Your "Diet" is Probably Making You Fat
Topic: Your "Diet" Is Your Enemy

Conventional diets don't work. It is impossible for them to ever provide lasting weight loss. When you begin to "starve- yourself with a reduced calorie diet. two things happen that assure that no matter how much weight you lose, you will gain hack every pound and often more.

Why Diets Don't Work

"Diets" Slow Your Metabolism - Remember that fat is a survival mechanism developed by our body to keep us from starving to death during long period without rood. Going on a reduced calorie "diet" kicks this survival mechanism into full gear and virtually assures your failure.

When you go on a diet and reduce your caloric intake or only cat one or two meals a day, your body thinks you are starving. It doesn't know that you're intentionally not eating. It assumes there is no food available and that there might not he any for a long time. To keep you from starving to death before your nett meal, it slows down your metabolism and starts storing all the food you cat as fat.

So even though you are eating less food, your body starts metabolizing it more slowly - burning less for energy and storing more as fat. That means that even though you are eating less, you may not lose weight. In fact, it is very possible to go on a low calorie diet and actually GAIN weight. And that's why after failing on a diet, people often gain MORE weight back than they lost. They've slowed their metabolism so much that virtually everything they eat gets stored as fat.

Are you one of those people whom are literally eating the caloric equivalent of one meal a day and they still cannot lose weight. They have become the human equivalent of a bear. Their bodies are literally hibernating. A hear eats nothing during hibernation and so its metabolism shuts down. Eating too little works against you.

That is why you have to eat to lose weight. You do just the opposite of a "diet." In other words, you are generally eating MORE not less... and you eat more often. Virtually every time you are hungry, you eat. Then, instead of thinking you are starving, your body realizes that food is plentiful. Every time it is hungry, it gets fed, so the survival mechanism never kicks in. It assumes it can get all the food it needs, so it stops storing the fat for an emergency.

In fact, once your metabolism starts moving this quickly, even heavy fattening foods, like a big log added to a raging bonfire, get burned up quickly. That means that, unlike those diets you've been on in the past, where once you started eating normally again, you gain all the weight back and more, even if you fall off the plan for a day or two, you will often continue to lose weight. You will have stoked your body's fat-burning fire so dramatically that your body sheds fat automatically.

Your Custom Eating Plan has you eat more of the right foods for your body, more often, to speed up your metabolism so weight loss then occurs almost immediately". The net result: you can stop dieting, stop starving yourself and start eating... and, perhaps for the first time in your life, you can lose weight fast and keep it off.

Diets Kill Muscle AND Your Ability to Burn Fat — The other big problem with diets is that when you go on a reduced calorie diet you don't just lose fat. In fact, one of the first things to go is muscle. It's all part of the survival mechanism. Muscle burns a large amount of calories, so if your body thinks it's starving, it is going to start shedding muscle tissue. It figures, "if I get rid of all this muscle, I won't burn as many calories, so I can survive longer without eating.- the problem should be obvious: when you lose muscle your body loses a significant amount of its ability to burn fat. At this point you've essentially lost the war on fat.

One or the things you must do is determine how much muscle your body has: then you will be able to select the right types and amounts of carbohydrates and proteins to assure you maintain and increase the lean muscle tissue in your body. Not only will this lean muscle make you look more shapely and sexy, but it increases the amount of calories you burn all day long. It speeds up your metabolism.

One Size Doesn't Fit All

The last big problem with conventional diets is that they presume that one size fits all. You wouldn't buy a one-size-fits-all suit and expect to look good in it. That's because everybody is different. Different hair, different eyes, different personalities and of course, different metabolisms. Everybody's metabolism runs at a different speed and responds differently to different kinds of foods.

Why is My Metabolism So Slow?
Topic: Slow Metabolism?

There are five basic factors that will affect your metabolism or how fast you process food:

Genetics: Unfortunately, it is true. Some people arc horn with slower metabolisms than others. If you've had trouble with your weight for your entire life, this probably describes you. But genetics is not the biggest factor and can be easily overcome if you know what you are doing.

Age: Another factor, that probably everyone has noticed, is age. As we get older, our metabolism tends to slow down. When you were young you may have been able to eat whatever you wanted and never gain an ounce. But after you had your first child or turned forty, the pounds started creeping on and now you find it's harder and harder to maintain the lean beautiful body you had when you were younger.

Again, that is an easy one to remedy this. And he really good news is, even though the pounds may have crept on over many, many months or even years, if you are able to effectively manipulates your metabolic rate you can reclaim the body of your youth in a fraction of the time it took you to lose it. In short: it takes a lot less time to lose the weight than it did to put it on!

Amount of Activity in Your Lifestyle: The amount and type of exercise you do can have a direct and significant effect on your metabolic rate. That is one of the reasons that you had less trouble keeping the pounds off when you were young - your lifestyle probably included a lot more physical activity. Even if you weren't an athlete as a youth, as we get older and begin to raise kids or advance our careers, our time gets filled with increasingly more activities that take place sitting down. This is called a "sedentary lifestyle" and it lends to slow the metabolic rate. It's also one of the reasons you feel like you have less energy as you get older. As you reduce the amount of physical activity in your life, your whole body starts to slow down... including your metabolism.

Exercise can have a direct effect on our metabolic rate, especially cardiovascular exercise. But, it must he done correctly to maximize your body's ability to burn fat - and that doesn't mean working hard. In fact that often has the exact wrong effect.

