How to lose weight

Before we start, there is not a single “magic pill” or gadget that will allow you to lose weight while sitting on the couch eating buckets of ice cream. The weight loss industry is a billion dollar industry because people buy into the latest fad and by the next year they are buying the next “latest fad”. It is residual income. So if you ever contemplated using a slimming pill, they might work for a while but if you do not CORRECT YOUR EATING HABITS and MANAGE YOUR WEIGHT, your weight will go back to where it was. There are many reasons why people can not lose weight. The concept of how to lose weight is pretty simple though, burn more calories than you consume. Most people simply over eat and eat the wrong foods. In modern times, foods are cheap, processed and filled with a bunch of nothing. They enter your system and really the only thing extracted is empty calories, this leads to making you feel hungry again soon after. High carbohydrate foods especially will do this. A carbohydrate is converted to glucose shortly after consumption and glucose is fuel for your body. So you can see when you consume large amounts of carbohydrate your body gets flooded with glucose which promotes a release of extra insulin. In some people their blood sugar levels drop from the extra insulin and then once again they are hungry. Diets high in protein became popular since protein takes hours longer to convert to glucose. This lengthy conversion process keeps people feeling full, longer. It also has a minimal impact on your blood sugar which can help control food cravings. Some people go as far as cutting carbs out of their diet completely and claim to feel healthier. In this how to lose weight section, lets learn a bit about calories and where they come from.

A calorie can come from 3 places:

• Fat
• Carbohydrate
• Protein

Calories from fat tend to have more per gram. The down side of fat is that it really does not have to do much to convert to fat in your body, since it is, well, already fat. If you want to lose weight, pay attention to the fat grams you consume and stay away from them, especially saturated fat.

Calories from carbohydrate as we spoke about earlier tend to be used up quickly and are easy to consume. Not to mention in some people they cause blood sugar swings. Lets look at something for a minute, imagine drinking a can of soda or eating an egg. Which one do you think would keep you fuller longer? Guess which one has more calories? If you said the can of soda you are correct.

Calories from protein once again tend to “stick” with you longer.

Calories needed to lose weight

Now this is where things get interesting and this is something you will need to discover for yourself and find out what works for you to lose weight. Don’t worry, you are not left in the dark on this subject. There are plenty of calorie intake calculators that will give you a guideline on how many calories needed to lose weight based off of your personal information such as age, weight and height. You can click here which will open in a separate window to plug in your information and get a rough idea of how much you should be eating to lose weight. Once you have done this, get out your weight loss notebook and write down the number of calories you need to eat to lose weight, we are going to use this as a starting guide.

In the next section, we are going to learn about food labels and how to count calories. Stick with it, you CAN lose weight. It is not going to happen over night, but by this time next year you are going to be a new you. You will not quit or give up! While at first it might seem like information overload and too confusing to learn how to lose weight, I promise you it will literally become 2nd nature and you will eventually be able to count calories by memory. We are going to replace a bad habit, over eating, with a good habit, calorie counting.

Motivation to lose weight

Motivation to lose weight is something a lot of us struggle with. If it were that easy, no one would be over weight. One thing about motivation though is that if you stick with something and start seeing results, motivation will increase. If you started a business and right away you were not rich, would you just stop and give up? Some of us would, others would not. Since we are transforming our bodies, we might as well transform our minds because we are going to get rid of any quitter attitude. Imagine you stuck with your business that you started and slowly it started to develop into more, your motivation to improve and evolve would go through the roof. The same applies in your weight loss and management goals. Stick with it, even when you have a bad day. Your motivation to lose weight will continue to grow.