Common Sense Dieting: Understanding Your Diet and Why it Will Work

Dieting for weight loss is as easy a thing to do as anyone could ask for. Easy that is, to understand the principle involved. Actually doing it isn't easy and it is never going to be easy.

But the principle is easy to understand. You simply burn more calories than you take in. That's it. Quite naturally, over a period of time the weight will come off. If you burn more fuel than you are putting in, that tank is going to run empty at some point. The difficulty is disciplining yourself to this diet and staying with it until you reach your target weight.

So exactly what is a calorie anyway? It is actually a rather archaic term. A calorie is a unit of measure for heat. And the definition of a calorie is the energy needed to increase the temperature of a gram of water by 1 degree centigrade.

So how does one go about controlling the amount he or she eats? That's quite simple as well and it has worked very well for me. I dropped twenty pounds over the course of about four months using this method and I have no doubt that you can too. Here is my weight loss method. Eat exactly what you want to, but cut the portion amounts in half...and no between meal snacks. And it would not hurt to cut the number of soda's and other sweetened drinks in half as well.

I think that common sense will also tell you that a certain amount of exercise would be beneficial too. I chose walking as it was something I could do during my lunch period at work. I chose to skip lunch in favor of a small sandwich and then eat the sandwich as I was out on the parking lot walking laps. I found that walking four times around the lot was just about half a mile and I did this each working day. I just took my time. I was not out to set some power walking record. Often times a friend would join me and we could just chat as we made our way around the lot. Some of the co-walkers didn't even know I was doing it for weight loss reasons due to the rather slow pace.

I won't tell you that this plan is easy. But I will say that it gets easier as you go along. Probably the most difficult part occurs during the first week of the plan. And that is refusing to eat more than the plan allows. But you will get used to this. It is said that the stomach will shrink after a time if it isn't getting continually stuffed with too much food and in between meal snacks. I like to think this is true and I found that after the first week, that eating only half as much as I was used to eating before hand, I got got used to the routine, and that a half serving soon became a full serving in my feeling full, and I had no desire to eat more.

Once you have achieved your target weight. You need to continue to exercise and watch your food intake. Do not let old habits return and allow them to put you right back in the same place you just escaped from.