PART TWO…HOW THE BODY LOSES WEIGHT
In part one we talked about how the body gains weight, which is little by little over a period of months and years.
It all goes back to lifestyle.
If you want to create a lifestyle where you are lean and fit, you have to alter what you are doing. It’s the day-to-day stuff that matters.
If you want to lose weight you have to create a caloric deficit, and you have to do it CONSISTENTLY.
In fact here are 6 things you must have to lose the weight.
1) Burning desire. You have to really want it!
2) Catalyst. What is going to be the motivator to get your inner voice to say, “It’s Time!”
3) Commitment. Nothing in life gets accomplished without commitment.
4) Patience. Be patient. It’s a process, and it doesn’t happen overnight.
5) Perseverance. You have to keep at it, despite the obstacles, you must stay focused on your goal!
6) Sense of Urgency. If you don’t say to yourself that you have to get it done NOW, other things will always come first and sabotage your plans.
So if an added 116 calories per day is all it takes to gain the weight (see previous blog), then that’s all you need to do to lose it too, right?
WRONG!
If I told you to go home and count every single calorie to lose the weight, would you?
You might for a few days, or possibly a few weeks, but the chances are you wouldn’t keep up with it. That’s my experience. It’s unrealistic to maintain food logs for a long time.
Over a short time, food logs are great to understand your eating patterns and get a general take on how many calories you are consuming. However, for the long term I recommend a more common sense approach.
In the Part One, How The Body Gains Weight, I talked about a study done by the New England Journal of Medicine that said that of different types of diets such as low-carb, low-fat, and mediteranean, it was the total amount of calories, not the type of food, that led to weight loss.
With that in mind, the question to ask then is: How can I maintain satiety and even blood sugar levels (so my energy won’t crash and I don’t go off and binge) and eat less calories at the same time?
(Keep in mind, that if you want to lose 1 pound a week you have to burn 250 calories a day through exercise and eat 250 calories less per day. A deficit of 500 calories per day is 3,500 over the course of a week, and 3,500 calories equals 1 pound of fat.)
The answer is both simple and complex.
Eat less. Burn more.
You have to create a caloric deficit consistently to be able to create a consistent rate of weight loss.
How can you do it?
Meal by meal.
Workout by workout.
Day by day.
Week by week.
Month by month.
It’s called a FITNESS LIFESTYLE. You have to want it. You have to go out and get it. You have to put in the work. You have to sacrifice.
But the rewards are worth it!
Your Trainer For Life,
Forrest Folen, MCT
This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 4:17 pm.
