Do You Sabotage Your Weight Loss Program?

By: Owen Jones

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 plain batty. If
they sound foolish, they probably are. Have you heard of the
'cabbage water diet'? It sounds foolish 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 play a role to play in almost any
program you choose to follow. One of these truths is that it is
better to eat many small meals during the day (approximately
5-6), than to go all day without eating and then stuffing
yourself at dinner in the evening. This is popularly called
'grazing'.

Have you ever wondered why this might be so? Well, the fact is,
that the typical human body can only process about 250 calories
an hour. If you consume more than that, you are almost certainly
overloading your digestive system. This is why it is important,
because if your body cannot handle all the calories that you
give it, it will store them.

Your body can only use up what it needs to fulfill the job that
it is active with, that is, what you are putting it through. If
you are watching TV, most of those 250 will be stored. If you
are exercising, most will be burned up. It stores the residue 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 hard times
any longer. Therefore, that fat is never used up and we just
keep adding to it until we decide, 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 ought to 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.

Therefore, 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 requires it and
secondly, you are able to better maintain a steady 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
surprising what it will stretch too, if you take the trouble to
investigate. It is true that you will have to severely restrict
some foodstuffs, like bread, pasta, rice and potatoes, but
whoever honestly 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 good cookbook, which shows calorie content. You are at
work all day? OK, eat some fruit, but choose wisely. It can be
done, it only takes a little will and planning.

About the author:
Owen Jones, the author 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?