So many people out there are desperately trying to achieve weight loss, but there are so many different diets and so much different information about weight loss, that unsuprisingly people are still confused on the subject. Something that is still a mystery to so many people is the importance of calories. The popularity of some of the recent ‘fad’ diets, Atkins to mention but one, has confused peoples understanding of calories even further.
Diets such as the Atkins diet promote the idea that calories don’t matter in the slightest, and the controlled intake of certain nutrients, namely carbohydrates in this case, is the deciding factor in weight loss. Although people do achieve some short term success on diets such as Atkins, the fact is that in the long term they are unhealthy and totally unrealistic to follow and stick with. Also alot of the weight loss on these type of diets actually comes from loss of water, and even worse muscle!
The real truth is that if you want to successfully lose weight, calories are the deciding factor. Here is a sentence that you should remember when people are trying to sell you the false idea that calories don’t matter…
TO LOSE WEIGHT YOU MUST BEEN IN A CALORIE DEFICIT!
I’ll explain this a bit further. A calorie is basically a unit of energy, your body needs so many of these energy units to perform all it’s daily functions, this includes maintaining bodyweight. So if you need a certain amount of calories to maintain your body weight, it makes sense that to lose weight you would need to reduce the amount of calories that your body needs (this is your calorie deficit).
The food that you eat contains these calories that your body needs, so one way of losing weight would be to reducing the amount of calories that you consume in your food. You can also create this calorie deficit through exercise. When you exercise the extra work that your body is made to do, causes it to burn off more calories. This can also create the calories deficit.
The most efficient way to create a calorie deficit is by combining a calorie controlled diet, with a suitable exercise routine, unfortunately that’s not where it ends though!
You may be thinking now that you could just cut your calorie intake right down, the more you cut out the calories the better right? Wrong. You have to be careful that you don’t bring down your calories too much, otherwise you will start to lose muscle rather than fat, leaving you looking scrawny and unhealthy looking. You need to do a bit of experimentation with this, first try and find how many calories your body needs to stay at the weight that you currently are. Then from there drop it by about 500 calories and see how you go. Everyone is different, so this really is a case of finding it out for your self. Take weekly measurements of your weight and body fat, so you can work out if you are losing fat or muscle. If you are losing muscle, simply increase your calories! Find the happy medium using experimentation and body monitoring is the key.
So in conclusion. Ignore the latest fad diets, and believe me when I say that calories really do count when it comes to successfully losing fat.
