The Fundamentals Of Weight Loss

When it comes to weight loss, many people have heard so many pieces of contradictory advice that they lose sight of the most fundamental issues. This post will help you get back down to basics so that you can finally begin losing weight in a way that is healthy, sensible, and speedy.

The first thing you need to understand is that human bodies do not all burn calories at the same rate. Anyone who will tell you that a calorie is a calorie does not know anything about the way that the body works. You are not a furnace. You do not indiscriminantly burn up anything that gets shoveled in. Your body is a complex living organism that is constantly renewing its own tissues.

That means that when you eat a piece of meat, most of the protein in that meat will not be "burned up" as calories, but rather will be incorporated into your body as muscle, organ tissue, and hormones. Therefore it is erroneous to think about how many "calories" worth of meat you're eating.

On the other hand, if you eat a muffin, it is almost entirely made of fuel. The calories in the muffin will be burned sooner or later. But there is more going on than that. The carbohydrate in the muffin causes your body to release insulin, which tells your cells that it is time to start taking sugar out of your bloodstream and either burn it or convert it to fat. So if you eat just a few too many calories worth of muffin, you will have more body fat than you did before. But you can eat protein more or less indiscriminantly.

The only other thing you need to know is that fat will be used as fuel when you eat it, but it will only be stored up for later if it is accompanied by carbohydrate. This is because insulin is also responsible for telling your cells to store existing fat for later. So as long as you don't eat any carbohydrates, it will be virtually impossible for you to gain weight.

Given what you now know about how the body and its metabolism work, you can easily surmise how you should eat that will cause your body composition to comform to your wishes. If you want more muscle, you have to eat more protein. Otherwise, how would you ever build muscle? You can't build muscle out of starch.

If you want to be slim, you have to get your body burning fat instead of storing it. The signalling system for this activity is intiated by sugar, so you have to eliminate sugar. And that doesn't just mean straight sugar, but all carbohydrates. After all, as every one of us learned in Biology class, the body breaks down starches into simple sugars. It's that simple.

This simple information gives you tremendous control over how you will look. You just have to manipulate these few simple variables and you can dramatically and quickly alter your body composition. There are of course plenty of intricacies to physiology and metabolism that you could explore, but this is the basic information that you really need, and if you never read another article on weight loss you'll do just fine.

About the Author

Marcus Maybourne is a health professional with a special interest in helping people find fastest ways to lose weight. Losing weight and maintaining a healthy body should be easy.

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