“How can I eat more and lose weight?”

I was talking to a friend once who complained that she kept cutting back on calories to a point where she felt she was hardly eating anything, yet she was still gaining weight.

I told her the first thing she would need to do is eat more. This didn’t make sense to her and she rejected my advice.

Later she joined a well known weight loss program. Guess what they told her. She would need to eat more. She followed their advice and was surprised to find she lost weight.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said to me. “How can I eat more and lose weight?” To understand this we must first understand why we gain weight in the first place.

You may have heard it said that to lose weight you need to burn more calories than you consume. Most people take that to mean they must cut back on calories. For some that may be the case, but for others it may backfire.

The real secret to maintaining a healthy weight lies in your metabolism. You metabolism is the rate at which your body burns energy. The more energy you burn, the more fat you will burn. Anything that causes your metabolism to slow down can cause your to gain weight.

At the end of the day, any unused energy must be stored. Your body will produce fat cells in order to store the unused energy. The only way to burn this fat is to burn the energy.

You only need to cut back on calories if you consume too many in the first place. If you cut back too far, it can cause your metabolism to slow down. If your metabolism slows too much, you will have unused energy and you will gain weight.

Let’s say you need 2500 calories of energy per day. You can lose weight by cutting back to 2000 calories per day.

If you cut back too far, you are cutting back on energy that your body needs. Let’s say you cut back to 1600 calories. Your metabolism must slow down to compensate. But since your body doesn’t know when you’re going to feed it again, it will slow your metabolism down far enough to conserve energy. It will slow it down below the amount you’re consuming. Let’s say it slows down to 1200 calories. That leaves 400 calories per day that must be stored. The body will produce fat cells to store this unused energy.

To maintain a healthy weight, you must consume enough calories to keep your energy levels up, but burn a little more than what you consume. Everybody’s nutritional needs are different. In my next post I will give you a simple formula to determine how many calories you need every day so you can adjust your caloric intake accordingly.