Monday, January 26, 2009

The Best Ways To Lose Weight Safely

Many fad diets, diet pills and crash diets are simply not healthy. The good news is that there are ways to lose weight that are both safe and effective. Do not endanger your health in order to shed a few pounds, that is not necessary. Instead, learn about healthy alternatives.

One of the common mistakes made when trying to lose weight is to begin by reducing the amount of food eaten. Although this seems logical and to some degree it would make sense it is not a good solution. In many cases it can even be dangerous to your health. You see, your body absolutely needs nutrition in order to function at its best and if it is deprived it will go into survival mode which means it will spread out whatever calories it has available.

Crash diets can force the body to slow down the metabolic rate. Because the body has few calories coming into it to burn it may be forced to burn some fat but because you are not eating properly you are likely to be feeling tired, fatigued and you may even be prone to illness due to a weakened immune system. It is also possible that you will force your body to burn muscle mass during this period.

Sadly many people use one fad or crash diet after another only to find that after losing weight it comes back and when it does there is usually more than before. These types of diets cannot be sustained for long periods of time because of the stress the participant feels.

Dieters using fad diets are usually hungry and often complain of feeling weak or having little or no energy. Diet pills often make the claim that the user will not be hungry. Although this may be true, if the participant is not eating a healthy diet then he or she is still depriving the body and there will be consequences.

So when one wants to lose weight safely he may wonder how to go about it. The answer is really quite simple. By eating frequent small-sized meals of smaller serving sizes of nutritious foods one can lose weight. This method does a couple of things. First, it insures that the person will not get hungry which means he or she will not be grabbing quick snacks that are high in fat and calorie content. It also keeps the metabolism at a higher rate.

Metabolism is the process of the way the body uses calories. Calories are the energy units in foods and the body can use energy to either break down to be used for immediate fuel or to store for the future. When we provide more calories than our body needs for its functions we basically are creating extra cells, and in most cases that will become fat.

Exercise is one way to burn more calories. As a matter of fact, if you build muscle mass the muscles will burn calories around the clock. So obviously having muscles is a good thing!

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