Weight Loss Tactics
The essence of weight loss is fairly simple: creating a calorie deficit, either by reducing the number of calories you take in, burning more calories through exercise, or a combination of both. There are, however, a number of ways to go about this --- some people like to eat whatever they want and make up for it with hours in the gym, while others prefer to rarely exercise but dramatically reduce their calorie consumption. Some people decrease their caloric intake by reducing portion sizes while others like to eliminate certain nutritional groups, like carbohydrates, from their diets.
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Calorie Counting
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One important weight loss strategy is calorie counting. Most people do not actually know how many calories they take in during the course of the day, which means that it is difficult to create a calorie deficit. After all, if you don't know how many calories you're starting with it's hard to know whether you're cutting enough or too many.
So, one strategy for weight loss is to meticulously count calories, keeping detailed notes of everything you eat. This will help you both set and meet calorie goals.
Carbohydrate Changing
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Your body needs carbohydrates to fuel itself. This means that the healthiest diets have a substantial (around 40 percent) amount of carbohydrates. However, there are two types of carbs --- simple carbohydrates and complex carbohydrates. The former cannot be processed very efficiently by your body, and are, therefore, metabolized as fat rather than used as fuel. The latter, on the other hand, can be slowly processed and used on an as-needed basis.
So, another strategy is to eliminate overly-processed carbohydrates, like white bread, rice and pasta (and anything else made of white flour), and replace them with their whole-grain counterparts. Vegetables are another good source of complex carbohydrates, so you should increase their intake as well.
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Strength Training
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Strength training is weight lifting that uses high weights and low repetitions (4 to 6 per set). It also focuses on compound exercises that use multiple muscles each, such as squats and bench presses. Since these work whole muscle groups, they make you sweat and your heart pound like cardiovascular exercise does. However, they also force your body to use calories for muscle growth, thus speeding up your metabolism and causing it to burn more calories when you do other exercise or even when you just watch TV or sleep.
Interval Training
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Interval training is an excellent cardiovascular activity for weight loss because it is high-intensity, low-duration. It is characterized by short bursts of intense activity followed by longer bursts of lighter activity. An interval training session could have someone working as hard as they can for 30 seconds, then slowing down for 2 minutes, then repeating.
Interval sessions are only around 20 minutes long, so to really get the best calorie burning effect from them, you should exercise at moderate intensity and longer durations as well. You could jog for 10 minutes, then do your 20 minutes of interval training, then jog for 10 more minutes, or just go for 40-minute moderate jogs on days that you don't interval train.
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