You don’t just lose muscle from your legs and arms. You lose some from your heart. Many fad diets provide protein supplements under the supposition that eating more protein will prevent muscle loss, but it doesn’t work that way.

Exercise, generally recommended as part of a weight loss plan anyway, will help preserve muscle tissue. You should make smaller changes in your diets and activity levels so that you lose no more than two pounds a week. It’s relatively easy to determine how many calories you should eat to lose weight if you know the right formulas.

A pound of fat is equal to about 3,500 calories. Figure out how many calories you eat to maintain your weight. And then, if you want to lose a pound a week, you would need a deficit of 500 calories a day.

If you wanted to lose two pounds a week, you would need a deficit of 1,000 calories a day. So if you are eating 2,000 calories a day, cutting your intake to 1,500 calories should result in a weight loss of a pound a week.

Experts do not recommend dieters cut down below 1,200 calories a day, because it is virtually impossible to get sufficient protein, vitamins and minerals on less than that.

Another way of calculating is to determine how many calories you need to maintain your desirable weight and cut down to that level, allowing the excess baggage to drop away. On the average, women need 12 calories a pound of bodyweight for very light activity, 13 for light, 14 for moderate, 15 for strenuous and 16 for very strenuous.

Men need 14 calories a pound for very light activity, 15 for light, 16 for moderate, 17 for strenuous and 18 for very strenuous.

Very light activity involves mostly sitting with up to two hours of standing or walking each day. Very strenuous activities include tennis, swimming, running, basketball and football.

Thus, a woman whose activity level is very light, who weighs 150 pounds – but whose ideal weight is 120 pounds – would need 1,440 calories at her ideal weight. That is 360 calories less than the 1,800 she would need to maintain her current weight – and would result in a loss of about a pound every 10 days.

But by increasing her activity level to moderate, she would burn 2,100 calories a day at her present weight and 1,680 at her ideal weight.

By comparison, a 200-pound man with a very strenuous activity level would need 3,600 calories to maintain his weight, while a 160-pound man who is a couch potato would require just 2,240 calories.

People who want to lose weight should return to the “basic four” food groups and cut their fat intake in particular, since fat has more than twice as many calories as carbohydrates or protein. And cutting down on extras can make a big difference. Just 150 calories a day – approximately the amount in either a 12-ounce can of cola or a 1-ounce bag of potato chips – adds up to 54,750 calories, or nearly 16 pounds of weight, in a year’s time.

A new study also indicates that people can lose weight by cutting down on fat and eliminating refined sugar, but not making a great effort to reduce their caloric intake.

So there you have it. Now that you know how many calories you should eat to lose weight, there are no more excuses for you. Start exercising and eating healthy and you will be amazed with the results.

A few individuals may be able to achieve their ideal weight by embarking on an exercise program; however, most people who want to lose weight will also have to reduce their intake of calories.

We keep reading about how important it is to have a balanced diet, but when we get all the figures thrown at us about vitamins, minerals and proteins and whatnot, we don’t know what to make of it all. Isn’t there some simple way that a person who is not a genius can have a balanced diet? Or is it necessary that we first learn how to operate a computer?

Enjoying a balanced diet does not require the intelligence of a genius or the use of a computer. A balanced diet can be achieved simply by eating moderate amounts of a number of different foods. This holds true, with only slight modifications, for people trying to lose weight. A balanced diet merely means consuming appropriate amounts of all nutrients, including proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and minerals.

However, it is not necessary to memorize lengthy lists of all the vitamins and minerals and all the foods that provide them. If you eat moderate amounts of a variety of foods, you will get all the nutrients you need.

The proper balance can be achieved by selecting foods from the four food groups: Dairy, which includes milk, cheese and yogurt; meat, including poultry, fish and beans; fruits and vegetables; and grain, including bread, cereal and rice.

Fats, sweets and alcohol compose a food group. The items included in this category provide calories but few nutrients, and therefore should be used sparingly.

When carbohydrates are eliminated or drastically reduced, a person’s appetite is diminished. That is because the body switches over to using protein and fat, and there is a chemical change in the body, called ketosis.

The hardest part of dieting for many people is controlling their appetites. But if you can consume just the same number of calories, regardless of the diet composition, you will lose the same amount of weight.

All low calorie diets are potentially dangerous. Semi-starvation is not the right approach to weight loss. Yes, the very low carbohydrate diets can lead to fatty deposits in the liver. The emphasis on proteins, particularly fat meats and other foods high in saturated fats, and even eggs, may significantly increase the total cholesterol levels.

