One of the things that I continue to hear about from many people is their desire to lose weight. It is quite understandable as obesity is quite a large problem in America and it is a good thing to see that people are at least trying to do something about it. Unfortunately, so many people go about it the wrong way. The biggest mistakes I see are almost always in dieting. In my personal experience I have heard a number of diet plans that were flawed from the get go such as skipping meals, quit eating certain items, starvation, etc.
I feel the best way to address the issue is through an education of what goes on with the body and its weight. The human body is very versatile, and will adjust to almost anything you do to it given the proper amount of time. I usually say change everything about every six weeks to keep seeing results, otherwise you just hit a plateau. The basic formula from weight is if the calorie intake is equal to the calories you burn during a day, your weight will not change. If you eat more calories in a day than you use, you will most likely gain weight. If you eat less calories in a day than you use, you will loose weight….for a limited time. The problem with cutting calories is your body adjust to it. For the weight loss, you basically create an energy deficiency forcing the body to use what it already has stored as fuel rather than what you have eaten on that given day. The body will eventually adjust to this and do it rather quickly if you decide to do a large calorie cut. What happens is the body realizes it is using more than what it is taking in so at first it will burn what it has stored, but it will also begin to adapt to the change in calorie intake and find ways to conserve the energy it is getting. Since there is an energy deficiency that doesn’t effect much at first, but as soon as you go back to your normal eating habits your body is still in conservation mode and your metabolism is slower than normal, so you generally gain back more weight than you lost. For this reason, dieting really is not a good plan for weight loss unless you plan to never come off the diet, and even then you will plateau.
If a person seriously wants to lose weight, you will need to get your diet set and a workout plan in place that has a high amount of calorie burning and that changes at least every six weeks. Rather than cutting calories all at once, it is better to cut them gradually. Say you count your calories for a week and you find that on average, you consume 2500 calories a day (not abnormal). a good plan would be to find a workout routine that burns 2000 calories or so, and then begin cutting the calories by about 100 calories a week. What will happen with your body is it is already use t o your daily consumption so if everything else stays the same, so will your body. Well you add this workout routine to it and your body is not use to that, so now it gives off more energy than it normally does so you start losing weight slowly but your body doesn’t see it as a big deal because it has more than enough energy to handle it. The next week your still doing the same workout, but you cut another 100 calories. The body will still recognize it has more than enough energy and since you are not demanding it to put out more energy than it takes in, it has no need to adjust to the calorie loss….but since it doesn’t have as much waste as usual, more of that energy goes towards improving your cardiovascular endurance and physical fitness rather than just being stored or wasted, so your workouts may start to seem to get a little easier, even if you haven’t seen a lot of result at that point. On the third week, you cut down another 100, your a bit more athletic, have better cardio, and as an added mutation your body will speed up its metabolism meaning that you can use the energy more efficiently and effectively at this point. By this week, if the numbers on the scale don’t change its a good time to start measuring parts of the body because even though the weight scale hasn’t changed, your body is thinner and your clothes seem to start fitting a little looser. That is just because muscle weighs more than fat and you’ve gained some muscle in your workout while burning fat, the scale might even say you have gained weight even though you feel better and look better, nothing to be discouraged about. Unfortunately this is a part where a lot of women freak out and say im gaining muscle and I do not want to be buff or anything, I just want to be toned.
On that subject, I would like to say a little muscle isn’t going to hurt anyone, and the more muscle you have the faster your body will burn fat. Yes you may gain strength but you are not going to look freakishly big or anything. Body builders and people who do look like that have to go through a lot of heavy weight training and work hard focusing on building muscle to get like that, and still many of them use over the counter supplements, weigh protein, or increase their calorie intake to get like that. If your cardio is sufficient, your calories at about the right intake, and you don’t have a high focus on strength, it would be very surprising to see huge arms just magically develop. Arms like that take a lot of intentional work, its not a by product your going to get on accident trying to workout to loose weight.
Because of the nature of how weight loss works and the bodies adaptability to what the body does, I really recommend not worrying to much about the diet and concentrating more on the workout. Remember you want to burn calories for weight loss, and cardio is the fastest way to do that. Cardio may build some long lean muscle, but it wont make you buff up or anything like that so no real reason to fear there. Unfortunately many females are so afraid they are going to gain muscle through their workout program they end up not doing it at all and focus on diet pills and the like. Truth is if a single one of those products actually worked, They would have replaced all the other products on the market by now. All they can do is possibly increase your metabolism and control your appetite, which again could just put your body in a conservation mode and cause you to gain more weight if you eat like you normally would, making them counter productive. So now that I have written all this, I am sure the next question is well then how do I loose any weight? This is my answer and I have found it to work for everyone I have used it on that has been through it.
Start counting your calories for one week to see what your average daily calorie intake is. Add 30 minutes of cardio everyday to whatever you normally do, even if its just taking a walk at first. After you know what your calorie intake is, drop it about 100 calories a day, but do not go below 1800, your still need sufficient energy to live and exercise. Don’t increase the amount of time you workout but rather the intensity as you increase in fitness level. If you started out with a 30 minute walk, work into a 30 minute jog, then a 30 minute run, then a 30 minutes run with about 2 or 3 minutes of it being a sprint. Whenever you do cardio try to get your heart rate up though. You want to achieve somewhere between 50 to 90 percent of your maximum heart rate. If you don’t know your maximum heart rate than an easy formula to use is 220 – your age. So say your 23, your maximum heart rate would be 220-23=197. So a 23 year old would want to get somewhere between 50 to 90 percent of that. so take 197x.5=98.5 and 197x.9=177.3. That means a 23 year old while doing cardio should keep their heart rate between 98 and 177 beats per minute for at least 20 minutes to get a good cardio workout. I hope this helps some people with weight issues they have been having and gives them a more informed way of going about loosing the weight.
