Calorie Restriction to Lose Weight

When you need to reduce your weight, restricting your calorie intake is a good idea.

You can do that though dieting sensibly and maintain good health while keeping your metabolism high by exercising regularly.

So what are the best ways to do this without sacrificing many of the things you like to eat?

Let's look at the pros and cons of calorie restriction in terms of dieting to lose weight.

We All Lose It Differently

Different people tend to lose their excess pounds of stored fat at different rates. However, there is one perfectly relative constant evident in all of the many popular methods, strategies and programs that can be found out there.

That is the fact that when you burn a greater number of calories of energy than you are consuming via your diet, you must reduce the volume of fat your body is storing. The beauty of this fact is that it generally equates to a marked reduction in weight for most people.

Yet why does it often baffle many people as to why this strategy does not always necessarily mean a visible loss of weight when you get on the scales? Let's take a closer look and see why this might be.

Why Don't I Lose Weight on a Calorie Controlled Diet?

It happens quite a lot that people don't actually lose weight even though they are eating a calorie controlled diet.

They weigh themselves each week but the numbers on the scales tell them that nothing has changed! But this is generally not something to worry about, especially if you are exercising as well as dieting.

What often happens is that you may be gaining muscle mass through exercise, even though it is unnoticeable because you are not doing heavy resistance training like a bodybuilder would do. But they still gain mass while your body's store of fat is slowly reduced.

Muscle mass weighs more than fat by volume, so even though you may be losing fat, you are gaining an equal weight of lean muscle. This, believe it or not is the most desirable effect of dieting and exercising to lose weight.

Because it causes your body to slim down and tone up to look a whole load better, even though it doesn't necessarily weigh any less than it did before. It will gradually weigh less, but it just takes time, while it gets to look better and better as you go.

This is one of the reasons why losing weight fast is not a good idea, while taking your time and letting it happen naturally is the most beneficial way of going about it.

How Do Muscles Get Big?

When you exercise your muscles gain strength because they are being used much more and to gain that strength they must burn more fuel. They get it from the glucose dissolved in the blood stream and that gets there thanks to your amazing digestive and metabolic system.

The food you eat contains complex sugars which are broken down into glucose and that gets placed in the blood stream to feed the muscles that need it. When you are eating a healthy, balanced diet the rate at which the sugars get into the blood stream is controlled to match the amount being taken by the muscles as they work.

As the muscles are made to work harder, they demand more fuel. If it is not present in the bloodstream, the body makes more by taking from the fat store and converting it back to glucose.

This is one of the great truths in reducing physical size as it is how exercising burns fat. In reality, it doesn't actually burn fat; it forces the body to reprocess it back into its original form, which was sugar, or more correctly, glucose!

The longer you exercise, the more fat is reprocessed into glucose as fuel for your muscles to keep going.

Why Do Different Sports People Look Different?

Different kinds of exercise will produce different body shape results depending on how the body is exercised. Bodybuilders work out with heavy weights and strong resistance apparatus with low repetitions (reps), because that forces the muscles to build bulk.

It uses a lot of energy, but to get the muscle definition and huge muscles, they have to eat a very high protein diet to build those muscles. Their bodies are stripped of almost all fat, which is why they look the way they do in competitions.

With contact sportsmen such as rugby players and footballers, their primary focus is to build fast running speed in short bursts, which means building up their leg muscles to cope with the rapid acceleration and direction changes they are forced to make.

Distance runners and those who take part in stamina sports events exercise differently still. They need to be able to keep going for very long periods of time, which means their muscles are trained to keep working while staving off fatigue.

Muscular Growth and Strength Increase

The muscles don't gain so much bulk but do gain the ability to work for very long periods of time. That's why when you look at marathon or long distance runners, they are nearly always thin looking!

The average dieter doesn't need to be able to perform like sports people or athletes and they don't necessarily want to look like bodybuilders, although a fit, trim figure is highly desirable. This is obtained by combining a healthy diet with regular exercise program designed to improve stamina and strength without unduly building muscle bulk, like walking, while reducing the ratio of body fat to muscle to get that toned, lithe appearance.

The idea of losing weight is only really necessary when you are very overweight and in need of reducing that number when you get on the scales. That's when, if you're a busy person, a home delivery meal replacement diet program like Nutrisystem or Jenny Craig could come in useful to you.

But if you are realistically only several pounds overweight, you can greatly improve your physical appearance while not actually losing much weight in the process, which is also how you avoid losing weight fast. You do that by eating a healthy diet and exercising every day for a reasonable amount of time.

Although the most important exercise you should do is to exercise patience, because the best way to go is to go slowly and surely!

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