Basics - General Concepts

General Concepts

Short term diet -vs- lifestyle change:
The vast majority of diets consist of a program that is difficult to maintain and are often nutritionally unbalanced. They typically do not help you incorporate lifelong healthy habits. Incorporating habits you can live with the rest of your life is the best key to sustained weight loss; otherwise, you will regain the weight and fall back into the same set or problems. To truly succeed, you must make a choice and work at permanently changing your lifestyle.

Depending on the source quoted, the failure rate of diets to accomplish long term sustained weight loss has been estimated to be anywhere from 80 to 98 percent.   That is why it is so important to focus on changing your lifestyle permanently.

What are you losing?
When you diet, you can lose fat, water, and muscle.   That is why it is so important to lose weight in a sensible way.

The worst part about a poor diet is that when you lose the muscle and then gain the fat back, your percent of body fat is actually higher. This is because you have lost muscle and the new weight gain almost never includes muscle gain (unless you are doing a LOT of weight lifting).

You definitely don’t want to lose muscle. With some starvation diets, up to 50 percent of the weight loss can be muscle. Depending on the amount of fat to lose, the average person on a diet loses between 20 - 40% muscle (of the total amount of weight loss). The average participant on the show "Biggest Loser" will lose an average of 19% muscle mass. For more information, see the side panel.

Diet4Living promotes a well balanced diet and exercise plan where it is reasonable to lose fat and gain muscle.

Losing water weight is only temporary. That is one reason why people on fad diets gain several pounds back in just a few days after ending their diet. It is not good for your body to be in a dehydrated state.

With a well-balanced diet lifestyle and exercise program, you can lose fat, GAIN muscle and not get dehydrated. This is what Diet4Living strives to show you.

Your diet lifestyle will change:
If you have a lot of weight to lose, the diet lifestyle you start with will not be the same as when you get closer to your goal. Your habits will transform: the types of food you eat the most will change, the quantity and frequency of the poor nutrition/high calorie foods will decrease. While there is no type of food you will need to permanently “give up forever”, you will start incorporating good foods into your diet and limiting the amount of poor nutrition / high calorie foods.

But beyond the types of food you eat changing over time, you physical fitness should change. Activities that would be beyond your abilities when you start working out may even become non-challenges. And if you are an older individual, you will likely feel years younger once your body gains strength.

Losing weight is not at an even pace:
You will have times where you lose weight more quickly than others. Don’t get discouraged. No one loses weight at an even pace especially when they are battling emotional challenges.

When you start to lose weight, it will come off fairly fast. The bigger you are the more calories your body needs to maintain that size. Also the same exercise a 300 pound person performs will burn more calories than a person weighing 150 pounds doing the same. Thus small changes will give you encouraging weight loss at the beginning. As time goes on, your increasingly wiser diet and exercise choices help you to continue to lose weight.

Next: Examine pg1

Food for thought:

Diet4Living maintains that losing fat and gaining muscle at the same time can be done with proper nutrition and exercise. See the following article at

"Resistance Weight Training During Caloric Restriction Enhances Lean Body Weight Maintenance" - found at www.exrx.net