If you want to lose weight, you must have a plan, a route map to success. This is called a program or programme. There are thousands of programs, but many of them are just plain batty. If they sound foolish, they probably are. Have you heard of the ‘cabbage water diet’? It sounds daft and it is. You cannot only drink cabbage water all your life!

Although there is a lot of nonsense talked about losing weight, there are some truths that have a role to play in almost every program you choose to follow. One of these truths is that it is better to eat many small meals throughout the day (about 5-6), than to go all day without eating and then stuffing yourself at dinner in the evening. This is commonly called ‘grazing’.

Have you ever asked yourself why this might be so? Well, the fact is, that the typical human body can only process about 250 calories an hour. If you consume more than that, you are probably overloading your digestive system. This is why it is important, because if your body cannot handle all the calories that you give it, it will stockpile them.

Your body can only use up what it requires to execute the job that it is busy with, that is, what you are putting it through. If you are watching TV, most of those 250 will be stored. If you are exercising, most will be burned up. It stores the remainder as body fat. Your body has learned through evolution that hard times will come, so it prepares for them. It is like us putting excess money in a savings account or people hoarding food if a bad winter is predicted.

However, these days in the West, we rarely face those lean times any longer. Therefore, that fat is never used up and we just keep adding to it until we decide, by choice, to limit our consumption of calories or increase our amount of exercise.

Given this information, what can we do with it? Well, if you were to want to lose weight, you ought to be consuming no more than 1,500 calories a day (or whatever your program tells you), so 1,500 divided by 250 is six. if you ate 250 calories every other hour, that would give you twelve hours.

Consequently, eating light but often would be a helpful strategy or program to follow, because first of all, you are only providing your body with what it requires, when it needs it and secondly, you are able to better maintain a consistent blood sugar level, which means that you iron out the spikes and troughs you experience in a normal day’s cycle.

Two hundred and fifty calories does not seem a lot, but it is surprising what it will stretch too, if you take the time to investigate. It is true that you will have to rigorously restrict some foodstuffs, like bread, pasta, rice and potatoes, but whoever honestly thought that you could lose weight by eating that stuff anyway?

If you do not have time to cook a number of times every day, look in your supermarket. There are loads of ‘250 calorie’ microwave meals. You don’t want to eat that? I can’t blame you. so get a good cookbook, which shows calorie content. You are at work all day? OK, eat some fruit, but choose wisely. It can be done, it only requires a little will and planning.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with lose weight programs. If you have an interest in losing weight, too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight? This and other unique content ” articles are available with free reprint rights.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the most frequent New Year’s resolution in the West is to lose weight. However, it is also the first New Year’s resolution most likely to be broken! Losing weight is not hard in theory, but practice is oh, so different. This is because it involves lifestyle changes.

Our bodies change as we get older and typically our level of activity diminishes too. Maybe, we get an office job with a promotion, whereas we used to work ‘in the field’. But people in general, do not regulate their diet to match their variation in circumstances. We sit behind our desks or in retirement and think we can still eat and drink like we did twenty years ago. Big mistake!

Fortunately, there are dozens of diets on hand to help us attain our weight loss goals. There are the traditional calorie counting diets, as advocated by Weight Watchers; there are the ‘new era’ diets like Atkins, which have us counting carbohydrates and there are no end of fad diets which are frankly not worth wasting time talking about.

The choice of which diet you would like to follow is all yours, of course, but it is well worth examining the main kinds of diet to see which one will suit you. Then you must determine whether you will need the help and encouragement of a weekly visit to a club or not, or whether you can get that companionship from an online club of slimmers, where you talk to fellow slimmers in the club forum online.

It is also worth fixing in your mind, why you want to diet. Is it to look better? Or to feel more comfortable in yourself? Or is it for health reasons? Or all three? Have a think about your reasons and let them motivate you. Whenever, you feel like packing it all in, remember your motivation. Get a book and journal your progress, but first write your motivation in bold capitals on the front page or cover. Keep it in front of you and read it out loud to yourself every day.

Consult some of the slimming sites online and work out a few key metrics like the typical weight people are for your height, sex and body type and your BMI or body mass index. Write these figures on the first page of your book too and use them as the ultimate goals.

You could create a graph and plot your weekly weight to see how you are doing. Set realistic goals and targets. You can get loads of free information from the Weight Watchers and Atkins websites or / and visit your doctor for advice and leaflets.

Aim to lose something like 10-20 pounds in the first month and eight to ten per month after that. Go slowly and aim to go slowly, because then you will hit your targets and you won’t feel like giving up. When you get within five to ten pounds of your target weight, assuming that you have lost a lot of weight, rein back a little and allow yourself a little more freedom. Drop your target to one pound a week, so that you will get a feel for ‘eating normally’.

The dreaded exercise; you have to face it, you will need to do more exercise, but two times thirty minute walks a day is ordinarily enough. You could swim once a week too or get an exercise machine, if you are tied to the house by family.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with how to lose weight online. If you have an interest in losing weight too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight? Click here to get your own unique version of this article with free reprint rights.