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You: On a Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management

The Best Life Diet

Previous:
Do You Need to Lose Weight?

Next:
How to Calculate How Many Calories You Burn

Understanding Weight Loss

In order to lose weight, it’s important to understand the basics of how your body gains and loses it. It all begins with calories.

Calories

Calories are a measure of the energy in food. In order to walk, run, breathe, blink an eyelid, or keep your heart beating, your body burns the calories it consumes in food. Gaining or losing weight is simply the result of how many calories your body burns each day versus how many it consumes:

You gain weight if: You consume more calories than you burn.
You stay the same weight if: You consume the same number of calories you burn.
You lose weight if: You burn more calories than you consume.

If you want to lose weight, you have to cut the number of calories you consume and/or increase the number of calories you burn. One pound of body weight is worth about 3,500 calories: to lose one pound a week (a healthy goal), you would have to burn about 500 more calories per day (3,500 per week) than you consume.

How to Cut Calorie Consumption

There are two basic ways to cut the number of calories you’re consuming:

Eat less: If you eat less, you won’t consume as many calories.
Eat differently: If you replace the foods you eat that contain lots of calories but few nutrients (fast food, sugary snacks, high-fat foods) with nutrient-dense foods that contain more nutrients but fewer calories (fruits, vegetables, lowfat dairy, lean meats), you can give your body all the nutrients it needs while consuming fewer calories.

Meeting Your Body’s Caloric Needs

It is both unhealthy and unproductive from a weight loss standpoint to cut your caloric intake too drastically. If your body doesn’t receive the calories it needs each day, it will think it is starving, and your metabolism will slow, making weight loss difficult or impossible.

Why Fad Diets Don’t Work

Many fad diets on the market promise instant and easy weight loss if you give up eating a certain category of forbidden foods heavy in fats or carbs. These diets can work in the short term, simply because by banning so many foods, they make it difficult for you to consume as many calories as you had before you started the diet. But the vast majority of people who lose weight using these fad diets eventually gain it back for two reasons:

A cycle of guilt: Banned foods make the diets difficult to maintain and create a cycle of guilt that often leads to overeating.
Bodily needs: Although eating too many fats or carbohydrates can lead to weight gain, your body does need fat and carbs in order to function properly. If you cut them out of your diet completely, you will be working against your body—and that’s not a battle you can, or should, win.

How to Develop a Healthy Weight Loss Plan

Weight loss is most effective when it’s a slow, steady, healthy process built on three basic principles:

Understanding your eating
Eating healthier
Exercising more

Whether your long-term weight loss goal is to lose five pounds or 50, you shouldn’t expect or try to lose more than one pound a week. If you focus on small, achievable short-term goals as opposed to dramatic long-term goals, you’ll be less likely to give up in frustration.

Weight loss also works best when it’s tailored to your needs, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all fad diet. To develop a healthy weight loss plan for yourself, follow these steps:

Determine how many calories you burn each day.
Determine how many calories you consume each day.
Increase your exercise time and modify the amount and type of food you eat so that you burn about 500 more calories a day than you lose. (A pound of weight is the equivalent of 3,500 calories, so 500 calories burned per day will equal a pound of weight burned off in the seven days of a week.)