Principles of Diet and Weight Loss By Eric Schmidt At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

'Diet' is a word that invokes a variety of emotions from a variety of people. Some people see the word as a set of rules to be followed when you need to lose weight, yet others see it as a general eating habit. Here we will look at 'œdiet' as a little of both.

But why do people want to lose weight? Sometimes is because they have some health issue that can be resolved or lessened if they drop a few pounds, sometimes it's just too look and feel better. Both are great reasons to lose weight.

When you diet to lose weight, you need to ask yourself one key question, 'Am I losing weight to weigh less or to slim down?' This question is so important it determines how you will approach your diet. I've seen way too much dependency on the bathroom scale from dieters and not enough on how well their clothes fit or how they are toning up. This can lead to multiple problems; the biggest of which is you could lose as much muscle as fat. If the purpose of your diet is to slim down and look better then judging your success solely by the bathroom scale will only prove a hindrance to your ultimate goal.

This brings me to a big issue I have with many diets: the fact that weight loss and good health can often be at odds with each other. All too often diets will heavily restrict certain types of foods or call for a huge reduction in calories. Neither of these are types of diets are healthy and should be avoided.

Losing Weight

Weight loss is simply the product of burning more energy, calories, in your daily lives than the amount that you eat. When you eat more calories than you burn you gain weight in the form of stored fat. However, burning fat when you lose weight isn't as easy as putting it on. This is due to the fact that muscle is just as easily turned into energy as fat is, if not easier, this means that if you just sit around all day eating your cabbage soup you will lose a lot of weight, but much of it will be in the form of muscle loss. This is very poor quality weight loss and will make it harder and harder to continue losing weight.

So, keeping all the muscle that you currently have, or even adding some will greatly assist you in your weight loss endeavors. Unlike fat, your body needs to burn calories to keep muscle around, so, by adding some muscle through light resistance training, you will be upping the amount of calories your body needs to burn every day just to stay going. So, by not exercising, your body will think that it doesn't need all the muscle you have, thus burning it for energy, and when that happens you will use less energy just to stay alive, thus making it even harder to continue losing weight.

So as much as we hate to do it, exercise is critical in losing weight, so do it. Find a partner, find a sport or activity, anything you can do to keep that muscle around will greatly assist you in achieving your weight loss goal.

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