Our body needs energy to function properly. The source of energy for us is the food we eat. What happens when we consume lot of high energy food and the amount of calorie intake is more than our body can burn, the extra energy is converted to fat and stored in the body for later use. What will happen if we keep consuming more and more calories than our body could burn? They will be stored mostly as fat and our body weight and size will increase over time.

If you consider the opposite of the above, that is when your total energy intake is less than the total amount of energy burned, the body fat is converted to energy in order to fill the gap. As a result, your body fat reduces and you lose in weight and size. It should be now clear to you, how the calories (or energy) in the food we eat can directly effect our body weight.

What is a calorie controlled diet?
It has been discovered that an average healthy male will burn about 2500 calories every day and a female will burn about 2000 calories in conducting normal body functions. This can vary depending on certain factors like age, activity level and body weight.

A more active individual will burn more calories and a less active person will burn less calories. As an example, if you are a person doing sports, you will be burning more calories compared to the average person.

The first step of counting calories is to determine roughly how many calories you burn every day (also referred to as ‘maintenance level’). By estimating the daily calorie requirement and by controlling the amount of calories you gain from you diet, it is possible to either lose or gain body weight. Therefor, a calorie controlled diet can help you lose weight or gain weight naturally without any negative side effects.

Most of the articles published on this website can help you understand this better. Also, we have published a lot of “how many calories in xxx” type posts, and these can help you specially in planing your diet.

Internet is a god place to get your self educated on weight loss related topics. Keep in mind to always consult a qualified individual for professional advice before you try anything any website may suggest, including ours.

Note that in a calorie controlled diet plan, no food item is really ‘prohibited’. You are free to eat almost anything as long as you can ‘balance’ to total amount of calories in your meals.

“Hollywood Cookie Diet” is one of the top diet-cookie brands you can buy online. The company has stated that people loved the taste of their cookies and most of them could not believe they were diet cookies. I don’t think you can get a better deal if you can eat delicious cookies and lose wight instead of taking pills or supplements and heavy workouts.

Now the golden question.. Do they Really Work?
Any nutritionists will agree, if you take fewer calories (calories.. its all about calories.. its what this site is all about.. isn’t it) than what your body actually burns, naturally you will lose weight. It’s simple logic and a proven fact.

A study, which was conducted in the USA involving over 14,000 individuals has shown great results for “The Hollywood Celebrity Cookie Diet”. Most subjects participated in this study have lost between 47-53 pounds of body weight. These data were taken from their website.

“The Hollywood Celebrity Cookie Diet” program offers 7 day money back guarantee as well. Which means, if you are not satisfied with the results after 7 days, you will get a full refund and no company will offer a full money back guarantee unless they are 100% sure about the performance of their product. In addition to that, anyone who will order this cookie diet from the link below will get a free bonus as well. This includes a well illustrated recipe book with dozens of low fat, delicious Hollywood diet recipes, web pages, videos and many more. It’s a win-win situation and well worth a try.

Here is the promised link. Go check it out now.
The Hollywood Celebrity Cookie Diet

1. Spend about half an hour playing an outdoor game with your kids in the evening. Kids will be happy and you will burn close to 100 calories in 30 minutes.

2. Resist the temptation to order food in a cafe or a pizza on the phone and spend half an hour to cook a delicious low-calorie meal. An additional advantage – the number of calories consumed is also reduced!

3. Start your day by going for a early morning walk. Maybe take your dog for a walk.

4. Get into a romantic mood and have fifteen minuets of slow dancing with your husband or boyfriend. This will help you strengthen the relationship with your partner, and also burn some extra calories.

5. Find time for hobbies. For example, you can play bowling for about 15 minutes, devote 30 mins to a game of Frisbee, play a game of golf or even play some cards.

6. Take the time to communicate with friends and family. An hour spent in socializing with friends, in online chat, or active e-mail correspondence during the day will also help you burn more extra calories.

7. Plant a few flowers – and enjoy admiring the beauty. Just 20 minutes of gardening every day – and some of those extra calories you consumed early in the day will disappear.

