Best Weight Loss Is Gradual

Most people who are overweight want to lose. The stigma of being overweight is often enough of a motivator to want to be slim. Add the health risks of being overweight to the stigma of being overweight and you'll find very few heavy people who are satisfied with their body type. While the motivation to want to lose weight can be a positive, and in fact is typically needed for weight loss to occur, being overly consumed with weight loss can have quite detrimental consequences.

Humans often look for ways to make tasks more efficient, and faster. This sort of mindset has been around since forever, and it applies to weight loss as much as anything else. People who are overweight usually don't want to be, and they often want to stop being overweight right now if not sooner. This strong desire for change can lead to trying to power through the weight loss process, or to a willingness to try methods that claim to speed weight loss up.

Fast weight loss can be seen when stepping on the scale, but fast weight loss is almost always the result of water loss. Water can be removed quickly from the body, which is why dehydration can set in so rapidly without regular water intake. Water is an absolute requirement for life, and a regular supply of water is needed for the body to function normally. Dropping weight in the form of water then is inviting various forms of health problems, some of which can be permanent and even fatal.

Losing weight in the form of fat is the ideal in weight loss, but it's a process. Fat is essentially surplus, and surplus takes time to build up. Surplus equally takes time to remove. The fat stored in our bodies took time to make in other words, and it's not going to go away overnight. There have been and continue to be various treatments that claim to speed up the fat elimination process. What these treatments typically claim to do is affect metabolism, but they often also affect the heart, usually speeding up its beat rate. Using any treatment that causes the heart to perform abnormally is a risky proposition, to say the least.

In the final analysis, the best strategy for weight loss just may be patience along with a dose of commitment. Accepting that weight loss is going to take time and effort is a healthy and realistic perspective to have at the onset of any weight loss regimen.

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Zinn Jeremiah is a freelance author. For help with weight loss, visit weight loss program or weight loss help.

Tags: weight loss, overweight

Reasons For Overweight

Excessive weight is a significant problem, particularly in western societies and in the United States most of all. The numbers may vary, but general estimates are that two-thirds of people in the United States are overweight, and one-third of people in the United States are obese, or extremely overweight. Given the exceptional levels of people carrying excess weight, it's worthwhile to consider what some of the possible reasons for the overweight epidemic are.

In most cases, excess weight is a reflection of calorie consumption. There are exceptions to this, most notably in circumstances where some form of bloating illness has set in. Generally speaking however, excess body weight is directly attributed to food consumed. The formula isn't quite so simple as eating and gaining weight: it's a matter of consuming more calories than are burned off through physical activity. In other words, eating more food than one uses for energy.

So then there are two factors in typical weight gain: food eaten and energy burned, or not burned. If energy goes unburned, it eventually gets stored as fat. A typical form of human energy is physical movement. Most humans to one degree or another physically manipulate their bodies. Performing this sort of physical manipulation takes energy. The level of energy required to physically move depends upon how much movement is actually undertaken. In the case of many people in the west, and in the United States especially, people don't move around very much in comparison to the level of food they intake. What we have then are lots of people who consume more energy than they use.

The energy factor in overweight can be expressed in terms of exercise; or more accurately, in terms of lack of exercise. This is the next factor in the explanation of levels of overweight. In short, people who are fat typically don't exercise. Overweight people do move about typically, but ordinarily moving about is not exercising. To exercise essentially means to exert physical energy at unusual levels. Under this description, walking to the car or moving down the aisle at the grocery store would not constitute exercise.

The next obvious question would be why don't people exercise. The obvious answer is that people don't exercise because they don't want to. A secondary reason, however, and one that likely carries a lot of legitimacy is that people don't exercise because they have little spare time in comparison to the amount of obligations they have. A working person who has children can see literally all of their time filled. But there are always priorities to be made, and not making exercise a priority is a good bet to lead to overweight, and all of the problems that go along with it.

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Zinn Jeremiah is an online writer. For help with weight loss, visit weight loss help or weight loss program.

Tags: weight loss, overweight