Most people who go on a diet want to lose weight.  I suggest that you should be concerned with fat loss, not weight loss.  There is a huge difference between the two.  If you want to see the difference, refer to my “Ideal Body” article.

A person’s body weight can naturally fluctuate on a daily basis up to 5 lbs.  Most of this difference is due to water retention.  In fact, you are made up of 70% water!  If you eat a lot of salty food, you will be a little heavier for the next day or so.  Your body will hold on to more water to try and dilute the salt content in your body.  This may sound crazy, but you actually need to drink more water to get rid of water retention or bloating!  If you are used to eating a lot of salt, and then change your diet, you will appear to lose weight. 

Don’t get caught up in the initial rapid weight loss that happens with most diets.  This is due to water weight loss.  Boxers can lose over 20 lbs in a 24 hr period when they are trying to “make weight”  before a fight.  They do this by severely dehydrating themselves.  They actually try to sweat out the water by doing crazy things such as exercising in a sauna.  It is true that they did lose 20 lbs of weight, but by the next day when they actually fight, they are fully hydrated and are 20 lbs heavier again.  If this rapid weight loss could continue, a 200 lb boxer could be back to his “birth-weight” in less than ten days!

Here are some of the biggest concepts of fat loss:

1.  You must have a goal.

Everyone states that their goal is to lose weight, but most people are never successful at it.  The problem with this goal is that it is not specific enough and will not keep anyone motivated.

The first thing to do is figure out why you want to lose weight.  If you don’t have a powerful reason to lose weight, you will not succeed – it is just that simple.  There are many, many reasons that people will have to lose weight.  For some people, they want to lose weight because they want to look attractive, others because they have developed diabetes as a result of their weight.  You need to spend some time and examine your reasons.

When you arrive at a good reason, ask yourself this question.  What would happen if I didn’t lose the weight?  If you answered, “I would still be fat and unhappy, but life would go on just the same”, you don’t have a good enough reason!

If you answered, “I will never find someone to marry and have children with in a wonderful house in the country, and I will always live in my parent’s basement”, you have a good reason.  Or even, “If I don’t lose weight, I will probably have toes amputated and lose more of my vision because of my diabetes”, is very motivating. 

Once you have found a motivating reason, set some goals.  Make your goals measurable and give yourself a time limit.  How much weight do you want to lose and by when? 

I make most of my goals in the one to two month range.  If you say that you want to lose 80 lbs in a year, it is just too big of a challenge and it won’t motivate you.  You always need to have a little “time pressure” and a goal that is realistic and attainable to keep you going.  It would be much better to set a goal of losing 7 lbs in the next month.  Think of all of the successes you will have along the way. 

2.  Don’t try to lose weight too fast.

Everybody has heard this over and over again, but most people ignore this concept until they have “yo-yo’d” one too many times.  Most people seem to start a diet when a number of factors come together and they reach a breaking point.   It usually starts with some sort of pressure such as a future high school reunion or upcoming wedding.  Then the realization that they weren’t as heavy as they are now when people last saw them.   Perhaps a feeling of disgust and embarrassment overcomes them about their current situation.  This is the point where it is truly more painful to not do something about their weight.  They are truly sick of the way they look and feel, and they want changes right now!   

This is a trap that most people fall into.

If you try to lose weight too fast several things will happen.  First your body will rebel against you.  Under-eating causes over-eating.  If your body thinks that it is starving, you will most likely get food cravings that not even the most disciplined person can ignore.

Second, because of your body’s starvation response, it will start to conserve energy.  Your metabolism will slow down in an attempt to keep itself from losing weight.  To keep losing weight, you actually have to start eating less and less.

Third, you don’t actually lose very much fat.  Your body will start eating it’s own muscle!  Many people lose as much muscle as fat – which slows down your metabolism even more. 

3.  Make small lifestyle changes that you can live with.

Nobody manages to stay on a diet for long.  A diet by most people’s definition is a temporary thing you do to lose weight.  Most people feel deprived on a diet and can’t wait to go off it.

It is your lifestyle that caused you to get fat, and it keeps you fat.  The food and beverages that you regularly consume throughout the year, gradually made you fatter.  It may eventually reach a point where your weight stabilizes and maintains itself at a higher level.  Some people never seem to reach this balance point, and they continue to grow and grow over the years.

