Diet and Exercise the Secret to Losing Weight
If you stay on a weight reduction diet, regardless of the combination of foods, you will lose weight. Unfortunately, you do not plan to stay on “a diet” the rest of your life. Most people, after losing ten or fifteen pounds, give themselves “a break.” They begin eating their favorite foods again, and soon they are back where they started.
Rarely can people maintain their weight by diet alone. The reason for this is that the body resists change and adjusts to the new program, and it becomes increasingly difficult to lose weight. This has been observed in people who were starving to death in concentration camps or in famine areas. Their bodies’ furnaces were dampened. Once your body makes this adjustment to a low-calorie diet, the only way you can continue to lose weight is by exercising regularly.
Another very important reason why exercise should go hand in hand with dieting is that when you restrict food alone, you lose both fat and active body tissue – lean body mass and muscle. In addition, your muscles burn most of your food calories. When you lose muscle tissue, you decrease your capacity to burn fuel, and in addition, you lose the outlines that make your body attractive.
The more muscle you retain, the better you will feel; the more fuel you will burn, the more shapely you will become and the more successful you will be in losing weight.
It is commonly believed that exercise adjusts your body’s thermostat higher so that your body will increase the rate at which it burns fuel and that this increased rate of fuel consumption continues during non-exercise periods. However, recent studies have shown that this is not true. The truth is that the amount of fuel you burn depends on the amount of muscle you have and how much you use it.
The secret to losing weight.
The formula for success is not difficult to understand, but it is difficult to put into practice because of established habits of life. Some people are literally “addicted” to food. Some even claim that it would be easier to give up smoking, drinking, and drugs than to curtail their eating. No one needs to take drugs, to drink, or to smoke. These can safely be eliminated from life. Nevertheless, food is different. Anyone who eliminates food from his life will die. Thus, food remains forever a temptation.
Food must always be present on our lives. It is the center of so many of our activities – parties, picnics, and celebrations, as well as our regular meals. What is more, we all do and should enjoy eating. Our creator designed food and designed us to get nourishment, pleasure, and satisfaction from eating. Then what is the problem?
The amount of food you eat is determined by three important pleasures or satisfactions you gain from it – visual, gastric, and psychic. You fill your plate with a certain amount of food, and as this disappears, you feel a certain fulfillment – visual satisfaction. As you eat the food on your plate, it fills your stomach and produces a feeling of gastric satisfaction. All this time, of course, you have been enjoying the aroma and flavors of the foods you have eaten psychic satisfaction.
What you must do – and there is no alternative – is to decide to eat a little less, with certain modifications. You want to have a nutritious diet, so examine the foods you are eating and significantly reduce or cut out altogether those that are nutritionally poor. Then plan your meals around those that remain.
