How Do I lose Weight?

Question

I 136 pounds and want to be 110 pounds. I really will try about anything to lose soem pounds. I new to the weight lose thing. I really need help!!!!

Answer 1

On Yahoo!Answers I find certain questions being asked repeatedly which is simply a reflection of new people participating. A couple of common question amounts to "How do I lose weight," or more specifically, "How do I lose abdominal fat?" I have gotten very positive responses from my answers when I paused to reply (and now beginning to get "It works!" emails that are very gratifying. I like helping people)... so have recently decided to put a good solid answer on my Yahoo!360 Blog (September 10) that I can point people to. These are my thoughts as a physician and athlete.

Don't target losing more than about 2 lbs per week. If you try to lose faster, your body will go into "starvation mode" and get very stingy about burning calories while at the same time very efficient about storing any calories that you do provide. And it will make you feel awful.

There is no site specific way of losing fat... the old myth about working your abs to burn belly fat isn't true. To get rid of love handles, you need to lose overall fat. That happens with exercise and watching your diet. More on that below.

The most effective way to lose fat is aerobic exercise in the "moderate" fat-burning range, ideally first thing in the morning before you eat. When you wake your body is ready to burn fat and your levels of growth hormone are highest at that time. Later in the day it can take up to 30 minutes just to put your body into a fat-burning mode.

Another overlooked way to burn fat is by lifting weights. Skeletal muscle has very high caloric needs... almost twice that of adipose (fat) tissue. Put on a little muscle and you will burn calories all day even at rest. Be aware that skeletal muscle weighs more, so with this approach you may see your weight increasing while your body fat is melting away. Not realizing this often stresses folks who think they should be losing weight as a measure of fitness. Forget the scale, look in the mirror and you will be happy.

To lose a pound of fat, you need to eliminate about 3500 calories. You can do this by burning more with exercise or by modifying your diet to reduce intake. If you do a Google search on say, "swimming calories" you will quickly find a website with tables of calories burned for a given exercise. You can use such lists to estimate how many calories you are burning up with your routine.

For diet, keep a diary for a couple of weeks counting calories, grams of protein, and grams of fat intake. It is easy with online sources of nutritional information (type the name of the food and calories into the Google search engine) and packaging labels. That will let you quickly figure out where the fat is coming from in your diet.

Fat gives you 9 calories per gram. So take the number of grams of fat, multiply by 9, then calculate what percentage the fat calories are of your total daily calories. Restricting the calories from fat to about 20% of your total intake is ideal for a maintenance diet... that isn't overly restrictive. Of note, you need some fat in your diet. For instance, the body uses fat to produce hormones. Once you have a picture of how to modify your diet, you can drop the diary and just go back to it occasionally if you are wanting to tweek things further.

There is a subset of questions that goes further and asks about "How to get a six-pack?" The answer is the same. Six-packs are 20% abdominal exercise and 80% diet. There is one caveat... abdominal muscles will form in the position that you work them, so be certain to pull them tightly toward your spine while doing crunches, etc. Also, during most lifting, the "core is active" which means that you should be stabilizing with contracted abs then too. Fail to do this and the abs will form, but bulging outward and the result is not attractive.

If you are trying to build muscle as a way to lose fat, then you may need to increase total calories and specifically your protein intake. I target about 0.8 g of protein per pound of body weight each day when actively building. That is far more protein than most people need in their diets.


Aloha

Answer 2

Control the amount of food you eat and get a little exercise.

It is that simple. What you do is plan out about 4 meals for a day. Those four meal should equal around 1500 calories for a person who doesn't exercise. I would recommend excercise. The more excercise you get, the additional amount you may eat. 1700 to 1900 calories worth of food spread out in a day will keep you from getting too hungry that you can't stand it. Burning 300 calories in extra exercise a day is not that hard to do.

There are all kinds of diet plans out there. The ones that work are the ones that manage your food. The special K challenge ( http://www.specialk.com/challenge/ ) for example is a legit diet plan. If you don't have a lot of self control for doing things on your own, I would recommend you find a health club/diet organization to plan it out for you and manage your diet. Like all legit diets, they work as long as you follow the plan.

Answer 3

funny thing to do! Exercise more but also eat more often! Like instead of three meals a day have 6 small meals! Eat every 3 to 4 hours! But exercise!

Answer 4

Losing weight is this simplest thoery on this planet, putting it in to practice is quite a bit harder.
First thing DIETS DON'T WORK.
Have a sensible diet with enough excercise and you'll be just fine and by the way unless you are under 4ft 6inces, you really don't need to lose any weight.
**** the media and peer pressure

Answer 5

Don't focus on your weight - focus on living a healthy life, i.e. eat at least 8-10 different fruits and vegetables a day, don't eat junk food but homecooked meals with low cat content., and lots of fibers. Remember to use your body, i.e. walk, swim, jog or dance. First and foremost: love yourself, eat healthy and exercise.

Answer 6

Eat less fast foods or fatty foods. Limit sweets. Exersize often. You may want to consider a gym membership and possibly a personal trainer.
Hope I Helped Some!
~Froggie :)

Answer 7

rather than yell toward family members in other rooms walk over to talk

Answer 8

Chew thoroughly chewing each bite 30 times before swallowing

Answer 9

Snap a photo of yourself once a week to know progress that will also increase your confidence level

Answer 10

Monitor your progress by noting your clothes fit looking in the mirror and taking photos