Fat Loss 4 Idiots Book

Principle one: eat three meals a day

On this diet, make sure you eat regular meals three times a day, with no in-between snacks. This schedule puts the body on a rhythm of satiety and hunger. Overeaters Anonymous has found that this is the surest way to achieve weight loss and to stick to your diet long term.

One reason you may be continually tempted to overeat now is that you never really allow yourself to sense the difference between the feeling of hunger and the feeling of satisfaction. Instead, you become more psychologically attuned to when you want to eat, not when you need to. As a result, you eat at odd times...or snack constantly. This undermines both your health and your attempts to lose weight.

This diet's high-fat content will help balance your blood sugar, preventing cravings, energy dips, and mood swings. If you happen to be hypoglycemic, suffering from bouts of low blood sugar, you need higher levels of fat and lower levels of carbs at each meal in order to avoid drops in blood sugar. Extra fats will slow down digestion time, allowing you to go longer between meals.

• On this diet, it is made sure that you're satiated in the morning, eating a nourishing and satisfying breakfast, such as:
• Scrambled eggs with buttered toast or bacon
• A smoothie containing coconut oil and whole-milk yogurt
• Nourishing oatmeal with butter or cream
• A cheese omelet
• Smoked wild salmon with toast and butter or coconut oil

Principle two: eat traditional fats

Your brain, nerves, horomones, and all your body's intracellular communication systems require the right kind of fats to function. In addition, fats act as carriers of the key fat-soluble vitamins D,E,K and especially A, which boosts thyroid function and helps maintain a healthy metabolism. Thousands of years of evolution have trained your body to seek and absorb these nutrients from food, not vitamin pills. These vitamins are found mostly in animal fats; in fact, the only source of true vitamin A is animal fat.

Polyunsaturated vegetable oils are usually rancid (even if they taste fine), do not contain these vitamins, and have other harmful side effects as well. But if you've ever wondered why you crave fried foods, doughnuts, ice cream, chips, and a host of other greasy foods, the reason is simple. These cravings are your body's desperate attempt to get the fats and fat-soluble vitamins it needs to function smoothly. If you were eating good-quality fats containing these nutrients, you would not crave unhealthy foods containing the wrong kinds of fats.

Principle three: eat nutrient-dense foods

Obesity is actually a symptom of nutritional deficiencies; therefore food quality, and not just quantity, is key to successful weight loss. Nutrient-dense foods provide complete protein, healthy fats, and unrefined carbs, plus the vitamins and minerals your body needs to build, maintain, nourish, and heal all the cells in your systems. Remember: the higher the nutrient content of your food, the less you need to eat to satisfy your basic nutritional needs.

Principle four: restrict calories moderately, a little but not too much

Calorie restriction ensures that you don't take in more energy than you expend, but instead begin to use up your body's stores of fat. On the other hand, to restrict the amount of calories even more than the amount specified is to deny your body what it needs to perform vital functions. Extreme calorie restriction is tantamount to starvation. The body responds with cravings and, as a result, you may wind up bingeing or eating undesirable foods. Even if you have the willpower to maintain the calorie restriction, your body may react to this perceived emergency by storing fat and altering your metabolism for the worse.

The key here is to offset calorie restrictions by eating moderate amount of protein and, compared with other diets, a relatively high amount of fat to induce satiation. Remember, about two-thirds of the energy produced in the body by the food we consume is needed to support basic body functions: of the lungs, heart, liver and kidneys. Therefore you don't want to restrict calories below the minimum number needed to support the basic functions, plus the amount needed for all your normal activities.

The basic requirement from the vital body functions ranges between 1100 and 1800 calories, depending on your size, build, and sex. A woman who weighs 132 pounds, for example, needs about 1300 calories just to support basic body functions; one who weighs 154 pounds requires 1500 calories. She'll need about 500 to 700 additional calories for normal light activities and much more if she is very active.

Check out our Top 10 Diets. If you follow our diet plan, you will lose a pound a week. That's 50 pounds a year!