The proper diet for weight loss is not a low calorie diet, but rather a balanced diet that includes all of the four basic food groups. It should provide 1,200 calories a day for adults. Anything less can lead to problems and needs to be managed by a physician. The low calorie diets being promoted today usually produce only temporary results. All you need to do is look at Oprah Winfrey’s story of rapid weight loss and not too long afterward, a rapid weight gain, back to where she started. That is the usual story. If you want to lose weight, you need to be on a program you can follow for life.

Don’t forget the value of exercise. A proper limited-calorie diet (rather than a very low calorie diet) along with a good exercise program is essential. And it really doesn’t matter if you have three or six meals a day. Calories do count and the total calorie intake is the important factor.

Losing weight (and trying to keep it off) is a major preoccupation for many adults in this country. Doctors tell us that being overweight is unhealthy. The media tell us that being overweight is unattractive. And the diet industry tells us (in no uncertain terms) that weight control can be a highly profitable business – for everybody but the person trying to figure out how to lose weight, for whom it can be a very expensive business.

How many times have you prayed for a magic pill or diet that would instantly solve your weight problem? How many times have you succumbed to the outrageous claims made for various diets, in the hope that this could be the one? How many pills or shots have you taken to try to lose those extra pounds quickly? How many times have you heard that the only thing that will really help you lose weight is to change your eating habits and increase your exercise? How many times have you rejected that advice as boring and impossible?

That many, huh?

Well, you’re going to hear it again, but this time with suggestions to make it easier.

While it is true that the only way to lose weight is to take in fewer calories than you burn, it is not as difficult as you might think to cut down on the number of calories you eat. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to give up everything you like to eat. It may just mean that you have to make room for food with fewer calories and more nutrients. Here’s how it works.

Your body is using up calories all the time, whether you are moving around or not. The rate at which you burn calories while at total rest is called your resting, or basal metabolic, rate. For women this is about 11 calories per pound of body weight and for men it is about 12. This means that if you are a woman who weighs 150 pounds, your body needs to take in about 1,650 calories a day just to exist. If you are engaged in light exercising, you multiply the BMR by 1 6, giving you approximately 2,400 calories to play with, moderate exercise activity requires somewhere around 3,450 calories (23 x BMR).

Let’s assume that this 150-pound woman is eating 2,500 calories a day and is doing light activity. If she cuts down her calories to 1,500 per day and does not change her exercisee pattern, in about 1 1/2 days she will lose a pound. If she begins to do moderate exercise and only eats 1,500 calories per day, it will take less time to lose the same pound.

You probably already know how to increase your activity level, but where can you cut those calories to make your weight loss plan as painless as possible?

• Instead of eating 1 croissant, substitute 1 plain bagel to save 72 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 whole egg, substitute 1 egg white to save 47 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 oz of Cheddar cheese, substitute 1 oz of part-skim mozzarella to save 42 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 tablespoon of cream cheese, substitute 1 tablespoon of 1 percent cottage cheese to save 35 calories.

• Instead of eating 35 oz of untrimmed beef, substitute 35 oz of trimmed beef to save 75 calories.

• Instead of eating 35 oz of lamb chop (broiled), substitute 35 oz of lean leg of lamb (broiled) to save 220 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 oz of regular bacon, substitute 1 oz of Canadian bacon to save 110 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 beef hot dog, substitute 1 chicken hot dog to save 67 calories.

• Instead of eating fast food French fries, substitute 1 baked potato (plain) to save 126 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 cup of ice cream (premium), substitute 1 cup of sorbet to save 350 calories.

The substitutions on this list also save many grams of fat and cholesterol, as well as calories. If you read labels, pay attention to what you are eating and eliminate the true junk food from your diet, you can come up with a 3,500 calorie savings in no time.

If you also start moving around and exercising a little more, you will lose weight even faster.

Now make no mistake, losing weight is hard work, requiring a lot of consistency and it will not work very quickly. But it is the most sensible way to lose weight, does not put money in anybody else’s pocket and will help you change your eating habits.

Incidentally, a person who has a normal amount of water in the tissues and goes to bed may also lose 5 pounds in one day. But it is not fat, and the weight will be regained once a person is out of bed.

It is important to drink enough water. The amount should be enough to cause a person to pass about one quart of urine or more a day.

But drinking water alone will not help you lose body fat. The key, as with many fad approaches to diets, is in how many calories you consume. If you continue to consume the same number of calories and have the same level of activity, drinking lots of water will not help you lose weight.

