Some Approaches to Weight Loss

There are many different approaches to weight loss. Most are
straightforward and extremely unappealing to us - they espouse eating
less and exercising more. That approach will undoubtedly work, but if
we ate healthy foods and exercised we probably wouldn't need to lose
weight in the first place. So that approach involves a behaviour
change that most of us will find difficult to accomplish. Some weight
loss programs rely on chemistry - appetite suppressants, miracle "fat
burners," things to speed up the metabolism.These approaches might
work, but they are undeniably bad for you. Additionally, once we stop
taking the chemical the appetite comes back, the metabolism slows back
down and we begin gaining back the weight we just lost. Yet a third
approach, the one proposed by this article, relies on biology. The
standard human metabolism is fuelled by sugar. The carbohydrates in
the food we eat are broken down into simple sugars and used by our
body. We even build up carbohydrate reserves, to be used whenever our
carbohydrate intake drops.The fats in the food we eat aren't used at
all, typically. They are stored as fat reserves, to be used in times
of desperation. A biological strategy of weight loss is to stop taking
in carbohydrates, so that our body is forced to use up the reserves it
has built up, and to switch over from a carbohydrate-burning
metabolism to a fat-burning metabolism. That, in its most basic form,
is the concept behind the Atkins Diet. Atkins aficionados have lots of
other details in their regimen - they take certain vitamins, they eat
a certain number of times a day, they take in very limited
carbohydrates with certain indices, etc.The effectiveness of these
additional details is sometimes a matter for debate among specialists.
What is not in question, however, is the fact that changing from a
carbohydrate-based metabolism to a fat-burning metabolism undeniably
causes the body to burn fat reserves and to lose weight. As with most
diets, the trick is to keep the weight off once it is lost.