters, I'll help you understand nutrients. Some people might say: "I'm too busy, I don't have time to do this," or think: "This is too much trouble, even losing weight is so complicated."

I want to tell you that if you find something troublesome, you might actually be doing it right. Instead of spending time in the kitchen for personal training sessions, you'll not only improve your weight loss but also save money on those sessions—a win-win situation! I guarantee that a month spent in the kitchen will definitely help you lose weight. I've seen many people who have spent six months in the gym without success.

Why? Because their diets are chaotic and haphazard. Every fitness coach will tell you: 70% diet, 30% exercise. If you don't understand the 70% diet, why spend so much time and money on the 30% exercise? Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? Moreover, most people don't lack time; they don't prioritize it. They inherently reject truly scientific weight loss methods, often resorting to haphazard dieting at the mere mention of weight loss. In reality, most people who follow my method and spend a month in the kitchen will see their weight loss success rate increase by at least 80%, and they'll also cut their salon expenses by at least half.