Diet & Workout Secrets

Weight-loss hopefuls have long followed accepted routines, diets and rules to the tune of underwhelming success. Although failure in weight-loss is often attributable to a lack of willpower, stubborn myths are also partly to blame. By understanding and applying these diet and exercise secrets, you can make your weight loss process more bearable.

The Importance of Tapering

Any many dieters understand, the optimal daily caloric intake is in the neighborhood of 2000. However, this often leads to the erroneous conclusion that the best way for a significantly overweight person to slim down is immediately adopting a 2000-calorie diet. In reality, a drastic drop in caloric intake will derail the weight-loss process; first, it will cause you to lose weight at an inadvisable rate, which can lead to health complications. Then, even if complications don't materialize, your body will enter starvation mode, lowering your metabolism to prevent further weight-loss and causing you to store a greater proportion of fat.

Fat is your Friend

Many traditional diets operate on the principle that dietary fat will make you fat. In reality, this is simply not the case. Fat contains the same number of calories per gram as carbohydrates, and most diets contain significantly more carbohydrates than fat. So, while you may have to cut the bun out of your diet, you can eat almost as many hamburger patties as you please; low-carbohydrate diets outperform low-fat diets in terms of weight-loss.

It's Okay to Cheat

Popular belief holds that dieting should be treated like any other withdrawal process; relapses must be avoided at all cost, and can sabotage a diet completely. In reality, the opposite is true. As mentioned above, once your body fully adjusts to a caloric deficit, it will adjust your metabolism to prevent further weight-loss. In order to avoid this adjustment, you can and should take one day each week to consume as many or more calories than you did before embarking on your diet. Remember, however, to keep this practice to once per week.

Less is More

There is a common conception that people with the best developed physiques spend hours in the gym each day. This is far from the truth. In reality, you should never spend more than five hours each week lifting weights because, at a certain point, weight-training becomes over-training, damaging your muscles too severely for them to recover and develop. So take a break from killing yourself in the gym; it will be to your advantage.

Intensity is Irrelevant

If you're serious about exercising to lose weight, chances are you've found yourself hyperventilating on a cardio machine, only to justify it to yourself by virtue of necessity. Fortunately, this never has to happen again. The fact is that walking at a comfortable pace is just as effective at burning fat as running yourself ragged, provided you increase the duration of your walk. As a rough guide, 20 to 30 minutes of high-intensity activity can be replaced by at least 45 minutes of low-intensity activity.