Do You Even Need A Diet?

The people who say this usually mean that they don't like the way their body looks, they think they've become fat, and they want to change themselves. They give aid and comfort to the publishing industry when they then buy one of the hundreds of diet books available: The Grapefruit Diet, Lose All The Weight You Want In Six Minutes, or maybe Get Slim By Eating Everything You Like.

The problem with a diet book is that it usually requires you to radically alter the way you eat and the specific foods you choose. Most people don't like this kind of change for very long, which is why most diets don't last.

Here's a weight-losing diet suggestion much easier than eating only grapefruit. To learn this approach to losing weight, which I will call The Slightly Diet, you must first understand the three easy steps to follow if you really want to slim down. Here they are: eat slightly less, eat slightly different, and exercise slightly more. Or a combination of all three.

Each step, taken on its own, will help you lose weight, but taken together, they've proven themselves as an unstoppable combination. How does the Slightly Diet work?

Each pound of fat consists of 3,000 calories, so to burn off the excess fat, you must make some kind of allowance for those calories. If you follow the Slightly Diet by eating 500 calories less each day, and increase the amount of exercise by 500 calories, you would create a 1,000 calorie loss each day. Doctors have stated that the easiest way to keep weight off is to start by only losing about one kilo (2.2)pounds each week, until you reach your goal, which you could do with this simple method.

You can even lose 500 calories a day, not by eating less, but eating slightly different. One way to start is by not taking in as many calories from fat. Several recent studies on nutrition concluded that no more than thirty percent of your daily calories should come from fat, even better if you can reduce it to twenty- five percent.

You can figure out how much of your current calories come from fat by using a simple formula. First look on the nutrition label written on the product if there is one. You will usually find a figure for grams of fat per serving. Let's say for example that the label says 3g per serving. Each gram of fat equals nine calories, so multiply 3g times 9 calories equals 27 calories from fat.

Then at the top of the label, you will see a figure for total calories per serving. For our example, we will say 100 calories. You divide the total calories (100) into the calories from fat (27), and find that 27 percent of calories come from fat in this item, which is well below your goal of thirty percent.

Losing 500 calories per day by changing slightly what you eat can begin with this simple method of choosing low-fat foods. Try using low-fat, or even no-fat milk, instead of whole milk. Stay off the cheeses and yogurts every other day. Use more baked and grilled foods instead of fried.

The idea is not to radically change what you eat. You want to choose new foods which are slightly lower in calories, without having to significantly alter your eating habits. Buy a book which lists the calorie counts for food, and then find substitutes which are lower in calories than what you eat now. You can spread the loss of 500 calories over all three meals each day.

The last step to the Slightly Diet is to exercise. Find exercises which will help you reach your goals without making you quit after two days. An excellent choice is the most simple: long walks on the beach. If you live in a villa, trying walking up and down stairs for twenty minutes. The most important thing is to exercise.