How to Lose Weight Fast

How fast is fast enough when you want to lose weight? The answer really depends on how long you want to keep any weight off once you’re no longer focusing intently on your diet. Make sense?

Typically, losing weight fast is not the healthy and long lasting way to go. Take the starvation diet as an example. This would be an attempt at losing weight fast by drastically restricting the number of calories you consume each day. And initially, you probably will lose pounds quickly.

A couple problems occur, although. You will likely be hungry and a little cranky. You might feel low energy. But the biggie is that if you keep up a starvation diet, your body catches on and goes into self preservation mode and your metabolism slows to a crawl. It can become very difficult to lose more weight because your body is protecting itself.

Starvation diets are hard to keep up and once your weight loss slows, the motivation goes away too.

Low fat diets are another option on the list of how to lose weight fast. Low fat diets are similar to starvation diets in that you can start out motivated and determined, but you can quickly tire of the food options and limitations. Just think of dry toast and vegetables.

Many people searching for how to lose weight fast will come upon the Atkins Diet. With this diet you are encouraged to eat a whole lot of protein and fat and very limited carbohydrates. It’s a low carb diet, maybe the first published, and there are now many variations in circulation.

In my experience, the Atkins Diet is one of the easy ways to lose weight, at least in the beginning. You’ll start out feeling pumped and motivated and the list of foods you can eat is great.  Your energy level might even soar too.  But the plateau will eventually come, and you will no longer be losing weight. It becomes very frustrating.

When you’re no longer losing weight and trying super hard to figure out why not; when you begin to restrict what you are eating more and more in an effort to jumpstart your weightloss again — That’s when the will power to stick with the diet begins to weaken.

In the long run, a much better option is to ensure you are eating a balanced diet of nutritious whole foods. You want to allow your metabolism to function at an optimum level, with your body believing you are going to feed it regularly.

The Calorie Shifting diet meets all of these criteria and the popularity of the diet growing. Actually, there are many variations of calorie shifting diets. But, with this type of eating plan, you basically eat healthy foods at regular intervals, while varying the number of calories you take in from day to day.

Each Calorie Shifting plan has guidelines about when to eat and how to vary the caloric intake. Typically a day of higher calories is built in regularly and helps to keep the diet more interesting. Because your body is being fed regularly and variably, your metabolism doesn’t slow down or plateau, and fairly rapid weight loss can occur.

Fatloss4Idiots and YayFood are two resources where you can learn the details of Calorie Shifting and decide for yourself if either seems like a good option for you.