Where do I start on the diet?
Body Mass Index

BMI or Body Mass Index is a simple measure of your height proportional to your weight and can tell you which one of 4 weight categories you fall into.

Your BMI will tell you whether you are at a healthy weight for your height, and although this should be quite obvious to you, it's a good place to start when planning a diet as you can use it to see your progress while dieting.

You can calculate your BMI here now and use the results to see which category you fall into:

• A BMI of 16.5 to 18.5 classes you as underweight
• A BMI of 18.5 to 25 classes you as normal weight
• A BMI of 25 to 30 classes you as overweight
• A BMI of 30+ classes you as obese

The BMI system is very basic and does have some shortcomings. It only takes into account body fat and will give incorrect readings if you are large boned, are an athlete with a high lean muscle percentage, or a breastfeeding mother. When calculating for children a different results scale is used.

Healthy eating

The first place to start on your diet is healthy eating. You probably know if you eat healthily or not, but there is a lot more to it than that. The following are important when trying to lose weight.

• The 3 main componets of food
• Calories in your diet
• Understanding the impotance of Fat & Carbohydrate
• Number of Meals you eat
• Time of your meals
• Glycemic Index & Glycemic Load

The 3 main componets of food

Here is a quick run down of the components of foods and what they mean to your diet.

Fat: Saturated fats are a big concern in modern food. Especially processed and fast food. However fat is not as bad as it is made out to be. Good fat is absolutely essential for good health and helps regulate vitamins and your will boost your immune system. The trick to eating the right fat is to eat fat in natural unprocessed food. Quite surprisingly, eating this type of fat actually reduces the amount of carbohydrates stored as fat in your body.

Protein: This great for diets because it is low in fat and carbohydrates. It helps build muscle which will burn more calories as well as making you feel fuller after eating.

Carbohydrate: This can be broken down into two categories. Sugars and starches.

Sugars are simple carbohydrates which have a sweet and addictive taste. Sugars are processed quickly by the body and are used for a fast energy release. When they are not used, they are stored as fat and are the main reason for weight gain.

Starches are complex carbohydrates which can be identified by their bland taste. They include oats, nuts and root vegetables. Complex carbohydrates are broken down to simple carbohydrates in the body, but this process is slow and the sugar is released slowly. This means that there is not a surplus in the body, so more is used for energy and less is stored as fat.

Calories

The number of calories in food is the amount of energy it contains. We eat food to get energy which we use when moving around, thinking and even sleeping. Obviously, a higher intensity of activity will use a greater number of calories than lower intensity activities.

IMPORTANT: Drinks also contain calories.

In your everyday life your body will use a certain number of calories. This number is called your maintenance level and is the amount of calories you need to consume to neither gain or lose weight. This is the KEY to starting your weight loss. If you know this number then if your intake is less, then you will start to lose weight.

The government sets an average calorie need for men and women, but as this is an average over the whole population, it will be nowhere near correct for you.

Once you know your maintenance level, take in this simple fact. There are 3500 calories in 1lb (0.45kg) of fat. That means that eating 500 calories less than your maintenance level for 7 days will make you lose 1lb of bodyweight.

Now that is a great way to start your diet and will start you dropping weight. However it is also where most diets fail. And they fail big-time because of it. The results may last for a few weeks but your weight loss will ultimately fail because of several reasons.

• Your body adapts to your new calorie intake.
• You drop too many calories from your maintenance level too quickly.



Both these are caused by metabolism slow down and the methods to combat them are explained in the later section on metabolism.