Saturday, November 1, 2008

Guaranteed Weight Loss needs both Calories Loss and Food Fuel

By Rowena French

If you want to enjoy permanent weight loss and remain healthy there is only one sure way to go about this. Follow a calories loss eating program and eat food containing fewer calories than your body would generally use in the course of your everyday living. To use more of your stored fat and to enable your body to operate in peak form as it should, take part in a healthy exercise program as well.

Let us say you normally eat about 2,000 calories per day, which is the recommended amount of calories for an average weight adult. If you create a calories loss and cut your daily calories back to 1,500 then your body needs to get that additional 500 calories of energy from somewhere. It will get that additional energy by burning energy from the fat stored in your body.

This steady burning of additional fat does bring about weight loss unlike popular diets or even diet pills that promise to do this but can not in a healthy way or across the long term. Keeping an eye on your calories intake and the calories you need to burn is an important part of losing weight. As for example, there are about 3,500 calories in every pound of fat, you need to burn 17,500 calories to lose this weight by creating a calories loss little by little over time.

No pill can ever cause your body to burn that many additional calories. Only restricting your calories in a calories loss menu and forcing your body to burn fat for energy can cause real weight loss. Dieting is about more than just calories though and you need to maintain a sense of balance in your eating program to lose weight and remain healthy.

An unbalanced diet consisting of only salad and diet soda will not help you lose weight as this is not enough for your body to operate in a healthy way. Your body needs more than this because it needs to be fuelled by food. A healthy food program should provide this fuel and reward your body for the work it does instead of punishing it.

There is no getting around that fact, so you need to change what you give your body for fuel and that is where the common sense part comes in. It is common sense to know that your body needs whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and healthy fats. Most of us would agree that some of these foods are OK but how do we include them in our diet on a regular basis instead of those high calorie foods we enjoy the most?

It is not always easy to only give your body what it needs when you are craving a juicy, cheesy, greasy burger, but if you want to be healthy, you will choose to skip that burger and replace it with a turkey and salad wholemeal roll. Changes like this are not really about going 'on' a diet in the traditional sense. They are about a lifestyle change and creating a calories loss and this is just a tool to help lose unwanted weight and keep it off.

Losing weight should not be your only priority as developing a healthy body is the best direction in which to be traveling and the best reason to be counting calories. If you uphold your body by feeding it healthy wholesome foods and not denigrate and if you add regular exercise to your schedule, you will discover that your weight loss will begin and continue. Foods such as vegetables, whole grains, fruits and lean meat will provide the fuel your body needs, allow it to function in all the ways it should and provide the opportunity for your excess fat to be used as energy.

So, even if your eating and exercise lifestyle changes feel a little strange at first because they are new and different, persevere because in time they will seem NORMAL. The greatest challenge is surviving the time of initial calories loss. By the time this change becomes part of your new pattern of living however, your weight loss will have begun and you will feel confident and wonder how you ever lived any other way. - 16004

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