Danger #1 – Trying to lose a lot of weight really fast.

You simply can’t do this. The human body was not made to operate like this. When you try to lose weight fast, you run the risk of not only losing weight, but you may also be losing muscle. Losing muscle will affect your ability to lose fat and then you end up making your body basically work against itself to lose weight.

Danger #2 – Crash dieting screws up your metabolism.

When you try to lose weight fast, your body will react by slowing down your metabolism to reserve your energy that the body has stored in fat. When you skip meals or drastically reduce the amount of calories that you normally eat, your body will look to its fat stores as a way to supplement the calories that it’s not receiving. This means that your metabolism will slow down a lot and if your metabolism is slow, then that means that you’re not naturally burning fat quickly or efficiently.

Danger #3 – Crash dieting is not a long term solution.

Most people that crash diet rebound with a stronger appetite than they had previously simply because their body still wants the higher amount of calories that it was used to before the diet. This leads to quick weight gain because by this point your metabolism is so slow that it can’t burn the calories as fast as before. You end up gaining the weight that you lost right back in record time, feeling miserable along the way.

The easiest and simplest way to avoid all of these dangers is to simply lose weight slowly. Your body was not made to lose 5 or 10 pounds a week. It was made to lose 1 to 2.5 pounds a week at most. Even better, simply try to focus on losing no more than 1% of your body weight each week. This is the healthiest approach that you can take to losing weight and you’ll feel better and healthier every step of the way.

The initial two week kick start program only allows 20 grams of carbs per day. The carbs from fiber are netted – subtracted from the total carb count.  So for example, while ¼ cup of blueberries has a total carb count of 5.1 grams, only 4.1 grams are counted because 1 gram is from fiber.

Protein such as fish, chicken, beef, and pork contains 0 grams.  The diet allows cheese and eggs.  Seafood is tricky, some, like shrimp, have 0 grams  and others like oysters, pack a walloping 12.5 grams per 6 oz.  You can have limited amounts of green vegetables such as spinach, kale, broccoli, asparagus, and cabbage.  Fruit is not allowed.  To give you examples of carb counts, an apple has a net 16 grams of carbs, a slice of wheat bread has 12 carbs.   Alcohol in any form is not allowed during the kickoff stage.  An exercise period of 30 minutes per day is mandatory.

After the initial two weeks, carbs are gradually and slowly added back to the diet, fruits and vegetables first.  Some vegetables like sweet potatoes (19) and corn (14 per 1/3 cup) contain too many carbs to ever become a regular part of the diet.  The maximum level of carbs at this stage should be between 30 to 35. The objective is to continue losing weight but at a lesser rate than the initial two week period.  If the weight loss stops the number of carbs being consumed has to decrease again.

The maintenance diet is at a level of carbs where you’ve stopped losing weight and don’t gain weight.  It maxes out at about 40 grams of carbs per day.  A turkey sandwich with mayo and sliced tomatoes is about 30 grams of carbs.  A medium pear has 21 and one cup of 2% milk has 11.

Sugar, processed foods, flour and starches, such as potatoes and rice are pretty much off limits forever on the Atkins Diet. Most fruits have to be eaten in moderation if at all and certain vegetables as well.

The first, and probably most important thing that you’ll have to do is to accept that you’re overweight and that you need to diet. Denial is not going to get you anywhere. You have to stare the problem right in the face and confront it head on. You have to have a positive attitude that you’re going to lose the weight. Sometimes attitude is everything. So going in with that positive attitude will make things a heck of a lot easier.

The next thing you have to do is tune out the outside world, especially your friends. When you hit the restaurants with them and order your fruit salad and cottage cheese, they’re going to make their comments about why you’re dieting. They’re going to make you feel like you’re missing out on that cherry cheese cake. You’ll need to learn how to not let those remarks get to you. More importantly, you can’t allow yourself to feel cheated. Make a game of it if you have to. Dieting can actually be fun, especially when you’re making progress, which brings us to our next point.

There are safe ways to lose weight and then there are not so safe ways. I’m not talking so much about particular diets but the speed in which you lose the weight. It has been determined that you should not lose more than one pound per week in order to lose weight safely. So when you are going on a diet, you have to learn patience. If you’re 50 pounds overweight, you’re not going to lose all that weight overnight. Don’t even attempt to do it because it’s not healthy. One of the biggest reasons why people don’t lose weight is that they don’t have patience with their diet.

These are primarily the main things that you have to keep in mind when going on a diet. If you can manage to keep a positive attitude, block out all negative influences and learn to have patience, you’ve already won a big battle as far as losing the weight that you want to get rid of.

In the next article of this series, we’ll go over what some of your most common dieting options are.

A spike in the blood sugar or glucose, signals the pancreas to make more insulin. The insulin’s job is to get the sugar out of the blood stream into the organs for energy or into storage.  The body stores glucose as fat.  Keeping the blood sugar from spiking means less insulin is produced which means the sugars are absorbed slowly resulting in a steady level of decreasing sugar levels rather than a rush.  Low blood sugar leads to cravings for sugary foods and over eating.  And the cycle starts again.

Bad carbs spike the blood sugar.  Good carbs don’t.  Good carbs are those from foods which contain a lot of fiber, such as whole grains or contain fiber and water such as fruit.  The body takes longer to digest the good carbs so they enter the blood stream more slowly.

