Guide to Weight Loss

According to scientists, if a person want to achieve their weight loss goal of reducing their body fat by one pound, they need to use up around 3,500 calories more than what their body expends during the day. It may appear to be a difficult target, and it wouldn’t be advisable to attempt to burn that many calories in a single day. Fortunately, it's possible to determine exactly how much exercise is needed per day to eliminate the excess calories with a gradual approach.

Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is the amount of energy your body expends with basic physiological functions such as respiration and the breakdown of food. The BMR is assumed to be the smallest amount of calorie intake your body requires per day. For instance, if your BMR is 1,500 calories and your daily energy expenditure through physical activity and exercise is 700 calories, then your total nutritional intake would need to be 2,200 calories in order to maintain your current weight. Increasing your nutritional intake to 2,700 calories would mean you would be consuming an excess of 500 calories of food. This would result in a body weight increase of 2 pounds over a period of two weeks.

This shows how straightforward it is to lose weight, although to do so does take time. First, you should look at the food you eat and make minor changes to it. This, along with increasing amount of physical activity you do will result in you using up more calories than you consume. So a good start would be to eliminate a daily amount of around 300-500 calories through changes in diet and exercise.

Causes of weight gain

Emotional Stress

At times of emotional stress people are often driven to eat more unhealthy "junk" food. These foods are high in saturated fats and contain excess calories in the form of sugar. Under stress, our body secretes more hormones such as adrenalin and cortisol into our circulatory system. Although these hormones are perfectly natural, they lead to the increase in appetite for unhealthy food we often see.

If you are under stress and feel an urge for junk food, replace it with something healthier, like fruit. Afterwards, help yourself to a low fat meal to satisfy your building hunger.

Missing meals and late night eating

A lot of professional men and women with busy lives prefer to miss having a healthy and nutritional breakfast in the morning and instead eat more when they get home after work. This is not good for the body; missing breakfast has the effect of reducing your metabolism for that day by up to 15 percent. Because of this, there's a greater chance of the food consumed throughout the day to become fat than if you had eaten the same with a breakfast.

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