How long have you been torturing yourself with bad food and not enough of it without losing the weight you wanted to? Or much more slowly than anticipated? It sucks doesn't it! Well let me tell you, its not because you are stupid, or because you have the self-discipline of a 2 year old, or because you are destined by the gods to be fat. No, its because no one really knows what they are doing including all of the people that have written books.
Have you ever noticed who is writing these dieting books. Well let me tell you who they aren't. They are not doctors that specialize in the human body's metabolism. They are not exercise or nutrition experts who have done and taken part in the latest and most exciting research, and they are not qualified to make the claims that they do. It really is a whole lot of quackery or in other words, bad science.
So let me give you a few quick pointers on losing weight. First you need to understand that it is simple math dealing with inputs, or the food you eat, and outputs or the calories that you burn and the food and water that you eliminate. If you input more than you output you are going to gain weight, simple as that. And if you output more than you input you are going to lose weight there is no question about it. So basically there are several different ways to affect these variables in order to achieve success. One is input less, or eat less and this can be either in terms of mass or in terms of total calorie content. Another option is to output more, that is burn more calories off during the day. The obvious application is to exercise and the more exercise you do both in terms of strain and in terms of time the more calories you will lose. There is also something called the basal metabolic rate or BMR.
The BMR is a function of genetics and environment. If you have fat parents chances are that you are going to struggle with obesity and have a lower than average BMR. Chances are also though that you learned inactivity and poor dieting choices from your family of origin which are environmental factors. You burn more calories at rest if it is cold and as a function of how much you exercise. If you exercise consistently and in a way that gives you a good work out than you will have a higher resting metabolic rate. If you don't than it will be much lower. It is also a function of the amount of certain tissue that you have that burns energy. The best example of this is muscle which is a highly energy needy tissue.