Although the idea behind weight loss is simple %26ndash; burn more calories than you eat %26ndash; the process is very hard for most people. Weight loss can be accomplished by replacing a couple of sodas with water and adding 20 minutes of walking each day. That sounds simple, but most people choose to use weight loss pills or other drugs to achieve their goal and look better. Obviously, they are unaware that it could be much better to lose weight by other means. The hard way to weight loss %26ndash; eating less, exercising more %26ndash; has proved to be a much better solution.Why it is hard to lose weight?
There are a number of factors that contribute to our weight gain, but it is not just about finding time to exercise or choosing the salad over the burger. It is also about genuine commitment to making healthy decisions every day. That is why if you are not ready to make some changes, losing weight will be hard. There are some things you will need to look at in order to get yourself on a healthy track.
1. Your Attitude: If you are only on a health kick to lose weight or look a certain way, it will be hard to lose weight permanently. What happens if you do not see results quickly enough is that you give up.
2. Your Workouts: If you do not workout consistently enough, it%26rsquo;s hard to lose weight. Although it is possible to lose weight through diet alone, but you will likely hit a plateau. This doesn%26rsquo;t mean you need to spend hours in the gym; you only need to set up a reasonable workout schedule that you can follow each week.
3. Your Eating: Changing the way you eat is another thing you are going to have to do for long-lasting weight loss, since you need to be willing to replace unhealthy food with healthier choices, and do it every single day.
4. Your Lifestyle: If you want a healthy life, you have to be willing to change how you live. It does not mean changing everything overnight, but simply being open to new ways of doing things.
Exercise more, the hard way to weight loss
If you want to burn more calories and fat while you walk, try adding a bit of running to the mix. Even just a few minutes of running during your walks can help you burn more calories. This might also help you build stronger bones, and boost your fitness level. You may even enjoy running so much that you will want to run more and more as the weeks go by. Running is not the only one exercise available, but it burns many calories and it could be fun if you run in a natural setting instead of gyms.
How to lose weight successfully?
Vacations, business meetings, conventions, even a get-together with old friends are all filled with temptations that can easily derail your weight loss efforts. Some doctors%26rsquo; researches discovered that you can cheat once every fourth day and make no serious impact on your weight loss efforts. Everyone who is attempting to lose weight has to know that one cheat includes one can of beer, one glass of wine, one piece of 10-layer cake, one ice cream cone, one slice of extra cheese pizza. However, you cannot eat a half-gallon of ice cream and a whole bag of Lido's. That is why you have to stay aware of the goal you are attempting to achieve, and stick to the program with minimal cheating of your metabolism if you want to succeed in weight loss.
The weight-loss industry
An estimated 50 million Americans will go on diets this year, and while some will succeed in taking the weight off, very few, perhaps 5%, will manage to keep all of it off in the long run. One reason for the low success rate is that many people look for quick and easy solutions to their weight problems. They find it hard to believe in this age of scientific innovations and medical miracles that an effortless weight-loss method simply does not exist. So they succumb to quick-fix scams claiming it is possible to eat all you want and still lose weight, or to melt fat away while you sleep. That is why the weight-loss business is a booming industry, Americans spending an estimated $30 billion a year on various diet programs and products, including diet foods and drinks. Trying to sort out all the competing claims, often misleading, unproven, or just plain false, can be confusing and costly. Of course, they won%26rsquo;t tell us that we do not need expensive products, but the only hard and the only safe method - eating less and exercising more.
In search of the magic bullet for weight loss
Some dieters peg their hopes on pills and capsules that promise to burn, block, flush, or otherwise eliminate fat from the system, but science has yet to come up with a low-risk magic bullet for weight loss. Some pills may help control the appetite, but they can have serious side effects. For example, amphetamines are highly addictive and can have an adverse impact on the heart and central nervous system. Other pills are utterly worthless, although overweight people hesitate to admit this. None of the substances contained in weight loss products, which include alcohol, caffeine, dextrose, and guar gum, have proved effective in weight-loss or appetite suppression. Diet patches, worn on the skin, have not been proven to be safe or effective.
At the same time, fat blockers purport to physically absorb fat and mechanically interfere with the fat a person eats and starch blockers promise to block or impede starch digestion; not only is the claim still unproven, but users have complained of nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and stomach pains. Magnet diet pills allegedly flush fat out of the body, but FTC has brought legal action against several marketers of these pills. Glucomannan is advertised as the 500-year-old weight loss secret from the Orient. However, there is little evidence supporting this plant root%26rsquo;s effectiveness as a weight-loss product. Some bulk fillers, such as fiber-based products, may absorb liquid and swell in the stomach, thereby reducing hunger, but some of these fillers, such as guar gum, can even prove harmful, causing obstructions in the intestines, stomach, or esophagus. The FDA has taken legal action against several promoters containing guar gum.
The facts about weight loss
Being obese can have serious health consequences, such as increased risk of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, gallstones, and some forms of cancer. Losing weight can help reduce these risks. Any claims that you can lose weight effortlessly are false, and the only proven way to lose either reducing the number of calories you eat or increasing the number of calories you burn through exercise. Most experts recommend a combination of the two as a hard but sure and safe way to lose weight.
Very low-calorie diets are not without risk and should be pursued only under medical supervision. Unsupervised low-cal diets can deprive you of important nutrients and are potentially dangerous. Fad diets rarely have any permanent effect, because sudden and radical changes in your eating patterns are difficult to sustain over time. In addition, the so-called crash diets often send dieters into a cycle of quick weight loss, followed by a rebound weight gain once they normal eating resumes, and then it becomes even more difficult to reduce weight when the next diet is attempted.
To lose weight safely and keep it off requires long-term changes in daily eating and exercise habits. Many experts recommend a goal of losing about a pound for a week. A modest reduction of 500 calories per day will achieve this goal, since a total reduction of 3,500 calories is required to lose a pound of fat you have stored. An important way to lower your calorie intake is to learn and practice healthy eating habits and stick to those.
Tips and tricks for successful weight loss
1. Never eat food just in case: Just in case you might get stuck somewhere without food later on, so in case you get hungry%26hellip; Use that opportunity to lose some weight.
2. Do not spice up your food too much. Even if you find vegetables a little boring, do not add cheese or seasonings to them.
3. There should be no such thing as a snack, at least not in the last resort weight-loss plan. You decide how much food you are going to eat and at what time of day.
4. You should not listen to people as much as you used to. When you became slender, people will urge you to eat, saying at your weight, you can afford to eat just one cookie.
5. There is no such thing as fattening food. Everything that contains calories can potentially make you fat, and fats are more calorie-dense than carbohydrates. However, if you pig out on saltines long enough you will get just as fat as if you were pigging out on ice cream. If you eat more calories than your body burns, you gain weight.
6. When you add regular exercise to your routine, you might gain as much as five pounds. At first you might be upset, but later you will realize that the added weight was muscle.
7. When you are depressive, there is no way to lose weight, because most people do not care about their weight at that state. Being lonely and bored also makes you hungry. That is why it%26rsquo;s not a good idea to start trying to lose weight when lonely or bored.
8. Beverages can also cause weight gain. Lithium made many people drink a lot, and drinking about a gallon of fruit juice a day may be the main reason some of them gained so much weight while on lithium.
9. As you lose weight, weigh yourself less and less often, because the only changes you will be your weight; nothing else will have changed.
10. Do not be afraid of hunger, because hunger never killed anybody who had sugar and fat stored in their body. Your doctor, who knows if you have sugar and fat stored in your body, said it was safe for you to lose excess weight.
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