Weight loss seems simple at first glance -- if you eat less, you will weigh less. While that may be true in a sense, healthy weight loss is far more complicated than that. Simply starving yourself, in many cases, will be counterproductive to your long-term fitness goals. Eating the correct foods in the correct way can be far more beneficial.
Fat Conservation
Your body does lose weight when you burn off more calories than you consume each day. However, if you suddenly cut a drastic amount of calories out of your daily diet, your body may try to compensate by storing as many of those calories as possible as fat. Afraid that it is faced with a sudden shortage of food, your body may conserve these fat stores to help it survive a potential famine, choosing instead to burn muscle mass to make up the caloric shortfall.
Lifestyle Improvements
Rather than cutting dramatically back on calories, you will experience more healthy and effective improvements to your physical fitness if you make more subtle lifestyle and dietary changes. For example, rather than stopping eating bread entirely, switch to a nutritious whole-grain bread instead of the empty calories of highly processed white bread. Instead of cutting out meat entirely, try lean chicken, turkey or tuna rather than fried, greasy choices. The type of calories you eat is perhaps even more important than the number.
Breakfast
Of all the situations where simply skipping food is counterproductive, eating breakfast may have the most dramatic impact on your weight-loss goals. Eating a nutritious breakfast at the beginning of the day lets your body know that there is no scarcity of food and, therefore, no particular reason to conserve extra fat stores. Additionally, a healthy breakfast to start the day helps keep your appetite in check and helps prevent binge junk food eating later in the day.
Meal Scheduling
Another lifestyle change that has helped many people lose weight is switching from a few large meals per day to several smaller meals. This also helps send your body the message that food is readily available and not to store what you consume as fat, which can help keep your hunger pangs under control. Additionally, ClevelandClinic.org states that a University of Cambridge study found that people who ate six small daily meals had 5 percent lower cholesterol levels than those who ate fewer, larger meals.
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