People do a lot of things to lose weight – follow diets that they don’t like, do exercise routines that they don’t enjoy and even take supplements, pills and even get surgery. But many of them end up gaining the weight back.
To answer this we need to understand how much energy a body requires. For each pound you weigh, each day you need 12 calories to maintain your body weight. If you weigh 150 pounds you will need 150 x 12 calories, that is, 1800 calories per day to maintain that body weight. If you eat or drink more calories than your body requires, the excess energy is stored as fat. It takes 3,600 excess calories to make one pound of fat.
In this example, if your typical daily calorific intake is 2400 calories, in around 30 days you would put on between 5 pounds of fat!
Let’s say, you then decide to go on a restrictive diet and halve your calorific consumption to 1,000 calories per day. You stay on this diet for around a month and lose 10 pounds and now weigh 140 pounds. You feel fantastic about losing the weight but can’t keep up such a restrictive regime because you are irritable and have no energy.
So you go off your diet and go back to your usual routine of 2,400 calories a day. Remember you are lighter now and your body requires less energy to maintain its new weight. You would now require 140 x 12, that is, 1680 calories per day.
In this instance, by consuming 2400 calories daily, because you are lighter than before, you would put the weight back on in just few days!
If you want to keep the weight off you must develop a consistent change in eating habits that you like to ensure you do not consume more than your body requires. You cannot continue to eat the same quantities and/or combinations of foods that caused you to be overweight in the first place. This will require developing an understanding of the nutritional content of food and raising your body’s metabolism through increased muscle mass and exercise.
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