If you change your lifestyle to that of a healthy person, you will eventually become that healthy person.  Don’t think of it as a 4 or 12 week program, think of it as the way you run your life from now on.  When you get down to your goal weight you will continue to eat and exercise the same way. 

The more drastic a diet is, the harder it will be to keep your weight off after you reach your goal weight.  Many simple changes will have a huge impact on your weight loss.  For example, assume that you drink one can of soda every day of the year.  If you keep everything the same, but change to diet soda, it will work out to about a ten pound weight loss over the course of a year.

This next point may seem obvious to most.  If you don’t like the food in your diet, you will never continue to eat the same food after the diet.  People will still go on the latest “Snails and Spinach” diet if it promises quick weight loss, because people don’t think of what they will do after the diet is over.  Their main concern is losing their fat now. 

4.  You have to do cardiovascular exercise

You can lose fat by restricting what you eat or by exercising, but the combination of the two will give you huge results.  Calorie restriction causes your metabolism to slow down, whereas  exercise speeds it up.  The combination of diet and exercise is the key to losing and keeping the weight off.

If you are just starting out, the exact cardiovascular exercise that you do doesn’t really matter.  As long as you are elevating your heart rate and breathing fairly heavy for at least 20-30 minutes 3 times a week, you will see a benefit.  You don’t always have to do the “perfect” perfect cardio workout.  Doing anything is better than sitting on your couch watching another hour of television.  It is more important that you find something that you enjoy and will continue to do, than attempt to stick with something you don’t like.  Consistency is over time is the key.

Make sure that you ease yourself into exercising, if it has been a while.  You will not be able to do the same amount and intensity that you used to.  Many people go 100% their first day back and they pay for it dearly.  These people wake up to stiffness and soreness in their muscles the next morning, and many can barely get out of bed.  Most people who have a painful experience like this from “over-doing” it their first few days back, give up and quit on exercise. 

If you start out doing very easy workouts, you won’t experience too much muscle soreness.  It is much better to do a few weeks of easy cardio than to over do it.  You can’t keep doing easy workouts forever though.  Make a goal to make every workout, just a little harder.  If you add 1 minute to each workout, that adds 12 minutes a month.  You could also increase the intensity of your workout, or do both together.   A gradual progression in your workouts will not be that noticeable on a daily basis, but over time you will make a huge improvement. 

5.  You have to do resistance training

Adults naturally lose muscle every year.  Muscle is very metabolically active – that means it burns a lot of calories even if you aren’t doing anything.  Some studies suggest that a single pound of muscle can burn up to 50 calories a day.  You need to keep your muscle at all costs.  Weight training while losing fat will help you hold on to the muscle that you have.  If you work hard, you may even gain muscle while losing fat.

My ultimate goal has been to eat as much food as I can without putting on any fat.  Because of my weight training, I can now eat more food every day without putting on fat, than what I used to eat when I was overweight!

If you gain only a single pound of muscle, you will burn up to 50 more calories a day.  In a year, you will burn an extra 18,250 calories (50 X 365).  There are about 3500 calories in a pound of fat, so just by “owning” an extra pound of muscle you will lose over 5 lbs of fat in a year without doing anything!  (18,250/3500)

The opposite is also true.  If you lose muscle while dieting, you will always burn less calories in a day.  That means you will always have to eat less to keep the weight off.  In most diets, people lose at least one pound of muscle for every 3 pounds of fat.  For example, if you lose 20 lbs of weight, you will also lose 5 lbs of muscle.  Because you now have 5 lbs less muscle, your metabolism now burns 250 less calories per day and you have to eat 250 less calories per day to maintain your weight. 

Conclusion

There is a law of calorie balance that simply states “if you eat less calories than you burn, you will lose weight”.  All diets that work follow this simple law – including the Atkins diet.

The more extreme a diet is, the less likely it is that you will keep the weight off.  A diet that incorporates a lifestyle change will always be more effective in the long run.

A diet that does not include cardiovascular exercise and weight training, will be inferior to one that does.  Without exercise, you will end up slowing down your metabolism.  This will actually make it easier for you to gain the fat back – exactly what you don’t want!

It really is fairly simple.  Eat a little less, and exercise a little more every day.  Its not flashy and will never appear on the cover of a magazine, but it works.