There are literally thousands of diet plans being promoted nowadays for people who wish to lose a few pounds and it is often hard to know just where you ought to begin. However, before you begin to think about any weight loss plan it is important that you have a clear grasp of precisely what dieting is really all about.
Weight loss is a simple case of regulating what you eat and what your body does with that food. Pause for a moment and re-read that last sentence because it is absolutely fundamental to any diet plan and if you take this on board you cannot fail to shed those extra pounds.
The food that you consume is in essence fuel for your body and it gives you the energy you need. If you put precisely the correct quantity of fuel into your body for the activity that you are doing then your weight will stay static but, if you put in more fuel than your body needs, then your body will store the excess food as fat and your weight will begin to increase. In the same way, if you put too little food into your body it will begin to dip into its reserve of fat to find the energy that it requires and your weight will begin to fall.
You will see therefore that it is possible to increase or decrease your weight by regulating the quantity of fuel which you put into your body and the amount of work that your body does to use up that fuel. In other words, eat more and take less exercise and your weight will rise or eat less and take more exercise and you are on a weight loss plan!
For a lot of people diets are similar to starvation. However, losing weight is not just a question of eating less but is much more a question of eating the correct kinds of food. In fact, it is possible to lose weight by consuming more and not less food, replacing high calorie foods such as fried breakfasts, peanut butter sandwiches, shepherd's pie, deep fried battered fish and fried potatoes with foods that are low in calories such as grilled or poached fish, vegetables, pasta, rice and a wide variety of fruits.
As long as you choose your food carefully, and there is a huge range from which to pick, you can not only reduce your fuel intake, but you will also be able to fill yourself up sufficiently so that you are not hungry in between meals.
The second very important but often ignored part of dieting is exercise. For most of us exercise conjures up a not very pretty image of a gym filled with already fit men and women and bodybuilders. Exercise however comes in all different forms and can be great fun.
The key to exercise in a diet plan is to begin slowly and gradually build up as your fitness improves and your weight falls. Additionally, you should select several different forms of exercise or activity that you enjoy as there is little worse than getting into a rut and following the same exercises every day. This will merely lead to boredom and in next to no time you will almost certainly give up exercising altogether. Remember also that the aim in this case is simply to raise your level of activity in order to burn off extra calories to support your diet plan.
Dieting is not a mystical process the key to which is locked in a vault with a key and a seven digit combination lock. Neither is it an undertaking on the scale of skiing to the South Pole. It is really a quite simple process of regulating your food intake and your level of activity and can be great fun.