The amount of muscle tissue in our body also affects the speed of your metabolism. Lean muscle consumes a lot of calories just to exist, so very simply, the more muscle you have, and the more calories you can burn. The more calories you burn, the less calories get stored as fat. Once you reach adulthood, you lose about one-half pound of muscle tissue each year (unless you do something to actively maintain it). As that happens, your body loses more and more of its ability to burn calories, which in turn means your metabolism slows down.

In order to keep the fat-burning engine fires stoked, you need to maintain and/or build muscle tissue that you lose with age. This is one of the most effective ways to increase your metabolic rate. In fact, increasing lean muscle means you burn more calories all day long - even while you're sleeping.

The Foods You Eat: Probably the biggest factor affecting your metabolic rate - how fast your body processes food and turns it into energy - is what you eat. Unfortunately, many of the foods that are staples in our diets these days have the ability to significantly slow or even stop the metabolic process. Foods with lots of simple sugars like soda, fruit juice and other sweets, as well as many processed foods like breads and pasta, particularly when consumed in the wrong combination with other foods, will release a hormone in your body that essentially tells your body to stop converting food into energy and start storing everything as fat. As you can imagine, once that happens, you are virtually doomed to gain weight, particularly if your metabolism is already sluggish from one of the other factors listed above.

This hormone that controls these processes in your body is insulin, and it is directly responsible for regulating the amount of sugar in your blood stream.

Dieting: The other big problem that affects almost everyone who is significantly overweight is: dieting. Once you start radically reducing the amount of calories you eat, your metabolism starts to shut down. That is why every single time you have gone "on" a starvation-type diet, once you go “off” of it and start eating normally again, you gain all the weight back... and usually more. You have killed your metabolism, and with it, any hope of losing weight.

Eating for Accelerated Weight Loss
Topic: Accelerated Weight Loss

Everybody is different. Everyone has a different metabolism and body chemistry. What works for you may not work for the next person. You probably know people who can eat whatever they want and never gain an ounce. You probably also know other people who eat the very same food and it goes straight to their hips or their butt or their belly. Everybody responds differently to foods. Everyone needs different types and quantities of proteins, carbohydrates and fats to cause the chemical reaction in their body that speeds up their metabolism and makes them lose weight.

That's what this article is about: determining how your body works; how your individual chemistry responds to food, and then creating a custom eating plan specifically designed for your unique metabolism. Once you do your Blueprint and understand how your body responds to food, you can start eating MORE of the foods that cause you to lose weight. That means you can finally stop dieting and stop starving yourself without results. You can start eating more and lose weight fast!

Why We Get Fat

It may be hard to believe, but fat is your body's survival mechanism. Early in our evolution, before our primary concerns were jobs and relationships, that great vacation and a new VCR, our major concern was finding food. To survive, we needed to hunt game, and gather enough nuts and fruits to keep us alive. Later, of course, man developed agriculture and animal husbandry, but these food sources were subject to natural cycles: migrations, seasonal changes and the weather. A winter too cold or a summer too hot could mean the difference between feast or famine.

Evolution helped us by allowing our bodies to store food, or fuel, in the form of fat. If we needed to go several days without finding food we could still survive. This is a genetic factor and a reality. Today, food is plentiful. We can easily find the food, so we eat regularly. Plus, nowadays we don't simply eat for survival; we also eat for pleasure and as part of the social ritual. While we rarely run the risk of starvation these days, our bodies are still equipped with the same survival mechanism of storing fat by slowing down the metabolic rate.

Therefore, manipulating your metabolism is the key to losing weight.

Metabolism - The Key to Fast Fat Loss

No matter what body type you are, the key, to fast weight loss is accelerating your metabolism. Metabolism is the rate at which your body utilizes food for energy, cellular growth and maintenance. Very simply - it is the speed that your body burns the food you eat.

If you have a fast metabolism, you likely have no trouble staying thin: you're always hungry and may even have trouble keeping weight (both at and muscle) on your body. Someone with a slow metabolic rate can eat very little, perhaps one meal a day and stay the same or even gain weight.

You can think of your metabolism as a bonfire and the food you eat as logs you put on the lire. If the bonfire is burning big and hot, it has no trouble consuming the additional wood that you put on it. You put a giant log on it and it burns it in minutes. Your metabolism works the same way: if you have a very fast metabolism your body can easily burn whatever you feed it. That's why some people seem to be able to eat anything they want and never gain weight. Their metabolisms are moving so fast it consumes whatever they feed it.

Conversely, if the bonfire begins to die out and burn more slowly, it doesn't burn the new wood you put on it so quickly. If you put a big log on the smoldering embers of a fire, the log is liable to just sit there. It may take all night for it to slowly burn away. Again, your metabolism works the same way. If your metabolism is very slow it can't burn all the calories you feed it. The food you eat just sits there and eventually gets stored as fat.

This fact is key to any weight loss program. In general, the slower your metabolism, the less quickly your body will convert food into energy, and the food that doesn't get burned as fuel will get stored as fat. And that's when you get fat.

The faster your metabolism, the more you can eat without gaining weight. That's what most weight loss programs are all about - reprogramming your metabolism so you can eat more and lose weight fast.

You must determine what kinds of food work with your individual body chemistry (your Body Type) to reprogram your metabolism so that it uses more of the food you eat as energy and stores less as fat. The good news: for most people the way to do that is by eating MORE, not less. You eat more of the Foods that speed up your metabolism and cause you to lose weight. Once you do that, it becomes impossible for your body to maintain the same level of fat. The pounds will start to melt away automatically!

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