How To Lose 1 LB / Week?

There is a galaxy of different weight loss programs, all of them shrieking their own personal universal truths, demanding that you jump through their hoops in order to lose that weight, get rid of that belly, slim those thighs, vanish that swinging fat from your underarms, tone that booty, suck in the gut, anything and everything. How are we supposed to know what to do when the opinions abound? How are we supposed to lose that weight, that flab, if we don't know whom to listen to, whom to trust? Like a dude frozen at Blockbuster on a Friday night, paralyzed by too many choices, we're liable to freak out like sharks in blood chummed water and try them all at once or do nothing at all.

Well, let's get down to facts. Let's dispense with hearsay and nonsense, and look at basic biology. You have a body that works like a machine. You put in fuel, you burn fuel, and what doesn't get burnt gets stored as fat. Simple. If, however, and stick with me here, if you burn more than you put in, you have to get that from somewhere else, and that's your fat reserves. See that ring of pudge around your belly? That's stored energy. When things get lean, you use your fat to keep going. So the basic idea behind losing weight is to burn that fat because you're not getting enough food. You need to create a deficit.

Now, how do you create a deficit? First, let's look at how much energy is in a pound of fat. One pound of fat has about 3,500 calories in it. Which, depressingly, is about two mega-sized chocolate shakes from your local fast food joint. Think about THAT next time you're about to guzzle one down. So if you want to lose 3,500 calories in a week, you need to lose 500 calories per day. Which means you need to eat 500 calories less than you need per day. Simple!

But how to figure out how many calories you burn / day? Ah, now we get a little tricky, but not much! Don't panic! It's actually easy to figure out. Take your current weight, and multiply it by 10. That's your Resting Metabolic Rate. Now multiply that by 1.1 if you have a desk job, by 1.2 if get around some during the day, or 1.3 if you have an active job. That gives you your total calorie expenditure per day.

So let's say you weight 200 lbs. That means you need 2000 calories for your RMR. Say you work a desk job, multiply that by 1.1 and get 2,200 calories/ day. Minus 500 to lose weight, and you get 1,700 calories / day to lose 1 lb / week. SIMPLE. The trick is to stick with it, hold on tight, and make sure you're losing those calories every day. Otherwise, not even the most simple and magical of weight loss recipes will help!

1. Prev:My Experience With The HCG Diet
2. Next:Learn How Coconut Oil Helps In Weight Loss