Basic Tips for Weight Loss

Before you get going on any kind of weight loss plan or program, it really helps to know the basics of what will be going on with your body as you start to lose weight.

That's because while you may think it doesn't matter, it really does when that knowledge can help you to maximize your level of success, while the lack of it can actually hamper your chances of succeeding or even cause you to fail in your attempt to lose weight.

As I'm pretty sure you want to succeed and lose all the weight that you have in mind to lose through your efforts, then knowing the whys and wherefores can really be of benefit to you.

This article will set out to give you those basic tips to lose weight (see: weightlossgo.com) and help you to better understand why you are going to be doing what you will be doing to lose those unwanted excess pounds!

Diet

Your diet is what you eat and drink and you should be taking a close interest in what those things are that you are allowing to pass your lips.

It's no good placing yourself on a commercially available diet where you eat healthy meals and watch your calorie count only to then wash it all down with several cans of soda! You might laugh at that, but it would shock you the amount of people who actually do exactly that and then wonder why they didn't lose much, if any weight on their diet!

Soda and other flavored drinks are either sweetened with sugar which will load up the calories at a really fast rate, or they're sweetened with artificial sweeteners like aspartame that may not add calories, but they do add a whole heap of problems.

One of the most destructive from a dieter's point of view is that ingesting aspartame stimulates hunger and has you reaching for the packets of potato chips and other high calorie snacks before your realize what you are doing. Worse is that it's linked with depression (which also fuels comfort eating) and cancer. So avoid all soda and flavored drinks and you'll be fine.

The best thing to drink is plain water, but if you really, absolutely must have something more exciting, then buy carbonated bottled water (not the flavored variety) and add some freshly squeezed lemon or lime juice. I'm talking about the stuff that actually comes from a lemon or a lime, not a packet! It's actually a really refreshing drink with zero calories and zero additives!

Knowing what to eat and what not to eat is the next thing, but your diet should have all of that sorted out for you. The rules of thumb are:

But if it's fresh produce, as in fresh vegetables, fruit, lean meat and poultry, fish and fungus (mushrooms etc), then it's probably okay as long as your particular diet says so.

The idea behind eating a healthy diet is to keep your calorie intake down so your body is not storing up the excess as fat. It also means keeping your sugar intake down, which comes from high glycemic carbs as in refined white flour products as well as from sweet things like candy, chocolate, etc.

A healthy diet coupled with drinking lots of plain water will improve your digestive system's effectiveness while helping to maintain a higher level of metabolism.

Exercise

You may think that you can lose weight just by eating a low calorie diet and not doing any exercise and while that may be true in the short term, it will not work out in the long term.

You really need to be active during the day to also maintain a healthy metabolism, with which your body burns more of the sugars that are coming in through diet and prevents more fat being stored. But there's more to it than that.

If you don't get any exercise every day, the lack of activity actually results in a slow down of your metabolism. So even though you may be eating a low calorie diet, your rate of weight loss will slow down over time as your metabolism slows down.

So you may be eating a lot less but you can still be storing more fat because your body simply isn't using all the energy that is coming in. That's why you see so many people who will tell you that this or that diet failed even though they stuck to it without cheating. If they didn't get any exercise, then their body simply didn't need even as much as they were eating on their diet, so it stored the excess as fat!

The trick is to make your day more productive in terms of the amount of physical activity you get. Now you may say that it is impossible to exercise because you are sitting at a desk all day at your job, or you drive a bus or a truck and there is no way you can just stop and go for a ten mile run.

The answer is that you can still do plenty to get the muscles in your body working even when you think you don't have the time. Think about where you can use the time you are doing other things to convert it into activity.

How about the time you spend waiting for the elevator to take you up or down two or three floors at work? You could use it better running up or down the stairs instead!

How do you get to and from work? If you drive and it's only a few blocks, try walking or cycling!

While you're at work, do you literally not move from your desk the whole time? If you do have to get up and go anyplace, don't just amble from place to place. Take big strides with your shoulders back and your chest out!

What do you do at lunchtime? Sit at your desk and tuck into a huge sandwich? Why not get out of the office and go for a walk in the fresh air instead?

There are a multitude of physically active things that you can do in place of doing nothing. You just need to use your imagination for the situation and come up with something that works for you.