The longer food takes to digest the better.  For example a piece of raw broccoli is better than cooked because your body has to work harder to digest the raw broccoli.  The faster carbohydrates are digested, the more quickly they’re turned into sugar – glucose, and the more likely they will be turned to stored fat.

Fiber, protein and fats slow down the digestive system which means the blood sugar rises slowly and falls slowly.  The tendency to over eat is diminished and the onset of hunger delayed.

The South Beach Diet limits fats and oils and encourages the consumption of lean cuts of meat and low fat cheeses.  Vegetables and fruits are allowed after the initial phase I – two week period.  Whole grains can be added back including whole grain bread.   White breads, cookies, cakes, rice, potatoes, and sugar are off limits except for special occasions.

The South Beach Diet is a change in eating patterns for life, but other than the forbidden processed foods, white flour, and sugar, the diet is reasonably manageable.  It allows a broader selection of foods than the Atkins diet.

Diet pills?

A lot of people just don’t have what it takes to lose weight naturally. Sure, the methods that I mentioned above do help people get started, but most people will reach a plateau and need help getting to the next level.

And that’s when diet pills enter the equation.

Now, before you get too excited, let’s take a moment to look at the pros and cons of diet pills, ok? Let’s start with the cons first.

Cons

There are a ton of diet pills in the market for you to choose from. How do you decide which ones to use? With all of the choices available, you may be paralyzed with uncertainty about which diet pills you should choose and if they are effective.

There are many diet pills that aren’t even approved by the FDA that are being sold on the market right now. That’s bad because consumers won’t know what all of the possible side effects are until it’s available in the market.

Most diet pills have not been tested to the point that their companies’ claims are justified. A lot of companies simply want to get the pills out there and let the chips fall where they may as long as they are making money from them.

Pros

Not all of the diet pills on the market require a prescription to use, primarily diet pills that contain natural ingredients. Some people want to grab weight loss by the horns and this is one of the most effective ways to do that.

Also, a lot of diet pills available today are considered over the counter medication, so there is no need for long delays from your primary healthcare provider for a prescription. This is valuable time that could be spent achieving your weight loss goals.

Diet pills are main factor to overcoming whatever weight loss plateau you are stuck on. Just as you would add new exercises to stimulate your body to lose weight, adding diet pills to your workout regimen will let you shed weight much faster and efficiently.

Anytime you are considering diet pills, you must look at the pros and cons of their use. Don’t be hasty in your decision. The extra time used to make a more informed choice will pay off in the long run.

The most common way for people to lose weight is by simple dieting. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as you’d like to think mainly because there are so many different diets out there. Each one has its own method of going about losing the weight. For example, you have the weight watchers point system diet. Each food gets a certain number of points assigned to it. Based on your current weight and what your goal weight is, you’re to eat a certain number of points each day and no more. It sounds easy, until you see how many points you’re allowed and how many you get hit with just from eating a tablespoon of peanut butter.

The next most common way for people to lose weight is through exercise programs. Believe me, there are more exercise programs than Carter has liver pills. You’ve got everything from yoga class to getting your own treadmill and throwing it in the basement. The primary goal of all these exercise programs is to burn off those extra calories that you took in when you pigged out on that hot fudge sundae the other night. Of course, if you ever took a look at how few calories were actually burned for an hour’s workout, you’d ultimately realize that you’d have to do a ton of exercising to lose any significant amount of weight.

The last method of losing weight, and one that many people seem to turn to when all else fails, is taking diet pills. A lot of people wonder what it is about these pills that makes it so that people lose weight. Contrary to what some people believe, that these pills actually burn away the fat, what they actually do is suppress a person’s appetite. I’m not going to get into all the technical mumbo jumbo about how diet pills actually work. The end result is simple. You take the diet pill and you don’t feel like eating as much and THAT is how you lose the weight. As I said up top, I’m not going to get into the good and bad of each method, but diet pills can be dangerous if not used properly. So if you’re going to opt for this method, which most people do when all else fails, consult with your doctor first.

The first thing you need to do is actually determine if you need to lose weight. Oh, I know, you’re not a size three. Well, maybe you’re not supposed to be a size three. After all, each of us have different heights and bone structures. Those two things play a great role in determining just how much we should weigh. For example, somebody who is five foot seven with a small frame, or bone structure, should not weigh as much as somebody who is five foot five with a large frame, or bone structure. News flash, bones are heavy. So you have to take that into consideration.

So, how DO you determine whether or not you should lose weight? Well, the good news about figuring this out is that modern science has done all this work for you. There are charts for every size frame and height imaginable in order to determine your correct body weight. And the beauty of these charts is that you can find them easily online. There are a number of sites on the Internet that have very complex programs developed to return your ideal weight. All you need to do is pop in your height and frame type and you’re in business. Some charts also include age as well since out metabolisms do slow down as we get older.

After we have determined what our ideal weight is supposed to be, we then have to find out what our current weight is. Don’t rely on your bathroom scale, sorry to say. Regardless of what they say, they’re not guaranteed to be accurate. Go to your doctor and find out what your actual weight is. His scale is going to be a lot more accurate than the one you picked up at Sears.

After you’ve determined what you’re actual weight is, you simply take your actual weight and subtract your idea weight from it. This will tell you how many pounds overweight you are to the pound and as accurately as possible. Why is this so important? Because losing weight properly has to be done systematically and with great regulation if it’s going to be done right.

In the next article of this series, we’re going to discuss some of the reasons why people are overweight. By understanding these few things and making changes in these areas, you may actually start to lose weight even before you begin your diet.