8. Wash your car at home if the weather allows you. Save the money you were thinking about donating to the car wash. This is not just physical labor, but also a good way to get some fresh air and even get a tan!

9. Go to the market, spend some time walking around the stalls and pick up some fresh vegetables and fruits. Burn some calories while buying items for a healthy meal at home.

10. Do not use the elevator. Without a doubt, this advice you’ve heard before. Just don’t not neglect these little things thinking they are silly. Just a few steps climb up that staircase should help your body burn more extra fat.

The amount of calories you will need varies from person to person, depending on your gender, age, build, what kind of work you do, and all sorts of other factors. As a rough guide, though, women need about 2,000 calories per day to function properly, while men need around 2,500. A good way to organise this is to have 500 calories for breakfast, 500 for lunch and 1,000 for dinner – as men and women tend to eat together in the evenings, a man may find it easiest to eat a large lunch in order to get his extra 500 calories. In practice, you will probably want to keep each meal a hundred calories or so under these amounts, to allow for a modest amount of snacking.

The world is full of fad diets, but this is one that works: combined with exercise, there is simply no way for calorie-counting to fail, provided you have the willpower to stick with it. The reason that there are so many ways out there to ‘lose weight fast’ is that many people, unfortunately, find it hard to make themselves count calories. One tip: if you find it annoying to add up how many calories you’re putting in food, you might find it easier to work out and write down how many calories there are in the meals you make regularly. This will allow you to plan better and have some days where you don’t need to worry about what you’re putting in the food.

The reason for it is simple too – you know that during holidays your normal workout routine will be affected and you will end up gaining a considerable number of tires (read rounds of fat around the waist). You must realize, however, that you took the vacation to get away from the stress, not to choose one stress for the other. So if you are worried about losing the workout routine during holidays, make sure not to lose it.

Did you say easier said than done? Then here are some tips you can follow to keep up the weight loss trend during holidays.

How To Avoid Holiday Weight Gain

Water
Many people in India too have started substituting water with soda or other drinks, which are high in calories. Even diet sodas are unhealthy as compared to water. As was taught to us in school, we need more than eight glasses of water every day, even in those days when we may not feel too thirsty.

Eat Many Small Meals
Yes! You read it right. Six small meals in a day are healthier than three huge meals. One must never wait till he/she is extremely hungry and cannot stay without food much longer, if they have to eat. While eating only three heavy portions, people end up eating, actually binging, on anything and everything, they can lay their hands on. They also end up eating much more than they should at any given point of time.

Veggies’ Delight
The easiest way to lose weight, even on a full stomach is to add as many vegetables and fruits in the diet. They are really low on calorie and, even if you have had a stomach full of vegetables, you will have added very few calories to your system. Not to mention that fruits and vegetables are natural toxin cleaners, which clean your body, giving you more energy, cleaner skin, and healthy shiny hair.

Exercise
If you are taking a vacation at a place, where there is a staircase, make sure to use that instead of the elevator. If the place you are in has a gym facility, make the best use of it. If it has a pool, use that too; swimming is an excellent way to exercise the whole body, especially good for the buttocks! Since your normal routine is broken, you may have to find other ways of compensating for the loss. Remember that exercise was the part of your routine that you never had the intention of getting away from. The vacation was from work, not from something that made you fit and healthy.

Cook meals at home as much as possible. Meals cooked in restaurants often contain hidden calories and bad fats as well as portion sizes that are too large. When you cook at home, you are in control of your meals contain and how big the portions are. This is extremely important since the name of the game in an effective weight loss plan is how many calories you consume and what types of calories they are. However, if you are going to eat out, be sure to ask your server to be sure to put all dressings on the side and to leave off any butter or other high calorie toppings.

Drink a lot of water every day. We often think we are hungry when actually our body is telling us that we are, in fact, thirsty (or even dehydrated). Keeping yourself hydrated throughout the day by drinking a lot of water will not only help prevent you from eating when you really aren’t hungry, but will also get on a faster track to a leaner you! It is recommended that you drink at least eight glasses of water every day and even more on days that you train exceptionally hard. Remember: our bodies are made up of approximately 70% water!

