“Diet� is a word that invokes a variety of emotions from a variety of people. Some people see the word as a set of rules to be followed when you need to lose weight, yet others see it as a general eating habit. Here we will look at “diet� as a little of both.
People generally diet for one of a couple of reasons, they either want to lose weight (slim down) or they have a health issue that requires better eating habits.
There are an awful lot of people out there who seem to think that losing weight is just that, subtracting pounds. But, that is a double edged blade, paying attention to your weight more than how your pants fit can hurt your future progress. This is due to the fact that poor quality weight loss also means that you are just as likely to lose weight in the form of muscle as you are in the form of fat.
This is why I have such a big problem with so many of the fad diets that exist out there, they can help you lose weight but they can also be very unhealthy. When a diet calls for a great reduction in the amount of calories you eat every day, such as the cabbage soup diet, or require you to cut out a large chunk of your daily diet, such as Atkins does, you can run into health problems and a very poor quality weight loss, one that when the diet is over, you are very likely to just gain all the weight back that you worked so hard on losing.
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.
Losing muscle during weight loss will severely hinder your weight loss progress. The act of having muscle means your body needs to burn calories just to keep it alive and around. So if you not only keep the muscle you have but actually add to it a bit your body will need to burn more calories every day just for upkeep, thus helping you continue to lose weight. Keeping your muscle and even adding a little is very beneficial to your weight loss goals. Just having muscle requires energy, so, allowing your body to lose muscle will decrease the amount of sustaining calories your body burns and thus will make it more difficult to continue to burn off fat, creating a weight loss plateau.
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.