Let me start off by saying that you can eat as much as you want and still maintain your ideal weight. If you’re thinking this is voodoo, it’s not. See, the general concept of how we gain a pound and lose a pound is very simple. The best way to explain this is with an example. But first let me explain what a calorie is. Yes, the evil culprit to this whole vicious cycle of gaining and losing weight.

A calorie, to keep this as simple as possible, is the amount of energy that goes into our bodies in order to give us fuel to operate. If we get just the right amount of calories, then our weight stays where it is. However, if we take in more calories than we need because we don’t burn as much as we’d like, then the excess calories just sit in our bodies. When this happens, those calories turn to fat and that’s how we gain weight.

Okay, remember I said that gaining weight had nothing to do with how much food we ate? This is true to an extent. Naturally, I guess we could force ourselves to eat enough food to gain weight even if we at the right kinds of food. It would just be a lot harder to do than if we lived on a diet of Devil Dogs and Yodels. But I digress. The main reason people are overweight is because they take in more calories than they burn. Do that over a long enough period of time and you will gain weight. Take in enough calories and you’ll gain a lot of weight. It’s not rocket science.

Eventually, we’ll get to the actual part of dieting, which, when all is said in done, comes down to taking in fewer calories than you burn in a day. That is where the underlying reasons come in for why were are overweight, which come down to these few things.

The first is that we eat the wrong foods and too many of the wrong foods. A Whopper from Burger King has more calories than an average person needs for a whole day. So if you live on a diet of Whoppers, and mind you, this is just one meal in your day, you WILL gain weight, and a lot of it. There is just no way around this.

The second thing is that we don’t exercise enough. The only way we burn a significant amount of calories is by exercising. If we sit in a chair all day long, there are only so many calories we’re going to burn.

The third thing, unfortunately, is heredity. Some people have slow metabolisms, usually inherited from one of their parents. This makes burning calories that much harder. These are usually the most difficult cases in losing weight, but it is still possible to do so.

In our next article in this series, we’ll get into the area of dealing with being overweight. This is more than just going on a diet.

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.