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Weight loss is very a simple and relatively easy thing to do. All it requires is a small understanding of your body's daily needs and above all else patience. What you certainly don't have to do is starve yourself or eat cabbage soup for the rest of eternity. Any one who has ever tried such a diet will have quickly realized there is no faster route to weight gain than fad dieting and that you soon end up eating the contents of your fridge (or anybody else's fridge that happens to get in your way) and gain more weight than ever before. This then leads to misery and probably a lot more food!

The main reason that most people fail (ninety five percent and this applies to every part of society's current thinking) is that they want results instantly. They want to be slim for their holiday that is three months away and they have only got four stone to lose! They know they can lose this much weight because their new dieting manual "the chicken soup diet" tells them that this is the minimum amount of weight they can expect to lose.

Now, the diet in question would probably work but not because it has been scientifically formulated by doctors but because it is basically a starvation diet. The thing is with starvation diets is that when you stop the diet your body will react by storing as much fat as possible and the result is over time you end up exactly the same weight.

How you lose weight permanently is not by thinking of how you can lose the weight but thinking about how you gained weight in the first place. The chances are if you are anything like me you probably put weight on over a couple or a few years. What happened was your body gradually adapted to an excess of calories and slowly stored more of the energy as fat. You generally need three thousand five hundred excess calories a week to gain a pound of body weight. That amounts to five hundred calories a day over the required amount that your body needs to sustain its current size. In my case this was about accurate I needed about two thousand three hundred calories to sustain my weight but instead was consuming about two thousand eight hundred calories. This in time helped me to gain Forty two pounds over two years.

So how did I lose the weight I hear you ask?! I did exactly the same in reverse and it was easy. I simply cut approximately five hundred calories out of my diet, and over the course of eighteen months I went from two hundred and twenty seven pounds to one hundred and eighty pounds and I have remained at that weight for over three years. All it took was patience. No silly diets, no unrealistic exercise routines, not even any discomfort, just patience. The key to losing weight is not to think I want to be slim now but to think how long do I want to remain slim. If the answer is forever then there really is only one way to do it and that is to do it slowly.

So my advice would be to start today, there really is no time like the present (apart from the day I left school, happiest day of my life!), cut fifteen to twenty percent off of your daily intake of food, weigh yourself and give it a few months. The only thing that can possibly happen is you will get thinner and it won't have cost you a thing!

Learn more about this author, Phillip Mcfadyen.
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