Why Am I Overweight And What Can I Do About It?

Weight loss can be achieved by increasing your physical activity level, together with eating a nutritious diet. Crash diets, fad diets and yoyo dieting do not help you lose weight. Dieting can also cause stress and increase the likelihood of binge eating.

The key to weight loss is a simple equation: Use more energy than you consume.

There are ways of manipulating the foods you eat and the manner and times at which you eat it which will assist you to lose weight in a rapid and sustainable manner. You don't get fat because of a lack of exercising. If that was the case then ascetic Tibetan gurus would be fat as whales. If you eat the wrong kinds of food at the wrong times of day, in the wrong amounts, then you will get fat and find it difficult to lose these extra pounds. There is a pattern to eating which suits each body and provides the correct type of calories at the right time. Once you become more in sync with how your body likes to be fed, you will find that the weight falls away swiftly and without you being hungry.

The sensible answer to losing excess body fat is to make small healthy changes to your eating and exercise habits. These changes should be things that you can maintain as part of your lifestyle - that way you will lose weight and keep it off. A hint to remember is that to lose weight sustainably and effectively, you will need to eat more than three meals per day. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? But the truth is that by eating four of five small meals a day, incorporating nuts, fruit, vegetables, meat and grain, you will never feel hungry AND your stomach will decrease in size so that you feel fuller, faster.

It is ironic that many people, when they decide to pursue weightloss, think that the best way to lose weight quickly is to start to skip meals. WRONG! This has two bad effects.

First: Your body notices that it is not being fed at the times it is used to. Hormonal levels change to adapt to these irregular feeding times and protect the body's stores of energy, by laying down more fat! Not what you want to teach your body to do.

Second: By skipping meals, when you do get around to eating, you find that you are starving and eat and eat and eat until you cannot move. Your stomach grows LARGER to accommodate the huge amounts of food being pushed into it once a day. Which makes you more hungry during the hours you are not eating. Once again, not the response you are looking for from your body.

Another thing that happens, is that when you lose weight rapidly and irregularly like described above, you lose muscle as well as fat and your metabolic rate adjusts itself to handle the periods of starvation by using less energy. Muscle uses far more energy than fat. When you do put weight back on, there is less muscle to fat than before, so your metabolic rate remains set on low. Weight loss becomes even difficult.

Even worse is the fact that using a "deny" diet such as above almost inevitably ends up in a weight loss/weight gain/weight loss/weight gain cycle. Where the yoyo effect gets worse with each cycle. Self esteem plummets and weight rises.

What overweight people need to realize is that the best way to lose weight quickly, painlessly and without feeling hungry all the time, is to eat the right foods at the right intervals each day. To do this, it is necessary for you to identify the times when you eat that you really do not need to eat.

For example:

. Night eating while watching late night movies
. Social eating while out with friends.
. Habitual eating, where you just eat because you are bored while watching television or reading a book.
. Eating food while drinking alcohol.
. Emotional eating, where you eat to soothe emotional problems. Oddly enough, these emotional problems often have links back to the problems caused by being overweight.

The next step is to have a plan when it comes to eating. You can lose body fat by making a few easy changes to your eating habits. It will help you lose body fat if you:

* Avoid yoyo diets.
* Eat a wide variety of food from all food groups. Check that you eat from the following food groups every day - bread and cereals, vegetables, fruit, milk and dairy, and meat, fish or legumes.
* Have six small, frequent meals and snacks rather than three large meals a day.
* Reduce your intake of foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt. Make soft drinks, lollies and snack foods an occasional 'extra'. Most adults should eat no more than one or two 'treats' a day. If you are very overweight or inactive, you may need to limit treats to less than one a day.
* Try to balance an 'extra' food with extra exercise. The more energy you burn, the more treats you can afford to have. Remember, you should only add extra foods after you have covered your nutrient needs with choices from the healthier food groups.
* Cut down on saturated dietary fats and alcohol.
* Try to eat more fresh foods and less processed foods.
* Avoid using food for comfort, such as when you are upset, angry or stressed. Explore other healthy ways to cope with these feelings.
* Try to stop eating once you've had enough. If you continue to eat, particularly foods high in saturated fat, the extra kilojoules will be stored as fat.

If you really and truly want to change your body shape with weightloss, you may wish to consider purchasing one of the many diets or programs available. I have tried many diets in my quest to be thin but the one that worked for me is linked in my bio box.

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