According to statistics, more than 60% of adult Americans (that’s more than 120 million Americans) are overweight or obese. Globally, there are more than 1 billion overweight adults, at least 300 million of them obese. Excess weight puts people at risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, certain forms of cancer, sleep apnea, liver disease, diabetes and a host of other conditions.
Because of a large number of different methods claiming to be able to help you lose weight, people often tend to get confused as to which method is best for them. If you are trying to figure out what is the best way to lose weight, here are some facts that may help you.
Why are people fat?
The foremost reason why most people are fat is because they eat wrong foods in the wrong amounts at the wrong times. It’s as simple as that. You don’t get fat because of a lack of exercising. Regular exercise is off course extremely beneficial and it helps to create a calorie deficit. However, while exercising helps you stay fit and in better health, you don’t get fat because you are not exercising, you basically get fat because of the food you eat and the way you eat it.
Do Low Fat diets work?
It seems everything today is low fat, except people. Increasing number of people are still fat despite growing number of products with fat substitutes. How can this be? Well, foods with fat substitutes might have fewer grams of fat, but they don’t have significantly fewer calories. Regardless of the fat content of the diet, eating more calories than you need will still lead to weight gain. Bottom line, a calorie is a calorie wherever it comes from.
Do Low Calorie or Low Carb diets work?
You will lose weight on a low calorie or low carbohydrate diet, the trouble is, you will only lose in the beginning. By starving yourself (and by using a low calorie or low carb diet you are starving your body) your metabolism will adjust itself by burning fewer calories, making you feel tired and hungry. In fact, fat cells respond to starvation by holding on to the fat they already have and becoming more aggressive at taking in new fat once the diet is over. You don’t have to starve yourself to lose weight. Actually, you shouldn’t.
The healthiest way to lose weight is not starvation or bursts of exercise, it’s eating the right meals in the right patterns each day. The number one diet secret that will work for most people is called calorie shifting.
Calorie shifting is a way to lose weight fast but without starving yourself. This diet is much easier then other diets because you are not eating less food and you are not sacrificing from any of the four major food groups.
Calorie shifting works by shifting the eating patterns from day to day and thus tricking metabolism so that it remains running high and burning a lot of fat. Because your metabolism is high all the time, you burn more calories. The result is rapid, but safe, weight loss.