Diet and Meal Planning

Diet is the basis of much confusion for you guys.  Why?  Most of our knowledge about diet comes from two sources, our "common sense" and some marketer peddling products on infomercials. 

Let's face it, we all have our ideas about what we need to do to burn fat and I'm sure that all of you have seen someone peddling some ab device with a model showing of his of her great looking abs on tv (Oh how I wish it that such a device could burn my fat off and leave me with my own sexy abs).  As such the proceeding are probably the source of the majority of the misconceptions out there. 

Probably the biggest misconceived common sense approach to burning fat is that we must starve ourselves.  Please listen up people and please remember this if you don't remember anything else. 

You don't have to and you should never starve yourself to lose weight.  If you do you'll end up in that vicious circle of losing weight then gaining back even more back than before.  Hopefully that fact alone will scare you away from using this practice. 

So why is it that this brain-dead method doesn't work? Sorry if that comment offended you, but you've got to get away from this mentality if you want to burn that unsightly fat and keep it off.  To understand, you must first understand how you gain the fat the first place. 

First there are 3 types of energy sources used by your body: carbohydrates, protein and fats.  When you eat, these sources they must be broken down into a substance called glucose before they can be used as energy in your body.  When you eat an excess amount of these energy sources, the body stores the rest as fat. 

So doesn't that mean if we skip a meal or two won't we lose weight? Yes you will because your body will use it's stored reserves to provide the missing energy.  However when you opt to skip a meal, there are other effects going on within your body.  The most dire is that your insulin level now becomes low. 

What is insulin? Insulin is a hormone secreted by the pancreas that transports glucose to the body's cells for use as energy.  When there's no food to be broke down, only a small amount of insulin is needed to transport glucose. 

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