Good Nutrition Can Lead to Desired Weight Loss
Personal body image invariably involves how we view our physical selves, and how we perceive others see us.
We are constantly bombarded with advertisements, depicting perfectly-proportioned men and women, who seem to be enjoying themselves tremendously. The message: if only you could control your eating habits you could live the good life too.
Good nutrition, as it applies to our daily lives means that we take in what we need, to maintain our body's healthy state. Nutrition has become an important word thanks to the involvement of the USDA in our daily food requirements, and the FDA's involvement in determining what is, and is not, dangerous for us to consume.
What about eating habits? What roles does our daily intake play in our health? The body's ability to remain well, under anything other than ideal conditions is a direct result of the nutrition received on a daily basis.
How do we determine that we are providing the essential nutritional needs? That knowledge comes by educating ourselves about what our individual needs are, the needs of our family, and then taking that knowledge and applying it to the foods we buy, that we prepare, and that our families consume.
Health is taught as a science course. Little individual attention is given to how to attain optimal health via our eating habits. It's funny that we skip the most important, fundamental building block to good health: our nutritional and caloric consumption in our food.
The body's metabolism is a unique process for each individual person. No two people metabolize food at the same rate; therefore no two people have the same metabolism. We all use our calories at different rates, with different results. Our metabolism, like our fingerprints is unique to each of us. But the need to understand and accommodate this metabolism is an issue that we all face.
The dictionary defines metabolism as the sum of all biochemical processes involved in life, or the sustaining of life. In application, concerning our health, metabolism is related to the intake and use of food. In reference to the case in point, it is our ability to utilize our food to the fullest extent.
Right now, the greatest results in raising our metabolism come from exercise and building our muscle mass, while reducing our body fat. Adding more muscle to the body, in turn causes us to burn more calories, and this helps to elevate our metabolic rate. Muscle tissue, per cubic gram burns calories at twice the rate of fat, per cubic gram.
Our metabolism functions also depend on how well we have taken car of our nutritional needs. Some people have really high rates of metabolism. In other words, when they consume food, their bodies burn it up almost as fast as they consume it. Then there are those of us who use our food intake so slowly, as to not even notice that we're burning calories. These people who burn quickly are often slim and trim, the people who burn more slowly are the people with the tendency toward obesity.
For years, people have sought ways to raise the metabolic rate. If you can raise someone's metabolic rate, you are then better able to control the burn of calories especially for overweight or obese people. This would make the goal of better or improved health a much easier reality for these people. Efforts to date have produced very little results. There are food that we can consume that naturally raise our metabolic rate, but not to a great extent. What we need is a way to directly alter the rate. We need to be able to raise our metabolism to a point where we can actually see a benefit.
There is where the effort to stay physically fit and active provides tremendous payoff. Over the course of your life, if you stay active, exercise, and maintain optimal health for your muscles, you will see a tremendous difference in the rate that your body metabolizes food. As people age, their metabolism quite naturally slows down. The greatest way to prevent this from happening is through exercise and staying fit.
The best way to date to control our metabolic process is through proper nutrition, daily exercise, eating foods known to have an effect on our metabolic rate, and plenty of rest. The metabolic process can be indirectly controlled by these methods.
If we can understand that a pound of fat represents 3500 calories, then it's simple mathematically to see, that a 500 calorie reduction per day, will result in a one pound loss per week. An increase in exercise and a decrease in daily caloric consumption will result in the desired weight reduction, over time.