If you would like to lose weight, you must have a plan, a route map to success. This is called a program or programme. There are thousands of programs, but many of them are just just batty. If they sound foolish, they probably are. Have you heard of the ‘cabbage water diet’? It sounds daft and it is. You cannot only drink cabbage water all your life!
Although there is a lot of claptrap talked about losing weight, there are some truths that have a role to play in nearly any program you choose to follow. One of these truths is that it is better to eat many small meals during the day (about 5-6), than to go all day without eating and then stuffing yourself at dinner in the evening. This is commonly called ‘grazing’.
Have you ever wondered why this might be so? Well, the fact is, that the typical human body can only handle about 250 calories an hour. If you consume more than that, you are probably overloading your digestive system. This is why it matters, because if your body cannot use all the calories that you give it, it will store them.
Your body can only use up what it requires to fulfill the job that it is busy with, that is, what you are putting it through. If you are watching TV, a lot of of those 250 will be stored. If you are exercising, most will be burned up. It stores the remainder as body fat. Your body has learned through evolution that tough times will come, so it prepares for them. It is like us putting excess money in a savings account or people hoarding food if a bad winter is predicted.
However, these days in the West, we rarely face those lean times any longer. Therefore, that fat is never used up and we just keep adding to it until we resolve, by choice, to limit our intake of calories or increase our amount of exercise.
Given this information, what can we do with it? Well, if you were to want to lose weight, you should be consuming no more than 1,500 calories a day (or whatever your program tells you), so 1,500 divided by 250 is six. if you ate 250 calories every other hour, that would give you twelve hours.
Consequently, eating light but often would be a helpful strategy or program to follow, because first of all, you are only providing your body with what it requires, when it needs it and secondly, you are able to better maintain a consistent blood sugar level, which means that you iron out the spikes and troughs you experience in a normal day’s cycle.
Two hundred and fifty calories does not sound a lot, but it is amazing what it will stretch too, if you take the time to investigate. It is true that you will have to rigorously restrict some foodstuffs, like bread, pasta, rice and potatoes, but whoever seriously thought that you could lose weight by eating that stuff anyway?
If you do not have time to cook a number of times every day, look in your supermarket. There are loads of ’250 calorie’ microwave meals. You don’t want to eat that? I don’t blame you. so get a decent cookbook, which shows calorie content. You are at work all day? OK, eat some fruit, but choose wisely. It can be done, it only requires a little determination and planning.
Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with lose weight programs. If you have an interest in losing weight, too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight?
