Saturday, June 19, 2010

How to lose weight by diet and exercise

Sometimes people want their good news delivered in convenient bite-sized amounts. If you cut out all the chatter and boil it down to just one simple thing, what do I have to do to lose weight? When experts get put on the spot, they tend to fall back on a formula. Reduce your diet to this number of calories and you will lose weight. The person does a mental calculation. That number sounds doable. Right. Let's do it! There may be a lot of other information that should be given, other factors to take into account. But none of that is heard. The decision is based on just one number.


Way back when, one of the more common formulas to see the light of day was an equation. About 3,500 calories add up to about 1 pound of fat (that's 0.45 kg who think in metric). Keeping it simple, that means you lose 1 pound every week if you cut 500 calories a day.
When an expert is trapped into endorsing such a plan, almost everyone will say they can do it. Ah, but wait a moment. At your current intake, you may have been putting on 1 pound of fat every week. So if all you do is reduce your overall intake by 3,500, the only effect would be to avoid putting on another pound. What tends to happen as people age is their stomach capacity grows.

They feel comfortable with increasingly large volumes of food inside. This fuels a progressive weight increase and a slow journey into obesity. So whatever charges you plan to make to your diet must take account of your current weight and eating habits. This is not to say that sacrificing 3,500 calories a week will not produce some weight loss. But whatever is lost is unlikely to be significant and the loss will not continue. People who diet will know that, after a month or so, their weight stabilizes at a new level. Those who are easily discouraged go back to their old eating habits and stop whatever exercise they had started. Within a week or so, they are back to their old weight.

The reality is that losing a significant amount of weight requires more than a simple formula. It requires commitment to cut a real percentage of your calorie intake and then to cut it again. Those experts who talk about little changes leading to good results are only right if those little changes set the stage for much bigger changes to follow. To lose weight and then avoid putting the weight back on, you have to make permanent lifestyle changes. This is not a game you play. It is a life changing moment when you decide to grow thin. At first, these changes will be tough. Your body must adjust to new levels of hormones in the bloodstream. The muscles will begin handling fat differently. Your stomach must contract. If hunger is a problem in these early days, the answer is to buy meridia. It keeps your appetite under control until you grow used to smaller portions. Avoiding hunger keeps your motivation higher and makes it more likely you will succeed. Once your body's metabolism has stabilized, you can safely stop taking the meridia and continue with the lifestyle program.

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