But if drinking water helps you limit your calorie intake, you might. The same applies to diets that are mostly lean meat. By limiting your appetite, and the fact that lean meat is not a high-calorie food, it is just a way to help limit your calorie intake. A pound of raw, separable lean round steak contains only 600 calories.

If you want to lose weight, limit your calorie intake and maintain a sensible exercise program.

There were some glowing reports about stomach stapling for weight loss, but this procedure was really not very good. The staples often came out and there were many complications. Because of its failure, several stages of modification have been developed.

Using a different method to segment the stomach and actually closing the top chamber of the stomach completely while rerouting the small intestine to bypass most of the lower part of the stomach have been done.

Stomach stapling can help a person lose weight because he eats less. You are really back to the basic truth that weight loss depends on consuming fewer calories than your body uses. If you could restrict your calories just as much without the operation, you would have the same results.

Stomach stapling complications

Initially there may be problems with nausea and vomiting. Others have the “dumping” syndrome. The small stomach means that whatever you consume is immediately dumped into the small intestine. This may cause attacks of flushing, rapid heart beat and even fainting. Doctors who have removed a major part of the stomach in the treatment of peptic ulcers are quite familiar with this complication.

The truth is, if you follow a proper weight loss program coupled with proper exercise you should be able to gradually lose excess weight without stomach stapling.?

Why diets don’t work

For decades, experts believed that weight problems were caused simply because people ate too much. That is, they consumed more calories than their bodies needed and the extra calories were stored as fat. New research, however, suggests that the real reason some people are heavier than others may have more to do with physiological differences between people than with how much they eat.

The most appropriate approach to preventing obesity may be to increase physical activity, rather than decrease caloric intake. There’s another reason why cutting calories alone doesn’t work.

Surprising as it may sound, crash dieting may actually cause you to gain weight in the long run. How? Drastically cutting back on calories can slow down your metabolism (the rate at which you burn calories). Each of our bodies has an internal control mechanism, or setpoint, that drives the body to maintain a certain amount of body fat. When we diet to lose weight, our bodies automatically try to compensate by conserving body fat – in effect slowing down our metabolism.

What’s a dieter to do?

Researchers are now pretty much convinced that increasing your activity is the easiest – and safest – way to lose weight. By increasing your physical activity instead of cutting back on calories, you won’t have to go around feeling hungry and miserable all day long. That means you’re more likely to stick with a sensible diet plan and make the weight loss stick, too.

Regular exercise helps you burn fat. Exercise slows down the rate of protein breakdown in your skeletal muscle, which means that an even greater portion of the calories will be burned as fat. You can see the results in groups of people who exercise regularly throughout their lives. Obesity is virtually nonexistent among nomadic people in Africa – even when fat comprises up to 70 per cent of the diet. Those people keep up a lifelong modest level of exercise. Their low body fat seems to be related to that continuous activity.

Dieting alone, on the other hand, usually causes you to lose water during the first several weeks, which you gain right back after you go off your diet. If you can manage to stick to a low-calorie diet for more than a few weeks, you’ll shed some fat, but the accompanying muscle loss can zap your strength. And although you won’t rapidly lose weight by exercising, you’ll probably notice improvements in your appearance fairly soon.

Since you’re building lean muscle mass, which weighs more than the fat you’re losing, your clothing size may drop before your weight follows suit.

But won’t exercise stimulate your appetite and make you want to eat more? That’s a myth. While it’s true that athletes in training do require more calories than most of us, studies have shown that regular, moderate exercise doesn’t appear to have much effect on the caloric intake of the average person.

If exercise is such a great way to lose weight, wouldn’t exercise and dieting work even better? Yes! In fact, scientific research is full of examples of the role of exercise in weight loss.

The beauty of combing exercise and diet, of course, is that you don’t have to cut calories so drastically, since the calories you burn during exercise add to the calorie deficit you need to lose weight. And since exercise helps stoke up your body’s calorie-burning abilities, it counteracts the detrimental effects that dieting alone has on metabolism.

If you decide to combine the two, just remember to diet sensibly. To start, make sure you take in at least 1,200 calories a day. If you eat any less than that, you’ll be short changing yourself nutritionally. One of the best ways to cut back on calories is to cut fat from your diet. That’s because fat has more calories (9 per gram) than protein or carbohydrates (4 calories per gram). And some studies suggested that it’s possible to gain weight on a low-calorie diet that’s high in fat.

