The #1
absolute key to losing weight and looking great simply put is hard work! You
may be working hard and busting your ass in the gym, but that is only part of
the equation, the major part of the solution is DIET, DIET, and DIET. The only
thing that you need to know to lose weight is that you must expend more
calories than you consume. Your body needs calories or in other words, energy
from food, just to function and perform at optimal levels; these functions
include but are not limited to, heart function, brain function, digestive
function and more, even breathing requires calories. The average human body
needs anywhere from 1500-2000 calories a day just for maintenance, and it gets
this energy from either food or stored energy in the body. This stored energy can come in the form of
fat, glycogen, muscle proteins, or a mixture of all three.
When losing weight
the proper way to go about it is to target and reduce mainly body fat, this way
you’ll look good, feel good, and be healthier. Though if you eat too little,
starve yourself, and/or workout too hard you can actually keep your body from
burning mainly fat and instead it will target muscle proteins and glycogen;
you’ll still be losing weight but mainly skeletal muscle and you could end up
looking what’s called “skinny-fat”.
The proper
and safe way to go about losing the weight is to aim for a loss of 1-2 pounds
each week (a little more if you’re on the obese side of things, and a little
less if you’re already fairly lean). A pound of fat consists of approximately
3500 calories, so in order to lose one pound of fat a week you’d need to be in
a calorie deficit of 500 calories a day for 7 days, make sense? 500Calories x
7Days = 3500Calories, so if you’d want to drop 2 pounds every week you’d need
to be in a calorie deficit of 1000 calories per day to add up to 7000 calories
(and no more) or 2 pounds of that lovely fat by the end of the week. This is
the best approach to attacking weight/fat-loss for average to overweight
individuals; it’s safe, effective, you’ll be able to function at almost 100%,
and you’ll lose little to no muscle at all if you follow this route. If you get
impatient, if you go too hard into diet mode, if you spend excessive time in
the gym killing yourself doing cardio, you’re not going to get 100% of the
results you want, you’ll feel like crap, you’ll drop a lot of strength and
muscle, you’ll most likely plateau at some point and stop dropping the pounds
and possibly even reverse weight loss.
In the next
articles to come I’ll continue to go more in depth about these details, certain
diets, why they work/don’t, and for a lot of you ladies out there I’ll talk
about why it’s important to have and spare muscle because you’ll actually burn
more calories with it!
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