How to Diet Effectively

There is a right way and a wrong way to diet with degrees of rightness and wrongness in between that make the process more hit and miss than many people think it is.

That doesn't mean you should disregard dieting as a viable means of losing weight. On the contrary in fact, as dieting is still the most popular form of weight loss for most people.

But many people do not really get too deeply involved in their diets from the perspective of learning how the process is affecting their bodies and why they do what they are doing. This is a shame, because educating yourself to every aspect of a diet is one of the best ways of making it as effective as possible for you.

So this site looks at how to diet effectively by learning what it is that is going on with your body and the way it interacts with the food you are consuming or omitting.

Dieting Basic 101

The absolute basic fact of dieting effectively is in ensuring that you are consuming fewer calories than your body is burning.

You can do this in a number of ways, but the most effective way is to ensure that your metabolism is working at peak efficiency.

This is usually done by including some daily aerobic exercise in your routine.

It is a way to jump start your muscles and makes them burn more fuel.

The more fuel they burn, the more of the sugars in your bloodstream get used up.

This is replaced from your body's store of fat cells, which is why you lose weight as the volume of fat in your body is reduced.

Your diet restricts the amount of calories going in so your body can't store more fats, so with a combination of dieting and exercise, a net loss in body volume (fat) is created.

The downside to exercising is that it also builds muscle mass.

While you are depleting your body's store of fat, you are increasing its mass of muscle.

By volume, muscle weighs more than fat, so at first you may not notice any drop in your weight, although you may notice the inches start to reduce around your tummy, thighs and anywhere else you were larger than you should have been.

This is not really a downside unless your focus is on weight and not on physical appearance.

Most people who want to lose weight really want to be slimmer, so don't focus on your weight so much as on your gradually slimming figure!

Metabolism Boosting Foods

The other way to boost your metabolism so that your body burns more calories is to eat foods that are known to increase your body's metabolic rate.

This includes foods rich in proteins and dietary fiber as well as some unsaturated fats.

Cutting out all refined sugars and high Glycemic Index (GI) carbohydrates from your diet and reducing low GI carbs that remain will also help to boost your metabolism. These sugars and carbs have a tendency to make your metabolism sluggish and slow, whereas removing them from you diet gives it a lift.

Drink Water

Other ways of boosting your metabolism through diet is to drink lots of plain water (not soda or diet soda). You can also include some caffeine by drinking tea, coffee or better still, green tea.

Caffeine increases blood flow and raises heart rate which combines to get the body working harder even when it is not being exercised and this increases the metabolic rate because more sugars are burned to provide the energy needed by the muscles that are working more.

Green tea contains less caffeine than both black tea and coffee but it contains other substances that interact with the caffeine it does contain to make it several times as metabolism boosting as caffeine from other sources.

Dieting Effectively

So this all leads us to how you need to diet to make it as effective as possible so that you both reduce your weight and reduce your waistline by several inches.

Common sense should always prevail in this area, because deep down you already know the things that you should avoid eating that will retard your metabolism, such as cakes, cookies, bread, pasta, white rice, candy, pastries, junk food (like pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs and similar) and it also includes sugary drinks like soda, sports drinks and off the shelf fruit juices (yes, even apparently "healthy" fruit juice is basically mostly just sugar).

Replace these unwanted foods with energy boosting foods such as fresh vegetables and fruits, berries, as well as high protein foods like lean meats, eggs etc and oily fish for the essential fatty acids.

Summary

To sum up, dieting can and, when done properly will help you to lose weight.

However, no diet will ever be as effective in getting you back into shape (on its own) as one that is combined with some regular daily exercise routine.

The more strenuous and lengthy the exercise, the better the boost to your weight loss efforts will be, so do consider all options including exercise, diet and nutrition (See: https://www.nutrition.gov/smart-nutrition-101 ) and you will really give yourself the best chances of success.

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