At least 70% of weight loss results from the food you eat, 10% from lifestyle and 20% from exercise. This means that weight loss can hardly happen without diet changes.
Diet, in this case does not imply the eating less food or not eating at all. Rather, it implies taking a balanced diet in order to reduce weight in a way that is healthy. To do this, you need to understand two main concepts:
- Consumption of Calories
Taking more calories that your body needs causes it to store the extra calories in fat form. This leads to weight gain. On the contrary, taking fewer calories allows the body to utilize all of them to refill energy thereby reducing the amount of fat in the body.
- Healthy Eating
Every day, we either eat healthy or unhealthy food. Healthy food contains essential nutrients that the body requires while unhealthy food contains calories that fill our stomachs without necessarily providing it with the nutrients it requires to function. Research shows that health foods have important nutrients as well as calories that the body needs.
What you eat as well as what you do not eat is matters most in good dieting. Some foods such as ghee chapatti and oily vegetables contain more calories as well as fewer nutrients. Other foods such as green vegetables, oats and fruits like sprouts and pomegranate contain more nutrients and lesser calories. When later foods are taken in right amounts, they help in reducing weight.
However, people who want to reducing fat take different actions. Some of these actions do not produce desired results. They include reducing carbohydrate, fat, sugar and junk food intake, taking small amounts of food frequently, eating healthy, taking cardio exercises or taking meals before 7 pm and more, you can view detailed tips for weight loss by Seema, who personally lost much weight.
The Caloric Deficit Approach
To cut down on fat, caloric deficit is the single most effective approach to fat loss that has been proven scientifically. This approach involves burning more calories than those that one consumes. Generally, calorie maintenance levels vary from one person to another. The calorie maintenance level refers to the calorie amount that the body requires to produce energy each day to enable for performance of daily tasks like physiological tasks. There are several scenarios in calorie intake. They include:
- Maintenance Level
If you take the same amount of calories that your body needs to use each day, you achieve the right maintenance level. This means that you will maintain your weight at the same level because your body gets all the calories it needs without excesses or deficits.
- Caloric Surplus or Excesses
This occurs when one consumes more calories than the body requires. This is caloric surplus, which means that the body utilizes what it needs and there is more left which is stored in the body for later use. When this happens, this excess calorie is converted to body fat leading to weight gain.
- Caloric Deficit
This occurs when the amount of calories consumed is lower than the amount required by the body to undertake daily tasks. In this case, a person experiences a caloric deficit. When this happens, the body is forced to find other energy sources to burn to meet its maintenance level, often the fat stored up in the body, which leads to fat loss.
All this works regardless of the foods that one consumes, whether its fats or proteins, processed or unprocessed foods, healthy or unhealthy food or the time when the foods are consumed.
Creating a Caloric Deficit
There are two key ways of creating calories deficit:
- Calorie Intake
You can create a calorie deficit by reducing your calorie intake. For instance, if your calorie maintenance level is 2500 per day and you consume 2000 calories per day, you are able to create a calorie deficit of 500 calories per day.
- Burning Calories
Exercising has its place in burning calories for fat loss as well. Here, you reduce body fat by burning a higher amount of calorie than what you consume. For instance, if you consume 2500 calories per day, and you burn 500 calories through exercise, are able to create a calorie deficit.
- Calorie Intake and Burning
One can opt to combine diet and exercise to create a calorie deficit. This approach leads to the same results of fat loss over time.
Where people lose fat by taking low fat or carb diets, vegan, paleo or raw diets that encourage clean eating, it is because these diets cause the body to create a caloric deficit indirectly. This means that each diet that helps in fat loss actually creates a caloric deficit in the body even though these diets are never direct. Each approach that has resulted to fat loss including taking low carb diet, low fat diet, less grains, processed foods or junk, has its foundation on consuming less calories.
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