Do You Understand How Calorie Weight Loss Works?
As more and more people around the world begin to struggle with unhealthy weight problems, more and more people are searching for solutions. Being overweight is very closely associated with lifestyle diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. While the details of weight center around concentrations of fat and sugar in processed foods, the reality of what makes us gain and lose weight comes down to calories.
Weight loss can basically take only a few forms. There is the destruction of tissue, dehydration, and calorie weight loss. Of course, in the fight against obesity, the only methods that count for the long-term are those based around calorie weight loss.
More specifically, weight loss only happens when you consume less calories than you burn. This is what is said to be negative calorie weight loss, or just calorie weight loss for short.
In this sense, weight loss is actually not a complex concept. However, achieving calorie weight loss can be a lot harder to do that in it is to talk about. We tend to consume more calories than we will burn under a variety of conditions such as when we are young and growing, nursing, pregnant, experiencing health problems, eating for emotional reasons, living a sedentary lifestyle, and experiencing eating disorders. In some of these cases, it is healthy for us to consume more calories than we burn and in other cases it leads to obesity.
Most people, unable to overcome their habits, have resorted to looking for a quick fix, rather than fighting to improve their habits. Others try hard to fight their habits, but fail because they don’t really have a good methodology for overcoming habits. The quick fix methods that most of us try are not always based on a long-term approach to burning at least as many calories as you consume.
Some weight loss programs try to label certain foods as weight loss foods and other foods as weight gain foods. For example, you will see a wide variety of vegetables and fruits labeled as negative calorie weight loss foods simply because they contain a lot of fiber and nutrients, to go with a low calorie to weight ratio. A simple look at the flaws in this theory is to see how many herbivores in the animal kingdom struggle to get enough food to grow and maintain their weights. Most of them look pretty healthy, and when cooped up they seem to become overweight.
You may be wondering how negative calorie weight loss translates into actual pounds. A pound of fat is made up of about 3500 calories. So you have to burn 3500 more calories than you eat to burn one pound of fat. Since most people don’t even burn 3500 calories in a day, even a day of fasting is unlikely to result in the negative calorie weight loss of 3500 calories required to lose one pound.
This helps to explain why healthy weight loss is usually losing a few pounds per month. The math works out something like if you limit yourself to 1500 calories per day and you are a relatively active person, exercising each day so that you can burn 1800 calories per day you will have a negative calorie weight loss equivalent to 300 calories per day. At this rate it will take you nearly twelve days to lose one pound of fat. This should help you understand why patience is required to obtain long-term, healthy weight loss.
You should not trust your day to day weights on the scale as much as your calorie intake and calorie burning calculations. For example, at times your body will hold more water than other times. It is very easy for your body to carry an extra three or four pounds of water in a day for a variety of reasons. Then the next day your body could take itself to a two or three pound water deficit. Your weight could easily change by three pounds in the day, completely unrelated to whether you burned off any fat. But, over the long-run it will be the storing or burning of fat that determines the general direction of your weight.
So rather than counting on scales and quick fix weight loss plans, that in many cases only manipulate your water retention for a few days or even weeks, you need to focus on achieving negative calorie weight loss. Simply decrease your calorie consumption through wise food choices and portion choices, while increasing your calorie usage through exercise.
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