Planning
There are many health benefits of losing excessive body fat. It lowers your level of cholesterol and thus reduces the chances of coronary diseases. Apart from that, it makes you feel and look good. Yet, there are people who want to shed weight just for competing with others who already have lost weight, or they just make an attempt to see how far they succeed.
If you are serious about losing the fat content in your body, you should understand that half-hearted approach will certainly not help. Human body likes to have a predetermined level of fat and will do anything to keep that level of fat. Usually, it succeeds in doing that by slowing down the rate of metabolism. It starts using muscle tissues in its efforts to hold body fat. The human body has perfected this mechanism over thousands of years and it can't be tricked into losing fat quickly.
So, if you opt to reduce your body fat, you need to define a reason for that and remain determined in achieving your goal. The first step in that direction is to decide the date for starting your project. Next, you need to inform that date to all your friends and members of your family, whose support you are going to need for fulfilling your mission. Losing fat is not going to be easy. It demands 100% commitment.
Setting Goals
You have to define your goal in the very beginning. Decide how much you want to lose and in how much time. Remember to fix realistic, but ambitious goal. Rather than deciding randomly, you should refer to some health magazines or search the Internet to know what goal you should fix. Having done that, you have to write it down. You'll also find it helpful to collect photos of people - before and after their fat loss program - and pin them in your room to keep you motivated.
Having written down your weight, make a few copies of that sheet and fix these copies at convenient points where you can frequently see one or the other during the day. Some such points include the door of your refrigerator, the bathroom mirror and your car interior. They will keep reminding you of your goal. There are going to be setbacks and these constant reminders will prompt you to come back to the right track you mapped for achieving your goal.
Nutrition
Remember, limiting your calorie intake by dieting is not going to help as the body possesses standby mechanisms that make it work in another way, to help storing the fat. Lipoprotein lipase is the enzyme that retards the process of fat loss by slowing down the metabolism, allowing the body to retain fat and use that for generating energy. Additionally, the body sacrifices muscle tissues for getting the required energy. Of course, you'll weigh less on your weighing scale, but that loss is basically due to loss of muscle, which is seventy percent water.
Since the muscles consume calories, your metabolism is further reduced. As a result, when you stop following that diet plan, you are sure to regain all the weight that you would have lost. In fact, you could gain more than what you might have lost. This additional gain is the buffer that the body builds up and uses it again, should you follow another diet plan! So, you may be eating less now but you may gain more fat in the future.
Meal Frequency
Invariably, people don't seem to realize the benefits of eating regularly. When trying to shed fat, do eat some healthy food every three hours, meaning that you should eat six to seven times a day. You won't consume calories more than what are necessarily needed but you will be regulating their intake the entire day. This helps improving your rate of metabolism and it stops your cravings for food and the resultant sudden changes in the level of blood sugar. You'll get more energy while hunger pangs are reduced. Food gets digested more easily and the body metabolism achieves a level that helps fat loss without losing muscle.
