Stop Crash Dieting! A Boot Camp Instructor Tells You Why 
Energy needs and weight loss Our body needs food for energy and it stores any excess energy as fat. This simply means that if we eat more than what our body needs, then you will surely gain weight. However, it did not say that you should not eat. Instead, it stresses the fact that we need food in order to fuel our body with energy so we would be able to do our daily activities. To lose weight, you need to make your body use those stored fat, and the most effective ways to do this is to reduce the amount of calories that you eat and increase your level of activity. Increase your daily activity levels A person that increases their level of activities, and maintains the same diet as well as calorie intake will certainly lose weight. Even if you dreaded the idea of going to the gym, a light exercise of a 20-minute walk will actually be beneficial to you if done in a regular basis. When you perform an activity more than your usual daily activity, this will actually help in burning extra calories and fats stored in your body. There are several ways to increase your usual daily activity – Indulge yourself in sports or attend aerobics classes, walk, run and swim. Just choose which among these activities is enjoyable for you, so as to add excitement, thus, giving you more interest into doing it everyday. Slowly introduce changes Small changes could eventually lead to a big difference. Say if you eat one extra cookie in a day, this could actually lead to a 5 lb. weight gain in a year. Therefore, you’ve got to cut that extra cookie out of your diet so to avoid gaining that massive extra weight in the near future. You may also try swapping your usual full fat milk to low fat milk, or choosing to drink juice over a bottle of soda. These small changes will surely benefit you a lot in the years to come. Dieting is not temporary, you should think of weight loss as permanently changing your eating habits, if you really want major transformation. Although most weight loss goals are only within a short period of time, say a week, or a month, the goal should also be to sustain the changes long term, and not just for a short period. Be Patient and Persevere It might take several weeks or even months before you will see the changes, but you will soon notice that beautiful change in your body. Wait until people will be asking you about how you lose that weight, and appreciate you for doing a great job. Slowly, you will begin to notice that your clothes are beginning to fit loosely to your body and that is the moment you’ve finally been waiting for. Keeping your motivation up while on a diet is very difficult. There will be several days when eating healthy is the last thing on your mind, but doing things little by little will surely result to a major change. Just be patient and of course, do it the healthy way.