But if you think about it, do all these drinks really have big effect on our diets?  Let’s run down the facts, it has come to my attention that a regular bottle of cola can carry as much as 200 calories! This is equivalent to you drinking a cup of water with 13 packets of sugar in it! When you make these claims people say, “Well…that why there’s diet soda!” Wrong! Although diet sodas are low in calories, research has shown that actually drinking these artificially sweetened drinks may lead the person to crave more sweets. The reason behind this is that the sweetener in diet sodas contain the chemical Aspartame. This is the low calorie chemical used to give diet soda their flavor and Aspartame is said to be 180x sweeter than sugar itself. There were also animal research done on this chemical and it’s shown that high consumption of the sweetener may lead to brain tumors and lymphoma in rodents. I cannot imagine what it can do to us!

Next are the sports drinks, we all see the Gatorade commercials and they are no joke. They usually have some sexy model of an athlete sweating, running, and working out and by the time they’re finished they’re sweating red or blue because of the Gatorade they were drinking. Well the commercial explains it all on who Gatorade is for. It’s for athletes not for the office worker who sit at the desk with a computer in hand! A typical 16 ounce of Gatorade is said to contain as much as 200 calories. So make sure when you’re drinking Gatorade, you’re doing some form of exercise.

Coffee is the next subject. When I mention this people are like wow really…coffee? Well not a regular cup of joe per say, but what I’m talking about is the melted milk shakes they call coffee. Okay, when you do go to a coffee shop what do you usually get? A Frappuccino double shot? A Cappuccino? A macchiato? You get my point? Yes these drinks with the domes can contains as much as 400 calories! 400….these contain more calories than a can of soda! Most of the calories come from the fat and sugar making up the drink and don’t forget you have to have breakfast too. Depending on a breakfast sandwich in one morning you can expect to get about 700-800 calories.

In conclusion, I’m not saying to stop drinking your favorite drinks. I’m only saying to do it in modesty, because most Americans drink these everyday! If you can cut some of these sugary drinks out of you life you could cut extra 450 calories! That is nearly one pound of fat loss in just one week. So remember to watch what you drink and read the labels. When you do think it’s a bad idea just drink water since it contains 0 calories and it’s always a good idea to stay hydrated.

Weight Loss Formula

• The number of calories eaten – The number of calories burned = Fat. In order to lose weight, the “Fat” value must be a negative number.

There are several ways to create a calorie deficit and those include:

• Eating fewer calories
• Aerobic exercise
• Weight training

Now I know this sounds very basic, and it is. The thing that makes everything more complicated is simply the fact that there is so much hearsay in the world of fitness. Keep this simple weight loss formula in mind while continuing through the weight loss program and you will be a step ahead of the rest.

Maybe warm-ups need a good ad campaign. An ad for warming up would tell you that it burns calories, enhances your fat burning potential, prevents injuries, and more. By not warming up, you do miss out on many important advantages.

For your warm-up activities it is recommended to do 10 minutes of light aerobic type activity, consisting of several different moves, to prepare your body for circuit training. You will move at a leisurely pace, say 50% of your maximum heart rate. In that 10-minute span of time, you can expend up to 100 calories. When it comes to exerting energy, every little bit counts.

Throughout the full 10 minutes off your warm-up, your body will tap initially into sugar for energy. By the time you begin your workouts, you will get a less sugar to spare, so your body will dip into its fat stores for energy much earlier. The advantage, you guessed it, more fat is burned.

Think about what it’s like to start your car’s engine when it’s cold. It performs poorly, right? Well, muscles are the same way; they don’t work well until they reach the proper temperature. Warming up also increases blood flow to your tissues, so that more oxygen and more nutrients are channeled to your muscles for fuel. Increased blood flow also helps remove waste products from muscles, such as lactic acid, that makes you want to quit. Finally your warm-up speeds up neural responses. Nerve impulses travel faster, improving your motor skills, coordination, reaction time and agility. Warmed up muscles move faster and generate more force than cold muscles and they burn more energy which means your body is better primed to lose weight.

If your muscles are cold and stiff and you go full throttle into your exercise routine, you are inviting injury on a couple of fronts. Your muscles shouldn’t be used until they are warm and pliable. But in addition, when you warm-up properly, raising your muscle temperature your body begins to lubricate your joints for easier movement and your muscle tissue becomes more elastic. This is important for strength training exercises in which you will need to move weight or resistance through a full range of motion. All of these psychological responses to reduce the risk of over stretching or tearing muscle fibers and connective tissue.

Also, if you begin a workout without a warm-up, you may provoke an irregular heart rhythm. In studies of healthy people, abnormal heart rhythms were found in those who exercised intensely without warming up, but disappeared when an appropriate warm-up was included in their exercise routine.