Why Aren't You Losing Weight AND Keeping It Off?
[7 Days To Permanent Weight Loss - Day 1]
I'm going to start off by making an outrageous claim: Give me 10 minutes for the next 7 days, and I will teach you how to lose weight, permanently. All those extra pounds shed. Off for good.
In just 7 days, you will learn the secrets of:
* How the human body deals with food.
* How your metabolism has evolved (and how you can change it to help you lose weight).
* What to eat and what not to eat.
* How you can put in place a simple system that will allow you to maintain your new, reduced weight permanently. Onboard? Let's get started.
Dieting is not about losing weight. No, not even if your girlfriend says it. No, dieting is about starving yourself.
The only purpose traditional dieting serves is to force your body to eat less than usual, without asking it to burn off more calories. This imbalance in the cardinal equation, as I will explain later, means that all your new diet will bring you is pain as you starve yourself for a week or two, lose a couple of pounds and then gain it all back in two days as your body tries to cope with being starved for so long.
Forget your fad diets. Forget any sort of diet plan for a few minutes, and concentrate only on this:
If you are serious about achieving permanent weight loss through effective, healthy techniques that do NOT involve having you run around the block 20 times a day, then you need to understand the two cardinal principles of this program.
The First Principle of Losing Weight
One - To lose weight, you have to consume less calories than you burn (or burn more calories than you consume) on a consistent, daily basis.
This first principle is common, and is the cornerstone of all diets (whether you start eating less, doing exercise to burn more calories or a combination of both). Some simple mathematics will explain this even more.
=> 1 pound of fat = 3500 calories.
=> Calories lost = calories used up - calories consumed.
So, if you wanted to lose 1 pound per week, you would try to make sure that you lost 500 calories daily; in other words, you would eat 500 less calories every day.
Simple enough, right?
However, this only tackles one side of the weight loss formula - reducing the amount of calories you consume every day. Crash diets attempt to take this to the extreme, without understanding the tremendous amounts of strain put on your body by taking such outrageous methods. Halfway through your crash diet, or even after you've you're your target weight, your body, unconditioned to function at this lower body weight, will immediately respond by literally forcing you to eat more.
The result? You end up regaining most or all of your lost weight. In some cases, you may end up gaining even more weight than before.
When traditional dieting (i.e. starving yourself) does not work, people almost always turn to exercise to alter the other end of the equation; they try to build habits that will increase calorie burning.
The Problem with Exercise
However, exercise has two serious problems attached to it.
First, through evolution, our bodies (and especially our metabolism) are trained to respond much better to natural training rather than forced activity. In other words, if your job requires you to do some physical activity, or if you are so much in love with a physically-challenging sport (poker or bowling do not count - think soccer, tennis or basketball) that you would willingly play it several times a week (if not daily), then that is just perfect.
However, many of us are stuck behind desks in our jobs (or at colleges), and sometimes we are not able to rely on sports to get a good dose of exercise. In these cases people usually turn to going to the gym or some form of indoor exercise to burn calories.
However, this is psychologically a "forced" routine on your body. While you will start to see positive results immediately (I once lost 5 pounds in three days (8 pounds in a week) simply by playing 45-60 minutes of basketball daily while eating a bit less than usual), your body does not respond to working out in the gym as well as it does to outdoor sport. While weight training has specific goals and objectives (specifically to increase muscle mass and strength), when it comes to losing weight it is a poor substitute for natural exercise.
Second, the moment you stop working out, you start ballooning. Regular exercise usually requires that you eat slightly more than usual in order to supply your body with enough nutrients to function properly throughout the day. Our body becomes "used to" this higher count of calories. Once you stop exercising, you will have to immediately slash your calorie intake (i.e. starve yourself) or you will start gaining weight. And if you have been doing weight training to tone your muscles, you will become bulky and possibly end up worse than when you started out.
I'm not telling you all this to scare you from exercising, or to say that exercise is bad for you. Far from it. Exercise should be, if possible, an integral part of your daily routine. There are countless health benefits, and in many ways exercise is more important than simple weight loss.
However, if you are looking to lose weight permanently, you cannot rely on exercise by itself. If you are getting natural exercise, that is great. If you find yourself having to force yourself to go through all the motions every other day, then you have a problem.
Exercise is NOT the magic secret to permanent weight loss.
Almost every diet that I have seen misses this insight. While exercise is the best way to balance the equation and regular exercise has countless benefits even apart from weight loss, at certain levels exercise is not much better than starvation - the minute you stop, you will put on the weight you just lost in half the time.
So, once again, how can we really lose weight (weight that does NOT climb back on you the moment you stop doing what you are doing (starving or working out))?
This is where the second principle of this program comes in.
The Second Principle of Losing Weight
Two - To achieve permanent weight loss, you must make permanent changes to your metabolism.
Your metabolism essentially determines how fast (or how slow) your body burns calories. If you have a naturally high metabolism, you can probably afford to eat more than someone who has a slow metabolism. The reverse also applies; if you have a slow metabolism, your daily calorie intake requirement is less than usual.
In the next couple of lessons I will tell you exactly how our metabolism works, how it has evolved from the "hunter-gatherer" frame of working to the "farmer" frame of activity, and how you can take simple steps so that you can gradually make permanent changes to your metabolism and boost it so that you can burn more calories daily, without having to exercise (although that will help).
There are two ways to speed up your metabolism:
You can work out, and in turn your body will begin to burn more calories (and require more calories as well). This is a short-term method and will wreak havoc on your body if you stop working out.
You can adopt better eating habits and be careful about what you eat. This is a safer, healthier and more permanent solution to speeding up your metabolism and loosing weight.
This is the part that stumps most people - how can simple changes in the how, what and when of eating lead to weight loss?
The answer lies in our first principle. Remember the equation? I'll repeat it again:
=> Calories lost = calories used up - calories consumed.
Now, the best way to lose weight is to make permanent changes in your lifestyle that cause you to:
* Increase the amount of calories you burn daily
* Reduce the amount of calories you consume daily.And to do both without creating a "starving" effect on your body.
Losing weight is about balancing the cardinal equation. However, before we tackle both sides of it, you have to understand how your current eating habits are sabotaging any efforts to lose weight!
In the next article, I'll tell you exactly why your current eating habits are bad for your health. In fact, they are the very reason that you are over-weight right now!
All the best,
Brad Callen
Health and Fitness Consultant
http://www.dietplannerplus.com/
