Principles of Diet and Weight Loss

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 make the decision to lose weight you need to ask yourself a very important question, "Am I doing this so I can weigh less or so I can fit into a smaller pair of pants?"  That may seem like a silly question but it's actually very important and will determine what you do on your diet.  Too many people depend fully on what the scale tells them, not on how well their clothes fit.  Multiple problems can stem from this; one of the main ones is the issue of losing muscle as well as fat.  If what you're looking to do is slim down and fit into smaller clothes then basing your progress on your scale at home will only slow you down.

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.

How Weight is Lost

L et’s cover briefly how weight is lost, and by weight I’m talking about fat, not water weight (which is all too common).  Fat is just excess energy stored for later use, so to lose weight basically all you have to do is provide your body with less energy than it wants.  So, by depriving your body of calories (the energy that it uses to run) you will force it to pull energy from other sources, including fat and muscle.  This is where a bit of exercise comes into play.  Yes, you can lose weight without any real activity however you will be more likely to lose more of the weight from muscle loss, this is a poor quality weight loss, it won’t help your toning, and in the end will only slow your progress.

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.