Diet and Weight Loss Essentials
Diet can mean two very different things; one meaning is something we do in order to lose weight, a set of rules to follow to this end, a second meaning is a general eating habit, which will be different for each person.
There are two main reasons why people go on diets. 1) They have some medical condition that requires a better eating habit such as high blood pressure. 2) They would like to lose weight or slim down.
When you diet to lose weight, you need to ask yourself one key question, “Am I losing weight to weigh less or to slim down?” This question is so important it determines how you will approach your diet. I’ve seen way too much dependency on the bathroom scale from dieters and not enough on how well their clothes fit or how they are toning up. This can lead to multiple problems; the biggest of which is you could lose as much muscle as fat. If the purpose of your diet is to slim down and look better then judging your success solely by the bathroom scale will only prove a hindrance to your ultimate goal.
I have a large problem with a lot of the mainstream diets out there in they although they help you lose weight, they are often fairly unhealthy and do nothing to help you keep the weight off once it’s lost. When a diet prevents you from eating a wide range of foods or forces you to eat a very low amount of calories you will have a much larger chance of failure. You should avoid any of these extreme diets at all costs, both for your health and your long-term weight loss goals.
Losing Weight
I will talk a little bit about how weight is lost, and when I say this I’m talking about weight from fat, not water weight or muscle weight. Essentially fat is energy that your body had too much of and is storing for use when food may be in short supply. So, if you deprive your body of energy by eating fewer calories than it requires for its daily functions, your body will turn to other sources for that energy. Those sources are typically fat and muscle. This is why exercise is so important when you want to lose weight, if you don’t use your muscles your body won’t think it really needs them and will use a lot of muscle for energy instead of fat.
So, keeping all the muscle that you currently have, or even adding some will greatly assist you in your weight loss endeavors. Unlike fat, your body needs to burn calories to keep muscle around, so, by adding some muscle through light resistance training, you will be upping the amount of calories your body needs to burn every day just to stay going. So, by not exercising, your body will think that it doesn’t need all the muscle you have, thus burning it for energy, and when that happens you will use less energy just to stay alive, thus making it even harder to continue losing weight.
This brings me to my next topic: exercise. As much as most of us hate to do it, exercise is incredibly important in high quality weight loss (the loss of body fat as opposed to muscle or just water). However that doesn’t mean you have to go join the local gym and pump iron for 2 hours a day or train to run a marathon, it just means you need to work that muscle a bit so your body keeps it around. There are many different exercises you can do at home that don’t require any additional equipment nor do they demand too much of your time, but will still get the job done. But the best exercise will always be finding something that you enjoy doing, such as swimming, kickboxing, aerobic dancing etc… And remember, finding a partner will help with motivation and boosting the fun factor of it all. So, remember, what you eat is very important in losing weight, but exercise is just as critical. Find a partner, find a sport or other activity that you enjoy, do anything, just as long as it’s active. I promise that you will succeed where others so often fail.
