Losing weight is difficult, gaining weight is not. This is the irony that has to be endured by most people having weight problems. Unlike in all other cases involving money or success where gaining takes lots of patience, endurance and hard work and losing can happen so easily, in matters involving weight loss, the reverse is usual.
A fitness guru surmised that reducing 250 calories per day from your diet, regularly for a particular week, and couple it with a 30-minute brisk walk every day, also for the same week can burn more or less 3,500 excess calories, which is equivalent to one pound of fat. Now, this is good news. At least a goal has been set.
Setting realistic goals in losing weight is essential. Unlike crash dieters, wanting to re-create their svelte figure in a program as short as three days, a slow, yet steady diet regimen is more effective in the long run than an abrupt weight-loss program.
How does one exactly go about it? Let us take a look at some common approaches and try to infer a workable model:
Dieting is the most common weight-loss strategy. One can lose weight through diet, but caution has to be observed in order to avoid excessive cut-down on nutrients that the body needs.
Dieting may take the form of liquid diet, pills or certain combination of food with reduced caloric content. Though proven successful with some dieters, health experts do not consider this approach as healthy in the long-run. These diets will deprive your body of the required caloric value to remain healthy. Diet with daily caloric value below 1,200 for women and 1,400 for men is not encouraged.
What is highly recommended by weight-loss experts is a diet low in fat, abundant in fruits, vegetables, whole grains and cereal.
As a rule of thumb, when you want to lose weight, you should avoid occasions to eat excessive of need. Also, avoid the contraptions of emotional problems. It becomes an automatic response of some people to drown pent-up emotions in platefuls of beef steak cooked medium rare with potato salad on the side.
Exercise done regularly offers lots of benefits, other than burn extra calories. Walking, for one is recommended for better heart condition and for firming and toning of muscles slackened by time.
When you exercise, focus on the benefits, other than just the burning of calories, although this may be the primary reason for the activity. When health benefits of exercise for the long term sink deeper in your consciousness, the more intense the desire would be to maintain a regimen for good health and more quality life.
Dancing, swimming, cycling, and all other similar activities can be explored interchangeably with exercise. Staying active can be fun. As it fine tunes the body, the mind is energized as well.
Any other activities that stretch the muscles and limber the spine, anything that makes you perspire, go for it! You can start running up and down the stairs, instead of riding the elevator for start-up.
How to burn one pound of fat every week is not the challenge. The real test in on how resolute you are to stick to your guns when your impulse to eat, more than what your body needs, reinforces its bid again and again. This is a real test of character. But you can win – because you now understand why you should.
Eat your way to health – today!
