Easy Ways to Lose Weight by Just Getting to Know Yourself & Your Body

There are hundreds if not thousands of diets out there trying to persuade you that their diet is the best, easiest, and fastest way to lose weight. From the Atkins Diet to the Mediterranean from the South Beach Diet to Weight Watchers. There is only one problem with each and every one of these diets...if your body and your mind do not match up with the particular actions the diet suggest you perform, then you will never lose weight. It doesn't matter how easy they make the diet sound, it will never work for you unless your body style matches the diet. Also keep in mind, that no matter what kinds of foods you eat or how you exercise, it's knowing yourself and your body that will determine how easy and how much weight you will eventually lose. This article will discuss how to get to know your body and what types of foods and exercises might work for you. It will also discuss the two things you need to do in order to lose weight – eat right and exercise.

Before anyone starts a diet it's an excellent idea to understand how your body works. Before we get into trying to figure out how your body works and what types of diets may or may not work for you, we need to cover some very basic physiology. No matter what you eat the body typically breaks down that food into five common components – fat, protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals. The body then uses these five components for various processes. There are all kinds of processes, but the ones we are concerned with are the ones that either cause us to gain weight, lose weight or gain muscle.

Now it's time to try and determine what works for your body when it comes to dieting and what type of exercises work for you that can help you lose that unwanted weight. The first thing is the actual diet, what foods you should eat and which ones you should avoid. The only way to truly find out which foods make you gain a lot of weight and which ones don't effect you is by trial. Most people that are pitching their diets will either say - “stay away from calories” or “watch out for those saturated fats” or “try to avoid sodium (salt)”. The truth is, any one of these could make you gain weight and any of them could also have little effect on you. Haven't you seen those girls that can eat a whole chocolate cake and never gain a pound? Those guys that drink 3-4 beers and eat a whole pizza and never develop that “beer gut?” I know how those people make you feel believe me, it's simply not fair. But there are certain foods that you can eat that won't cause you to gain weight as well. You just have to figure out what nutrients in the food that causes you gain the weight and cut down on it. For example, I tried the type of diet were I counted my calories. I researched how many calories I should eat a day in order to lose weight. I got out my calculator, read the labels on everything I ate and started counting. I followed the research to a “t” and after a week guess what....yep – you guessed it....no loss in weight! How discouraging and frustrating. So I thought to myself, “what else is there to cut back on when it comes to reading those labels....sodium and fat. I decided to start cutting down on the fat grams. Fat-free items definitely lose a lot of taste, but products with 5 or less grams of fat really aren't that bad. I went for the reduced fat items (reduced fat chips ahoy cookies are amazing!) and guess what...I began to lose weight. I can't start to explain why this happened, but it worked for me. I never counted or worried about calories again, but I did watch those fat grams and I lost weight. A lot of times this is where people stop and think that the weight will start to easily and quickly disappear. Not True!

Now that you have figured out what foods will help you lose that weight, it's time to figure out what kinds of exercises will help speed up the process. Once again, this may be a trial and error period. Some people can walk one mile and lose five pounds, it's just how their body works. For me, I have to sweat ! I can walk all over town, but if I'm not sweating, I'm not losing anything. It can be the middle of the summer, 70-80 degrees out, but when I go for walks or jogs I still have on a pair of sweat pants and a sweatshirt so I can, “sweat the poison”. I also realized that by lifting weights, even just small amounts, allows my body to keep working even after I have sat down to relax. This is actually a fact. Once you break down muscle tissue in your body, it has to work to build that tissue back up. Guess what it uses to build that tissue? Yep....fat grams or sugar that can turn into fat. The whole key with exercising is knowing what works for you and doing that. Try not to spend a lot of money on gadgets that advertise how easy it is. The only piece of equipment I bought, that I truly thought I needed, was a treadmill. The reason I bought it was so I could still walk/jog in the cold winter months because it's pretty difficult to work up a sweat outside in 10-20 degree weather. So I crank up the heat to 80 and put on my sweats and sweatshirt and go to work!

The whole key to losing weight is knowing and buying into that fact that the diet and exercise go hand in hand. Walking two miles and working up a great sweat and then heading to McDonalds for dinner is only going to frustrate you. Knowing what ingredients effect your body is crucial to understanding what to cut back on and what you can indulge in when it comes to your actual diet. Does any kind of physical activity help or accelerate your weight loss plan, or do you have to actually sweat in order to lose weight is also a key to taking off those extra pounds. One last thing to keep in mind is be patient! I can recall stepping on the scale 2-3 days in a row and not losing a single pound and I had been dieting and exercising. But after day 3 I lost two pounds, then another pound, then two more pounds and before I knew it within a couple of weeks I had lost 5-7 pounds! Somebody told me it had to do with the salt and retention of water that was keeping the weight on in the beginning. Of course my reply was, “a guy can retain water?” Good Luck Everyone!