Diets and Weight Loss Explained

While every major media outlet will tell you otherwise, diets for weight loss are not rocket science.

Some diets will make you count carbohydrates, others will force you to enumerate your fat intake, and still others will tell you to eat hardly anything at all.

If you are really interested in having diets and weight loss explained, then remove every preconceived notion you have about dieting right now and focus on what is about to be said:

Dieting happens when calories in are fewer than calories out.

No, I'm not making a wisecrack. The very most basic formula for human food consumption is that calories in must be greater than calories out for survival. To make up for the possible lack of "calories in" during famine or poor hunting, our bodies store energy in the form of body fat. It is just unfortunate that our bodies are quite efficient in doing so even when there is no famine, making your tummy trade a six-pack for a muffin-top.

So, when all those diets out there tell us that special counting strategies are a must for losing weight they're wrong, right? Not necessarily - the complexity in diets for weight loss is definitely not necessary for pure pound-dropping, but they are designed to cause avoidance of hunger-related behavior or a more rapid fat-burning process.

Take the Atkins diet for example. Recall that Atkins is all about the fat, hardly about the protein and not at all about the carbs. The reasoning behind this is not that carbs contribute more to weight gain (FYI, fat does a much better job than carbs), but rather that the body goes through a process of fat-burning called ketosis when it is starved for carbs. Ketogenic diets do have their place in medical usage - in epileptic children. Unfortunately, the severely unbalanced nature of the Atkins diet may cause as much harm as good.

The most important takeaway is that two identical individuals, one pursuing a calories in/calories out approach with a balanced nutritional profile and one pursuing the Atkins diet, will lose weight similarly if their caloric intake and usage was equal. There you have it, diets and weight loss explained - there really was never any mystery, just a lot of media hype and confusion over the basics of nutrition.

*The author of this article is not a medical professional. This advice should be taken as an article of interest only and not as medical advice. For medical advice, contact your doctor or nutritionist.*