Learning How to Lose Weight
One of the most important aspects of successful weight loss is actually learning how to lose weight. Now this may sound like a strange thing to say, but you'd be surprised at just how many people go into some form of diet plan or exercise plan or this or that whatever plan designed to help them to lose some of their excess weight, but without really understanding what it is they are undertaking. In other words, they are trying to lose weight without first learning how to lose that weight!
The process is not difficult to do, but it does take some commitment from the person who is on the sharp end of the process, ie you! The commitment is in educating yourself about what is actually going on with your body when you start the wheels turning that you hope will cause you to shed some weight. That's because once you understand what is going on inside your body as you lose weight, the realization hits you like a ton of bricks. It's all so simple on the level that you need to understand, despite the internal body processes being actually very complex. You don't need to know every single thing that happens at the molecular level as a scientist would do, because that would send most ordinary people to sleep and you wouldn't learn very much.
The trick is to keep it fairly high level and this is what I'm going to show you now.
First of all, before you can learn how to lose any weight, it helps to understand what happens to cause you to gain weight in the first place. There is really only one cause of weight gain in the average person that is easily explained at a high level. That happens when their body is not able to burn an equal amount of calories as they are consuming. The balance is tipped and where there is an excess of calories consumed that cannot be burned off through work, the body simply stores them for later use in fat cells.
What are Calories?
Calories are units of energy that are an easy to understand measure that helps us to visualize what we are consuming and burning off through our body's metabolic processes. Don't get caught up in trying to get to the very bottom of this, suffice it to say that all you need to worry about is the calorie count labelled in certain portion sizes of certain foods or drinks and the amount that your body can burn for a certain level of work over a certain amount of time.
What Happens in the Metabolic Process?
When you consume food or drinks they contain sugars and other nutrients that the body needs for normal functioning. The level of sugars contained in food and drinks varies enormously so that pound for pound, a slice of chocolate cake with cream filling will contain considerably more sugars than a comparable sized sandwich made from wholemeal bread and filled with lean chicken and low fat spread. But they all contain a level of calories and what happens is that after eating the food, your body digests it, separating out the usable sugars and other nutrients and discarding what it can't use.
The sugars get into the bloodstream and are sent to the muscles that are doing the work. Most people think of muscles in terms of what you build up at the gym, but there are also muscles that are working behind the scenes that also need the energy they derive from these sugars that are dissolved on the blood. Think of your heart that needs to beat to pump that blood around your body, your lungs need to work so you can breathe, your digestive system needs to work so you can digest and eliminate the food you eat. All this and many more bodily functions are operated by muscles that use up some of the sugars in the blood. So you can see that you need a bare minimum of sugars just to keep your body going, or to keep you alive, if you like!
Other muscles are used in just getting you around, like walking, picking up things with your hands, stretching, turning your head, smiling and frowning, talking and all the things you do throughout the day. All these actions are made by muscles working and those muscles need the sugars to use as energy. This is without any excess needed for harder work. So you can see that even leading a sedentary lifestyle, you still burn a number of calories doing what you may consider to be very little.
As long as the food that you eat contains no more calories than you would burn doing these things, then you will not gain weight. But you have to be aware that these actions require only a low level of calories, which will be different from person to person but will be far less than the popular one thousand calories a day set by many diets.
Consequently, most people who gain weight will do so because they are consuming more calories than they are using up thanks to their sedentary lifestyle. What needs to happen then is for them to do something that will cause their bodies to burn more calories in order that they reach equilibrium of calories consumed to calories burned to maintain an unchanging weight. This can only be achieved by doing some exercise, or eating less. Often, eating less is the worst option, because the body is very good at surviving on less food and the metabolism is just slowed further to enable you to stay alive with less food.
So the best course of action is to exercise. This has many benefits over merely dieting as we shall see in later articles.
Suffice it to say, you now have a good idea of how to lose weight because you now understand why weight is gained and what is needed to make it reduce again and then to maintain the balance.
