by Ryan Giering

Created on: July 12, 2010   Last Updated: July 14, 2010

Fat loss for idiots

The first thing you need to know is that you cannot simply lose fat from specific areas of the body; rather you lose fat from all over the body as a whole. This means that by simply doing hundreds of crunches and sit-ups every day, you are not going to lose belly fat and expose rock hard abs. Instead, you will lose fat from all over the body when you burn enough calories. Everybody is different, and different people store fat more readily in different areas of the body, typically in the stomach and butt regions.

In order to burn fat, an individual must follow the basic mechanism of fat loss; expend more calories than you take in. This of course sounds very simple; however, with the alarming amount of overweight and obese individuals plaguing the world today, it obviously isn’t that easy. So what is the real deal behind fat loss and what can you do to prevent yourself from sabotaging your goals? Provided is a list of things you can do to lose weight without ruining your chances before you even start.

The way weight loss works is that 3500 calories equals one pound. In order to lose a pound of weight, you must either eat 500 calories less than your body uses per week, or you must increase the amount of calories that your body burns by 500 calories through exercise. A combination of both methods is recommended because if you cut too many calories from your diet, you are generally subsequently cutting out lots of necessary vitamins and minerals needed for basic bodily functions. Also, by cutting out too much food, your metabolism will actually think it is starving and will store fat and begin to break down calorie burning muscle in order to conserve as much energy as possible. Also, many simply don’t have the time to fit an exercise regime into their schedule to burn 500 extra calories per day, therefore the combination is recommended.

Don’t set your goals too high – Many people start off by deciding that they want to lose 20-30 pounds to look good for that wedding or beach vacation that’s coming up within the next month. The simple fact of the matter is, unless you want to fail you need to plan ahead and set more reasonable goals. A typical guideline for healthy weight loss is around 1-2 pounds per week, so if you aim to lose 20 pounds in a month, that works out to 5 pounds per week. Does this sound reasonable? The average person burns around 2000 calories per day just going about their usual day-to-day lives,

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