Nearly five months into the year and if you are like most people who made losing weight your New Year’s resolution, chances are – you’ve already blown it. It’s hard to stick to a diet. I know that I have always found diets to be hard to stick to. I despise deprivation diets. All the things we need to give up constantly bombard us through advertising. The same advertising that bombards us with everything we want to eat. Then we’re equally bombarded by the images of food we can’t wait to eat, but we’re denied the right to.
Deprivation just sucks.
Dieting experts tell us to count calories, points, grams, ounces, exchanges and every other thing under the sun. A diet can require us to buy pre-packaged foods or have meals delivered. The cost can be prohibitive and it can make it even more difficult to eat out when you have to depend on the meals that you are delivered.
Frankly, with the amount of over-information that is available – it can be really depressing that you and millions of others are still fighting the battle of the bulge.
The problem, you see – is the fundamental principle of weight loss. That fundamental principle requires that the number of calories you eat be less than the number of calories you burn. When you burn more than you consume, your body must resort to burning excess fat for the extra nutrition that it needs. But it will only do this if you are exercising regularly because muscles burn more calories than fat.
Deprivation leads to cravings. Your body will rebel against the diet, especially when it is not getting enough calories to sustain muscle mass. That’s the other crafty part about dieting. As you lose weight and build muscle, you need to be able to adjust your diet accordingly. If you lose a lot of muscle tissue because you are not actively exercising, you will find that your metabolism will continue to drop and your body fat is higher than it was before you started exercising.