Ways on how to lose weight securely

If you need to really understand how to lose weight you only need to remember one equation.  Calories Burned – Calories Intake = Calories Lost.  It really is as simple as that.  When a person works out they burn calories.  When a person is more energetic they burn calories.  When they eat food they gain calories.  Every 3500 calories you gain or lose equals one pound of weight.

Reduce Eating

This is the most dangerous part of the equation.  If you try to eat so little that you lose weight quickly you can have nutritional problems.  Also, if you starve yourself you won’t gain as much as you hope because your body will slow down your metabolism meaning you burn fewer calories as part of living.

Burn More Calories

The best way to burn more calories is to do aerobic exercise.  By doing workouts like running to get your heart rate up over 150 beats per minute you can get the maximum calories burned per hour during your workout.  However, not just aerobic time is good.  Doing anything active throughout the day versus being sedentary will increase the number of calories used for energy.

Increase Your Metabolism

By increasing your metabolism you will burn more calories per day just by existing.  The most common way to increase metabolism is to increase your muscle mass.  Muscles require more calories per day to maintain so you will burn more when more of your weight is muscle.  For some this may not be an appealing option because they don’t want to be bulky.  Swimming and running produces a leaner muscle build than standard weightlifting.   Some doctors claim that a balance of vitamins and other supplements can increase your metabolism making you more alert.

Putting it All Together

It is very difficult to lose significant weight by focusing on only one aspect of losing weight.  Not eating is the worse option to focus on because you can only limit your results down to zero. As you can read in this post, how to lose weight without a diet, if you choose not to follow a balanced diet then the whole process will become more difficult.

Really you can’t even limit to zero because you’ll just become so sluggish that you’ll lose less for every calorie you reduce.  It’s a losing battle.  Most recommend that you lower your calorie intake about 10 – 20% less than your recommend maintenance intake.

There are online calculators that give you a good estimate of the number of calories you need to not gain or lose weight.  After that I would just add a blend of cardio and weight lifting activities.

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