Diet And Losing Weight Made Simple

That dreaded four letter word again. It needn't be the big boogeyman that it is. Everyone has a diet. It's not just about losing weight. It's what and how we eat. That's it.

Problem is, you do it wrong and you get fat. (Added to by the fact that it's easier to take it easy rather than expend energy.)

So you go on a "diet". Most diets aim to cut calories. Fair enough I suppose if you don't want to burn off the excess food calories by exercising.

Unfortunately people frequently make the mistake of assuming that if you're losing weight on 1000 calories a day then you'll do twice as well on 500 calories a day. Over-zealousness like this is counter-productive to losing weight because it results in muscle loss and flabby loose skin that looks as bad as skin tight with fat.

It's true that you won't lose fat if you consume more calories than you burn. But over dieting means that by not eating enough you won't add any more muscle which burns extra calories simply to sustain itself. In fact you'll actually be losing muscle instead of losing weight from fat supplies - making fat loss even harder!

The solution is to diet right.

* Eat plenty of muscle-building foods, high in protein, complex carbohydrates and fibre. The good protein foods are chicken (not the skin), lean red meat, tuna and other fish, egg (particularly the whites) and milk.

* Make sure you eat protein with each meal because the protein slows down the digestion. This helps to avoid spikes in your blood sugar levels.

* Good carbohydrate foods include fresh fruits and vegetables, rice, potatoes and whole grain products.

* Avoid foods with a lot of calories in a small portion. It's too easy to over eat on these foods as they feed your fat cells and kill you appetite for muscle-building foods. These are fatty foods like chips, hot dogs, oils and so forth, and sugars: cakes, sweets, soft drinks and desserts. You won't be losing weight by eating a lot of this food.

* Processed foods generally contain lots of fats and sugars so avoid them as much as you can.

* Use vinegar, lemon juice or non-oil herbal dressings. If you must use oil use a cold pressed olive oil.

* Eat more, smaller meals rather than 3, 2 or even one meal a day as some people do. Four to six, small quality meals are better than 3 or fewer larger ones.

* Limit between meal snacks to fresh fruits (bear in mind they are sugars), nuts (the fats in nuts are mostly the beneficial form of fat), lettuce or bell peppers and other raw green vegetables.

* Drink plenty of good quality water. It not only helps to suppress appetite but helps to clean out the wastes from your body.

* To help cover the nutrient gaps in your diet you could take a multivitamin with minerals. The nutrients your body doesn't need will be excreted in your urine.

* To help burn fat you might also consider a couple of free form amino-acid capsules and a lipotropic fat burner with your meals. Any of these thermotropic fat burners and fat burning potions however are not even worth wasting your money on though if you aren't tending to the basics mentioned above.

They are the simple facts of diet and losing weight. It's not really rocket science. But remember that diet is not the only part of the equation. If you support your diet with the right sort of exercise you give your diet more latitude to accommodate some of the not-so-good things you like to eat. Of course, you must also deal with the mental and emotional aspects of the weight problem as well.

But as far as the diet side goes, while it can be made as complex as you like, and there are certainly many things to consider, the simple fact is, to lose weight you must consume slightly fewer calories than you expend, and how you do that is important as well.

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