In fact, some “crazy” individuals have even made an entire lifestyle of this practice. These folks are called fruitarians. The great Leonardo da Vinci was one of them. Mahatma Ghandi went this route for about six months, before reverting back to his original vegetarian lifestyle.

So if you want to give it a shot, even for a brief period of time just to experience some lightning-fast weight loss, it is certainly a viable option for you.

I suppose it would be irresponsible of me not to tell you that before you attempt to lose weight eating only fruit, you should consult with your most trusted health care professional. I believe most of these are called doctors!

I personally tried the fruitarian diet when I was 23 years old. I think I lasted two weeks. I was doing a lot of aerobic and ab exercises during this time, so I can’t credit only the diet for the weight I lost, which to the best of my recollection was 13 pounds. That sure was a good two weeks.

I found that the diet wasn’t sustainable for me, however. I felt great and looked pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. But I was craving hearty foods like crazy toward the end of my stint, and as many of you can imagine, nothing sounded better to me that a big, fat cheeseburger! (I went with a Garden Burger, instead… delicious!)

By no means do you have to be a fruitarian for life. You can lose weight by eating only fruit for any set period of time you choose. Try it for a week. If you think you can go another week, by all means go for it. And on and on and on…

- Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lee_A._Murray

One thing about exercise is that it raises your metabolic rate not only while you’re huffing and puffing on the treadmill. Your metabolism takes a while to return to its normal pace. It continues to function at a higher level; your body burns an increased number of calories for about two hours after you’ve stopped exercising.

Lots of people wonder if it matters where their calories come from. At its most basic, if we eat exactly the number of calories that we burn and if we’re only talking about weight, the answer is no — a calorie is a calorie. A protein calorie is no different from a fat calorie — they are simply units of energy. As long as you burn what you eat, you will maintain your weight; and as long as you burn more than you eat, you’ll lose weight.

But if we’re talking nutrition, it definitely matters where those calories originate. Carbohydrates and proteins are healthier sources of calories than fats. Although our bodies do need a certain amount of fat to function properly — an adequate supply of fat allows your body to absorb the vitamins you ingest — an excess of fat can have serious health consequences.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommends that a maximum of 30 percent of our daily calories come from fat. So, if you eat 2,000 calories a day, that’s a maximum of 600 calories from fat, or 67 grams of fat, per day. However, many doctors and nutritionists now set the maximum number of fat calories at 25 percent of our daily caloric intake. That’s 56 grams of fat per day for a 2,000 calorie diet.

- by Julia Layton

So how to lose belly fat effectively and sustainably? As it turns out, there are two facets of the strategy, balanced diet and physical exercise.

You have to be aware of the way the body consumes energy, before you can be on the marks to lose belly fat. The natural order of energy consumption in the body is carbohydrates, fats and proteins. Since you want to lose belly “fat”, you have to burn more fat. In order to achieve that, you will have to turn your body into a fat burning machine. How? Well, you will cut down on your carbohydrates (commonly called, carbs), so that the body’s metabolic mechanism is not left with a choice but to resort to fats. Simple eh!

However, it is important to note that you don’t need to bring your carbohydrates intake down to zero. A 60g to 100g of carbs intake daily is reasonable while you are set out to lose belly fat.

The other facet of the strategy is physical exercise. But what kind of physical exercise? It can’t be just any kind, right? Well, there is a huge misconception that regular and thorough cardiovascular exercise is what you need to lose belly fat. This is totally wrong and fallible. What is important is that your fat-burning diet plan must be supported with a fat-burning exercise routine.

To lose belly fat, the exercise approach you should adopt, is called “interval training” or “high intensity interval training”. What is this? In this kind of routine, any cardiovascular exercise is performed with varying intervals of low and high intensity. Statistics clearly show that interval training gives best results in terms of losing belly fat.

So here we have it. A simple belly fat-burning program. To summarize, it is all about using the body’s metabolic process to burn fat instead of carbs, and doing exercise that boosts that very metabolic mechanism. Last but not the least, consistency pays off well in whatever you do, and losing belly fat is no exception.