An increasing number of people around the world are starting to struggle with unhealthy weight problems and are searching for solutions.

It is well known that being overweight can trigger the start of lifestyle diseases such as heart disease and diabetes.  The reality of what makes us gain and lose weight comes down to our calorie intake, more so than the concentrations of fat and sugar in processed foods. The mechanism of weight loss can be split into a few basic forms these being the destruction of tissue, dehydration, and calorie weight loss. In the fight against obesity, the only methods that are beneficial for the long-term are those based around calorie weight loss. More specifically, weight loss only happens when you consume less calories than you burn. This is what is said to be negative calorie weight loss, or just calorie weight loss for short. It could be said that weight loss is actually not a complex concept and that all that is needed is to maintain a net negative calorie count. However, achieving calorie weight loss is normally more difficult in practice than in theory due to a variety of reasons and excuses. Generally we consume more calories than burn when we are young and growing, bed bound, pregnant, experiencing health problems, eating for emotional reasons, working long hours in front of a computer, generally not getting much exercise, living a sedentary lifestyle, or experiencing eating disorders. In some of these cases, it is healthy for us to consume more calories than we burn eg pregnancy but in the other cases it leads to obesity. Usually when people find it seemingly impossible to overcome their weight increase they resort to looking for a fast solution a ‘quick fix’, rather than become more determined and try and resolve and improve their bad habits and lifestyle. Others do try hard to combat their habits, but don’t succeed due to not having a proper methodology for overcoming the habits and the wrong lifestyle. The quick fix methods that most of us try are not always based on a long-term approach to burning at least as many calories as you consume. Some weight loss programs label certain foods as weight loss foods and other foods as weight gain foods. A example of this too simplistic approach is having a wide variety of vegetables and fruits labelled as negative calorie weight loss foods, purely down to the fact that they have a high fibre and nutrient content, together with a low calorie to weight ratio.  To realise the errors in this basic and too simplistic approach you just need to see how many herbivores in the animal kingdom struggle to get enough food to grow and maintain their weights but most of them look pretty healthy.It’s when they are in some way have their movement restricted then they seem to become overweight. So how does negative calorie weight loss translate into actual pounds. A pound of fat is made up of about 3500 calories. In other words you need to burn 3500 more calories than you eat to burn one pound of fat. The problem is that most people don’t even burn 3500 calories in a day, so that even a day of fasting is unlikely to result in the negative calorie weight loss of 3500 calories required to lose one pound.   This goes a long way to explain why healthy weight loss is usually losing a few pounds per month. The maths works out roughly that if you limit yourself to 1500 calories per day and you are a relatively active person, exercising each day so that you can burn 1800 calories per day you will have a negative calorie weight loss equivalent to 300 calories per day.  At this rate it will take you nearly twelve days to lose one pound of fat. This should help you understand why patience is required to obtain long-term, healthy weight loss. You must also bear in mind that your day to day weight may vary due to the fact that your body will hold more water than other times during the day as much as your calorie intake and calorie burning calculations.  It is very easy for your body to carry an extra three or four pounds of water in a day for a variety of reasons but not the next day when your body could take itself to a two or three pound water deficit.  Your weight could easily change by three pounds in the day, completely unrelated to whether you burned off any fat. But, over the long term it will be the storing or burning of fat that determines the weight loss or gain. The overall solution is simply to decrease your calorie consumption through exerting control over your choose of food and the correct amount, while increasing your calorie usage through exercise.And don’t rely on quick fix weight loss plans, that in many cases only manipulate your water retention for a few days or even weeks.   Remember you need to focus on achieving negative calorie weight loss.