How to Lose Weight Naturally

by | Jan 12, 2012 | Health Habits, Nutrition Support, Uncategorized

Here are a few simple, professionally approved tips about how to lose weight naturally – the right, healthy way.

First off, eat according to your needs

To gauge your need for energy, you can judge for yourself whether you are an active person or do you lead a sedentary life.

Allow me to clarify the two terms. An active person is someone who is fully or partly an athlete and exercises for several hours a day, or, someone who holds a desk job but also exercises for at least an hour in the gym or performs rigorous exercises such as swimming, or aerobics or uses his or her muscles at the work site. An active person might typically utilize 1,000 calories or more energy per day. This is over and above the daily requirement of 2,000 calories required for a normal human being to complete his or her day to day activity.

A non-active person needs no more than 2,000 calories per day to sustain the body and perform daily mundane activities. If you eat less than 2,000 calories per day, to make up for the deficit, your body will burn stored fat and you will lose weight.

Here is how to lose weight naturally and safely

You lose weight naturally when your body converts part of your stored fat into energy. It does this whenever your body encounters any energy deficit. This however, should not lead you into believing that if you eat very little or do not eat at all then all your fat will vanish because there’s more on how to lose weight naturally than meets the eye.

The human body is a complex mechanism. If the energy deficit is between 300 to a maximum of 500 calories, the deficit will trigger a fat burn. But if the deficit crosses the 500-calorie limit, it will trigger a protein (muscle) burn caused because the body panics and in an all out effort to provide energy so you survive, it begins to break down the protein because breaking down protein is the quickest way to release energy. Breaking down fat is a slightly longer route.

A body that is starving ultimately breaks down and utilizes both; muscles and fats. But this would not be the answer to your question on how to lose weight naturally and safely.

The answer on how to lose weight naturally therefore lies in

ensuring we always maintain a daily energy deficit that is roughly 300 calories

or thereabouts. And this can be quite easily be achieved by:

  1. Eating 2,000 calories worth of food a day
  2. Exercising and utilizing 300 calories of energy (a 5 mile brisk walk will do it) a day.