How to Make Your Own Diet Plan and Lose Weight - By: Pete Nisbet

When you decide to make your own diet plan in the hope that you can lose weight that suits you best, you have many factors to consider and likely a lot to learn. Most people believe that losing weight is a matter of eating less food. Cut down on fatty foods and eat more lettuce and tomatoes - after all aren't tomatoes full of nutrition? Actually, not particularly - not unless they are cooked, but that's another story.

Making your own diet plan and losing weight by doing so involves knowledge of cellular respiration, aerobic and anaerobic exercise, the difference between eating high carbohydrate and high protein diets in respect of the way your body generates glucose, and a whole bunch of similar considerations. It is not easy - why do you think that dieticians have to go to college?

However, here are a few tips for you on how to make a start on how to make your own diet plan and hopefully lose weight through it. The first is that there is no diet plan, unless you are trying something that messes with your metabolism such as Atkins high protein, low carbohydrate diet.

I am not a great fan of that, but it works if you follow it exactly and then make sure that have enough cash for all the supplements you will need to keep you in good health. You will lose weight with Atkins, but will not be so healthy due to a lack of the antioxidants and anti-inflammatories in a diet full of fresh fruit and vegetables. Your breath will also stink though ketosis, but maybe that's a small price for you to pay to be thinner - but I don't think so.

So if you want to make your own diet plan, let's start off by forgetting ill thought-out money-making programs and diet plans, and work plain old common sense. Then you will lose weight - I guarantee it, and you can sue my ass off if you don't. I am that confident about this because nature came up with this one. So let's call it the natural plan. This is how to make your own diet and lose weight.

Energy Consumption

Ok, so you want to make your own diet plan and lose weight. You actually don't need to work out if you want to lose weight and neither do you need to diet. Here's why.

Let's just agree on one thing, OK?

Exercise makes you slim, calories make you fat. OK? Agreed on that? Then good - keep that in mind. Now let's look closer at exercise and calories. This is important if you want to make your own diet plan.

Exercise is Work: When you exercise you are doing work. It doesn't matter if you are simply sitting up from your chair and standing up, or running 100 miles an hour on a treadmill. You are exercising and doing work. Agreed? OK - the guy on the treadmill is more likely to be doing 10 MPH, and doing more work, but he is doing work just the same as they guy standing up from his chair. Only, one is doing more than the other. Who loses weight? Who knows because we don't know what they eat!

Work is Energy: Any physicist will tell you that work is related to energy. So when you do work you are using up energy. Where does that energy come from? Yep, you got it - the food you eat. But what if you work so much that the food you eat doesn't provide enough energy? Can you still do work? Can you still run, walk, can your heart still beat - all that is work.

Rainy Days: Of course you can, but where does that energy come from? You might even have that one - it comes from your body fat. When you are born, you are born with a certain number of fat cells. They are with you all your life and can be empty, full or somewhere in between. Your body fat index is a measure of how full these fat cells are. That's all they do all your life - store fat as an energy store for a rainy day. That day comes when you use up more energy than you eat. Then you start to lose weight. So now let's look at food.

Your Diet

Without getting too technical and discussing the energy in the chemical bonds that make up your food, the food on your plate is of three basic types: carbohydrates, fats and proteins. They all contain energy, and that energy can be measured. When your body uses your food, the carbohydrates get broken down into glucose, which is then used by your body cells to generate energy by a process known as cellular respiration.

Forget the fats - they go into your fat cells and make you fat. Forget the protein - that can be used to create muscle cells if you exercise a lot, but is mainly used for all the chemical reactions that take place in your body. It gets relevant later, but not in this article.

Energy Balance

So, if you exercise enough to use up all the energy that is contained in the carbohydrates in your food, what happens next? Yep - your body's metabolism uses the fats. And when they are gone - yep again, it uses the fats in your fat cells and you lose weight.

So, to make your own diet plan, all you need do to lose weight is to count the calories in your food - in the carbs and in the fats and make sure that you use all these up in exercise and you will lose weight. If you eat more calories than you use up you will put on weight - your fat cells will start to fill up further.

Make Your Own Diet and Lose Weight

So, finally, what you must do to make your own diet plan and lose weight is to find out how many calories are in your food, and how many you burn up with your exercise, and adjust one or the other or both so that you use up more than you eat. It's a law of nature. Simple!

About the Author

Pete writes his own articles so knows what he is talking about. More details on the energy equation and How to Lose Weight Fast are available on his website Slimming Tips where you will also find theoretical and practical information on how to lose weight, get slimmer and bulk up your muscles.

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/Pete-Nisbet/37304

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