Best Crash Diet (Don’t Do One)
If you are wanting to lose weight over the long term and keep it off don’t crash diet. The best crash diet is simple don’t do one. I should know because I use to swear by crash dieting. I would put on 20 pounds, then I would have a wedding or holiday to somewhere hot coming up and try to lose the weight within 4 weeks. Crash dieting for me has always worked, all I do is dramatically reduce my daily calorie intake and losing 20 pounds within 4 weeks is a piece of cake.
But the downside to this by doing this over and over again, year after year I have lost quite a lot of lean muscle mass from my body. Which has really taken it’s toll on my body, I remember when I left school at 16 I weighed around 190 to 200 pounds with not an ounce of fat on my body. I now weight in at 199 pounds with a body fat percentage of 23.2% which means I’m carrying quite a lot of fat on my body, even though I’m now at my target body weight.
The more muscle you carry the more calories that your body will burn each day at rest, which really helps in stopping you gaining weight. If you are searching the web for information on what is the best crash diet, listen to an ex serial crash dieter. It just doesn’t work over the long term. If you are trying to lose weight and you want to see long term results. Cut your daily calorie intake my 500 calories, by doing this you will lose 1 pound per week. If you want to double this to 2 pounds burn another 500 calories off through exercise each day. By doing this you will lose 2 pounds per week.
I know a lot of you are looking for faster results, but think about it for one minute. If you were to lose 2 pounds each and every week through 2009 you would lose a whopping 104 pounds. When you first start a diet though your losses will probably be much bigger for the first few weeks. With a lot of your weight loss being water. Once your body get use to your new diet always look to lose around 2 pounds per week.
Crash dieting will definitely allow you to lose much more weight each week. But think about it this way, would you rather lose 2 lbs of fat from your body. Or would you rather lose 4 lbs of muscle and 1 lb of fat. I know which one I would choose every time, its the 2 lbs of fat. Plus you have got to remember that crash dieting is very unhealthy and unsafe, you are starving your body of the vital nutrients it needs to perform at its best and help you to stay fit and healthy.
Make Exercise A Part Of Your Life
Lots of you can probably relate on what I’m about to tell you. You’ve got that special occasion coming on and you do your best to lose weight. You make the mistake of leaving it to the very last minute. What I mean is you crash diet and try to lose weight as quickly as you can, I’ve been a yo-yo crash dieter for several years now. But I have finally come to my senses and said to myself enough is enough. I have done crash diets in the past were I have been able to lose over 20 pounds in under 4 weeks.
When I’m on a diet and trying to lose weight I always do exercise to improve the results that I get through dieting. But once I lose the weight I’m a fool and begin to start eating like I did before, and you guessed it I stop doing the exercise as well. Exercise is such an important part of your life not your for helping you to lose weight but for your overall health.
For most people we all have to go to work to pay the bills, so why don’t we make exercise a part of our lives and something that we must do to stay healthy and fit. At the moment I’m exercising like crazy because I want to see quick results. But I know that I can not continue at this pace for much longer. Not only will I start suffering from over training but I will begin to resent going into my home gym. Exercise should be fun, I really do enjoy lifting weights because after a few sets on each exercise you change the exercise and its feels like more of a variety. Whereas cardio training on my exercise bike for one hour can get a little boring. This will get easier once I complete the 50,000 calories in 50 day challenge because I’m going to reduce my cardio workouts to 30 minutes. But they will be much more intense, instead of doing them on a set level for the duration of the workout I will doing high intensity interval training which will burn a lot more calories which means I will be burning more fat in the long run.
Apart from my little nibbles in between meals and the odd blowout 2009 has been a good year for me so far. I’ve lost 35 pounds and lowered my body fat percentage, in fact I’m now below the weight I targeted for myself before I started my body fat loss journey. I’ve still got a long way to go though and this will only be achieved by continuing my diet and exercise plan.
Not Sticking To My Diet Plan
I’m having a very bad day on my diet today, I woke up this morning and the sun was shining so me and my girlfriend decided that it would be a good idea to go out for Sunday lunch. It sounded like a good idea at the time because I said to myself I will be good and choose food off the menu which is healthy and low in calories. We decided to go to one of our favorites pubs were the food is absolutely delicious. For starters we tucked into the combo for two, which contain spicy chicken wings, onion rings, spring rolls, garlic bread and other delicious tasting foods which are very high in calories. It’s come out on quite a big plate because it is meant for two people.
You can guess what happened next the girlfriend hardly ate a thing from the plate leaving me to look at all this delicious food. I couldn’t resist it and I really tucked into the combo starter and probably ate around two thirds of it all on my own. For my main meal I had the massive mixed grill with chips. Which contains an 8 ounce chicken breast, an 8 ounce steak and 8 ounces of gammon, I managed to polish all that off as well.
The only good thing about it was, I was too full up at this point to even entertain a desert. So I left the pub feeling rather full and a little bit upset with myself once I had demolished all the food. I’ve just done a one hour weight training session in my home gym which should help to burn off some of the excess calories I have consumed today. I’m not finished there yet though I plan on doing a 30 minutes high intensity interval training session on my exercise bike to burn even more calories.
If you are going to over eat you need to make sure that you can lose the excess calories and at the moment I’m losing mine through exercise. The biggest problem with doing lots of exercise is, it makes you extremely hungry. It really does gives you the munchies, I’m been chewing on some gum for the last 30 minutes to try and reduce my cravings slightly. One bad day won’t hurt my progress though to be honest it will probably help me. I always said from day one that I would allow myself the odd blowout day were I would go wild and give into my cravings. I’ve got till Friday morning for my next weight in so I’m going to hit the gym hard this week and stick to my diet plan to make sure that I see another loss in my body fat percentage this week.
