How To Lose Weight Fast With a Healthy Diet

How To Lose Weight Fast With a Healthy Diet

 

Learning how to lose weight fast is all about making choices and eating a balanced and healthy diet. If you cut down too much on one particular food group (like fats, or carbs for example), the longer you stick to that diet, the more your body is going to crave what’s missing.

As you probably already know, there are five basic food groups that we need to choose from when creating our healthy diet: carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals. Whenever you start any kind of weight loss program, you should make sure you’re following a healthy diet and that to really lose weight quickly you need to give your body a properly balanced diet.

The first three food groups (carbohydrates, fats, and proteins) give us energy; proteins also provide ammo acids, the building blocks of the body. Vitamins and minerals are absolutely essential for the efficient maintenance of body functions (like chemical reactions).

 

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But vitamins and minerals do not provide energy, and therefore – provided we ensure our diet is not deficient in these essential elements – vitamins and minerals are not part of the weight-loss equation. So, we are left with carbohydrates, fats, and protein. The secret of burning body fat lies in the relative proportion of these constituents in the diet.

There are three golden rules that you must understand to diet effectively:

1. Your body does not work like a machine.

What does this mean? Let me explain because this is the reason for the failure of low-calorie diets. The way that scientists determine the energy content (or ‘calories’) of any given food is literally to burn the food in an instrument, like a type of mini-oven that measures the heat produced. Heat is the way in which energy is ‘released’ when a material burns, and we give the food a ‘caloric content’ depending on how much heat is generated. For example, 1 gram of fat produces about 9 calories, whereas 1 gram of carbohydrate or protein produces about 4 calories.

Seems fairly simple. On this basis, you might reasonably assume that fat in your diet (as it has twice as many calories as protein or carbohydrate) has twice as much risk of being deposited as fat in your body.

In fact, this is wrong. The human body does not function as a machine, and it does not burn food in the same way as a laboratory instrument, so the simple calculation of calories based upon the relative amounts of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats is fundamentally flawed.

As you will see, by applying medical principles to the way your body processes food, you will be able to eat more calories than someone on a low-calorie diet, and yet you will lose body fat and they will not.

The absorption of food in the gut depends upon a complex series of interactions, which means that by varying the composition of your food, you can eat far more calories (and calories of tasty foods rather than the traditional tasteless diet foods) and lose weight, while someone else may eat fewer calories without losing any weight at all. Incredible, but true! Now you may begin to see why so many years are wasted counting calories and yet not losing weight – or fat.

2. Fats in your diet do not necessarily cause weight gain.

In other words, although fat has double the calorie content of carbohydrates or protein, it does not necessarily cause you to put on twice as much weight.

If your diet is properly balanced, you can include a moderate (not excessive) amount of fat in your diet and actually lose weight. Once again, this is based upon the fact that the body does not function simply as a machine. This is not intended to encourage you to consume excessive amounts of fats, but rather to eat ‘healthy’ fats in moderation. You will then lose far more weight (and especially fat) than you ever did counting calories – and with very little effort, you will keep the weight off.

Remember, certain fats are essential components of the human body. Essential fats make up the outer coating of nerve cells and form the basis of many hormones in the body – including sex hormones.

We need these lipids (a medical term for fats), but not the fat cells deposited in all the wrong places. So you can see that some fats are absolutely essential for a healthy body.

You can eat certain fats in your diet, and at the same time remove the unsightly bulges of storage fat around your waist and hips. In other words, not all fats are bad.

 

3. You can program your body to burn excess body fat instead of dietary calories.

This is the most amazing statement of all – the ‘Holy Grail’ for all dieters. You can program your body to burn its own fat – especially from the waist and hip region – in preference to the food you consume. In other words, you can have your figurative cake, and eat it.

How can this be possible? Like most medicine, it’s actually very simple, as I’ll explain in a future article, but once you understand the principles of how fat works, and which fats you can eat and which you can’t, you will be able to keep to your diet easily, and then you can proceed to eat your way to losing fat.