In spite all the difficulties we often feel when trying to shed pounds, it’s not a mysterious process. Two major factors come into play, burning more calories than you consume, and keeping your metabolism high. Both are fairly difficult things to do, as your metabolism will decrease significantly when you try to cut calories. This actually creates periods of “plateaus” where weight loss is not only difficult, but slow. There are only a few ways to increase your metabolism, and most of them are through various supplements.
The secret to weight loss is to make sustainable changes, ones that you intend on making permanent down the road. You need to make small but steady changes to your diet until those changes just become routine and part of your life. If you go on a rapid weight loss method like with HCG, you need to keep in mind that the maintenance afterward is just as important as losing the weight to begin with. Sustaining your progress requires a sustainable approach to weight management.
Hard and Fast Rules for Weight Loss
In order to lose one pound of fat, a person has to burn over 3500 calories. However, this may seem like you would have to exercise for a 4 or 5 hours per day to burn off that much weight, yet people can actually lose that much more rapidly in studies. What gives? The difference lies in your metabolism. A person’s metabolism, if sped up properly, will burn off 200 to 300% more than it would normally just by sitting or walking. That’s the secret for fast weight loss, and also the secret to keep it off forever.
Many people recommend that you calculate your BMR (or your basal metabolic rate). This is what your body needs to maintain things like breathing and digestion, etc. This is the minimum level you require. There are a lot of calculators to choose from to do this online, but many of them will offer you a fairly good estimate of your number. You need to eat at least this much each day (your body will burn off the rest it uses from stored fat).
You also need to calculate your daily activity level. This is not always easy, because you burn calories at a different rate even for the same task throughout the day. Track how much you walk each day, how much you exercise and a general idea of how much time you spend sitting throughout the day. This will give you a rough estimate of the amount of activity you do per day and how many calories you are burning.
Last, but probably the most important, you have to count your food intake. Contrary to a lot of the fad diets that claim you can eat anything, in order to succeed in weight loss you have to count your calories regularly. This means daily caloric counting so you have a solid idea how much you are taking in. You want to eat foods that are as natural as possible, which means no processed foods. Foods such as fruits or vegetables are perfect just the way they are in their natural state. This is what you should be eating, and avoiding all those processed products (like chips, or frozen dinners).
You take all of these numbers, and can calculate how much you burn in excess per day. Your BMR plus activity burning should be greater than your food intake to lose weight. However, your metabolism does not always cooperate with this unfortunately and can really slow down an disrupt this quickly. Exercise to boost this or a proven treatment like HCG or garcinia can boost metabolism a lot to help you overcome many of these issues without needing to do anything drastic.