If you want to lose weight, you must have a plan, a route map to success. This is called a program or programme. There are thousands of programs, but many of them are just plain batty. If they sound foolish, they probably are. Have you heard of the ‘cabbage water diet’? It sounds daft and it is. You cannot only drink cabbage water all your life!

Although there is a lot of nonsense talked about losing weight, there are some truths that play a role to play in almost every program you choose to follow. One of these truths is that it is better to eat many small meals throughout the day (approximately 5-6), than to go all day without eating and then stuffing yourself at dinner in the evening. This is popularly called ‘grazing’.

Have you ever asked yourself why this might be so? Well, the fact is, that the average human body can only process about 250 calories per hour. If you eat more than that, you are almost certainly overloading your digestive system. This is why it is important, because if your body cannot use all the calories that you give it, it will stockpile them.

Your body can only use up what it requires to fulfill the job that it is busy with, that is, what you are putting it through. If you are watching TV, most of those 250 will be stored. If you are exercising, most will be burned up. It stores the remainder as body fat. Your body has learned through evolution that tough times will come, so it prepares for them. It is like us putting excess money in a savings account or people hoarding food if a bad winter is predicted.

However, these days in the West, we rarely face those lean times any longer. Therefore, that fat is never used up and we just keep adding to it until we decide, by choice, to limit our consumption of calories or increase our amount of exercise.

Given this information, what can we do with it? Well, if you were to want to lose weight, you should be consuming no more than 1,500 calories a day (or whatever your program tells you), so 1,500 divided by 250 is six. if you ate 250 calories every other hour, that would give you twelve hours.

Consequently, eating light but often would be a helpful strategy or program to follow, because first of all, you are only providing your body with what it requires, when it needs it and secondly, you are able to better maintain a consistent blood sugar level, which means that you iron out the spikes and troughs you experience in a normal day’s cycle.

Two hundred and fifty calories does not sound a lot, but it is surprising what it will stretch too, if you take the trouble to investigate. It is true that you will have to severely restrict some foodstuffs, like bread, pasta, rice and potatoes, but whoever honestly thought that you could lose weight by eating that stuff anyway?

If you do not have time to cook a number of times every day, look in your supermarket. There are loads of ’250 calorie’ microwave meals. You don’t want to eat that? I can’t blame you. so get a good cookbook, which shows calorie content. You are at work all day? OK, eat some fruit, but choose wisely. It can be done, it only requires a little will and planning.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with lose weight programs. If you have an interest in losing weight, too, please go over to our website now at Why Can’t I Lose Weight? Check here for free reprint licence: Do You Sabotage Your Weight Loss Program?.

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