An Important Distinction That You Must Understand

While this book is talking about losing weight, I want to be more specific than this, because I am really talking about losing fat rather than just weight.
As I mentioned earlier, it is possible to be overweight but to have a very low fat to body weight ratio at the same time, because you are carrying a great deal of muscle. In other words, it is possible to be healthy but weigh more than the ‘norm’.
There is a common myth that muscle weighs more than fat, but it doesn’t. Five pounds of muscle weighs exactly the same as five pounds of fat, but fat is far bulkier than muscle as you can see from these replica models:
Because fat is bulkier, if you are carrying too much fat, you will tend to look ‘lumpy’ and carrying too much fat brings increased risks to your general health and well being.
So, be clear about this. This book is about losing fat naturally, but if you want to replace that fat with muscle, that is fine - because what I am essentially focused on here is your health, well being and fitness.
It’s all about shedding fat, getting you as lean, fit and well as possible.
That point having been clarified, let’s move on.

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Natural Weight Loss is a REALLY simple concept

The concept that underpins weight loss or indeed weight gain is a

very simple one.
Every human being at every stage of their life needs to take in a certain amount of energy in order to get through the day. This energy comes from the nutrition that we take in, in the form of the food we eat or the liquids we drink, and is generally measured in terms of calories or kilocalories. There is a slight difference between the specific meaning accorded to these two terms, with the latter being favored by professional nutritionists, but for the purposes of this post, I am going to use calories as an all-encompassing unit of food energy.
While every individual is different, you need a certain amount of food energy calories every day to satisfy your own personal energy requirements. These requirements will vary according to the amount of physical work you do, how much exercise you take, the speed at which your body burns the energy you are taking on board (your metabolic rate) and your general lifestyle.
However, at the end of the day, if you take on board the right amount of calories every day, your weight will stay stable and you will in general remain healthy.
If you take in too much energy, you will put weight on, but if you take in too little, you will see the opposite effect and lose weight.
It really is as straightforward as this.
You will see diet plans that recommend that you must cut down on your carbohydrates in order to lose weight, with other diet ‘experts’ on the opposite side of the fence who swear that the only way to lose weight is to reduce the amount of fats in your diet.
However, no matter what type of food you are eating for energy (which includes both carbohydrates and fats), you are going to keep getting fatter as long as you are taking in more energy than you burning. Thus, you will only lose weight if you are taking in less energy than you need.
That really is it. That is how you lose weight naturally – you ingest less energy than you need every day, and the fat will gradually fall off.

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What is The Difference Between Overweight And Obese?

When someone is overweight, their weight exceeds the normal

standards for people of their height and age. However, because everyone’s weight must include their bones, muscles, fat and water content, it is possible for someone to be overweight without being obese. For example, a professional athlete or bodybuilder may well be overweight, but because the majority of the ‘excess’ weight that they are carrying is muscle tissue, they are not obese. Nevertheless, in the majority of cases, being overweight does equate to carrying too much body fat and often progresses to become clinical obesity. There are several ways of defining obesity, but the most common is by reference to what is known as ‘Body Mass Index’ (BMI) which is a mathematical formula that generates a numerical BMI based on an individual’s weight in kilograms divided by their height in meters squared. Hence, the mathematical formula for BMI is kg/m2. These figures can be converted into imperial measures (pounds and inches), but because the formula for doing so is somewhat complex, you should use this easy ready calculator taken from the consumer.gov statistics page to calculate your own ‘Body Mass Index’:

So, now you have a BMI figure, what does it mean? From the same web site, you can see the relationship between your clinical weight classification and the risk of weight related illnesses and disease:

The most common way of quantifying whether someone is obese or not is if their BMI is in excess of 30 points on these scales.

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