Watch your calorie intake to lose weight

The traditional belief about how to lose weight is that you need to burn more calories than you consume, and for the most part, that’s right, but what I am going to tell you might surprise you, because if your calorie intake is too low, you could end up putting on more weight, rather than lose weight. In fact, you very likely will!

We all have a basal metabolic rate (or BMR). This is the rate at which our bodies burn calories, based on our gender, our age, our height and of course our activity level.

Once you know your BMR, you will know what calorie range you need to consume each day to either gain, maintain or lose weight.

The problem with many people is that they believe that to lose weight, they should just reduce the number of calories they are consuming. Some even resort to skipping meals in order to keep their calorie intake down or they just eat too few calories (way less than they should be).

The problem with this method is that starving your body like this lowers your metabolism. Our bodies are very complex and indeed very clever. Once you start starving your body, it becomes very efficient at storing fat. It does this so that it has somewhere to draw from when it needs energy. Whenever you eat, your body goes into “storage mode” and therefore if you wanted to lose some inches off your hips, you’re definitely going the wrong way about it because lowering your metabolism means more fat on your hips (and everywhere else!).

If you want to increase your metabolism, it’s time to start eating more often. Eating healthy food every 3 hours or so, 5 to 6 times a day is what you need to do. This teaches your body to hurry up and burn those calories because it knows more food is on its way only a few hours later!