Watching Those Calories

Calories play a crucial role in any diet, for to lose weight we must burn more calories than we take in when we eat, to lose just one pound in weight you must burn off 3,500 calories more than you take in. Therefore it is simply a matter of cutting down on the calories consumed and exercising a little more each day.

How the body burns calories

Simple basic functions such as sleeping, breathing, digesting food and even just sitting all use energy but these activities alone are not enough to lose weight of course, but any physical activity added to our normal daily routine helps to burn off calories.

Watch What You Eat

Once you have dieted and have reached the weight ideal for your height then obviously you want to maintain that weight, the easiest way to do that is by controlling the portions of food that you eat.

It is thought that many of us underestimate greatly portion sizes and the amount of calories they hold. So what actually is the recommended portion size, below are guides to actual serving or portion sizes:

Healthy Eating For Children

Just about everyone you talk to will say at some time in their lives they have been on a diet, many adults worry to some extent about their weight but now it seems that increasingly children are worried about their weight too.

More so it’s becoming increasingly popular to be thin, teenage girls often fall into the category of worrying sometimes to the point of obsession about the weight. But is it good for children to actually go on a diet, the majority of children do not need to diet and they shouldn’t.

Dieting & The Internet

Another popular way to manage your diet is online using your home computer and your web browser, usually you will be asked to sign up for an account online, some of them are free to join while others charge a small fee or give a free trial.

What are the benefits?

Usually this type of club will offer a custom plan based on a series of questions and answers, the plan will then guide you as to how many calories you should be having per day, the average weight for a person of your height and build and you will be given the option of tracking your weight, your daily exercise routine and plan the goals you wish to achieve.

Diet Success

Many of us go on diets time and time again only to give up and very often we even regain the weight we lose and so we begin again after a few weeks. Even the slightest weight loss can make a huge difference to the person who is overweight or obese.

The reason many of us fail fad diets is that losing weight is a slow process so in the long term crash diets do not work. Fad diets may work in the short term but once interest is lost we soon regain the weight, this can often discourage us from dieting.

Dieting A-Z

A glossary of weight loss, dieting and slimming terms you may encounter on this website.

Amino acids: There are 22 amino acids and these are units from which protein is formed.

Antioxidant: A substance that protects molecules from oxidation by getting oxidized itself.

Bingeing: An eating spree.

Calorie: An energy unit in food.