Carrying excess fat is a health risk for everyone – including “fat ‘skinny' people”. Fat loves to settle around your liver, which is dangerous and further slows down your metabolism. Ever hear of an enlarged heart? What about heart bypass surgery? “Skinny” people carrying a high percentage of fat are just as vulnerable to chronic conditions as visually obese people are!
So you see, you can lose muscle and water weight and still not have the dream body you're dreaming about with diet pills and fad diet trends. You will weigh less, but what will your body look like? How about a shar pei puppy – otherwise known as the dog covered in thick wrinkles of saggy skin. It's cute on a dog, but hell in a bathing suit! Instead of fat rolls, you have empty saggy rolls.
When you lose “weight”, you have a new physical problem: the lose skin that flops around and sags. How many times do you hear this question asked of diet and fitness gurus? “I lost all this weight…how do I tighten up my skin?” Well, there are two ways of doing that: gain the fat back, or develop muscle tissue to fill it back in. You should understand at this point lean muscle tissue is your friend:
It burns more body fat as an energy source
It speeds up your metabolism
It fills out the empty spaces and gives you shape and definition
Some people are still going to be thinking about the easy way around the problem of how to develop lean muscle tissue. You see the advertisements again from the diet pill industry, and they guarantee if you take this “scientifically engineered” formulation, it will increase your body's ability to enter into a thermogenic state (which is just a fancy word for turning your body's thermostat up so it liquefies the fat so you can excrete it). Yes, the pills do work – but only a tiny bit! They will not increase your temperature enough to “burn” anything, except your wallet and your willpower when you don't see results. The diet industry's not there to assist you in getting skinny – they're there to keep you fat and buying their products!
At this point, you should see there's a big difference between weight and fat. You can afford to carry extra water and lean muscle, but not fat! No one ever died from being fit and well hydrated. So how do you lose the fat, keep the muscle, and manage to look like one of those diet commercials? Cardio and strength training exercises, in addition to proper diet – there's no way around it that will give you lasting results. Focus on the cardio as your main point if you want to lose fat, but don't neglect building muscle to have something to give you definition. You might have six pack abs, but until you lose the fat layer on top of it, you won't ever see them.
Also give up on the fantasy you can “spot reduce” in problem areas – you can't. Calories will be expended and fat will burn where it wants to. All you can do is continue using cardio workouts to burn the fat. If you continue working the muscles in your problem areas in addition to the cardio, your efforts will pay off.
I've got an assorted collection of exercise videos; some I like, most annoy me. Almost three years ago, I purchased the “Slim in 6” and the “Winsor Pilates” DVD series, and although I've started using the Slim in 6 program, I have recently gone back and looked at their diet plans. For some reason, I didn't like the Winsor Pilates diet, although I couldn't put my finger on it. Recently I saw the advertisement for “Slim in 6” and noticed the claim of being able to lose ten pounds in a week.
At this point I had been doing the Slim program for a few weeks – I was working out on the second of three workout schedules and thought, “How come I'm not losing weight at ten pounds like the ads claim?” So I went digging around in my large diet and fitness box and pulled out the diet plan to figure out what I was doing wrong. It turns out you must go on a liquid diet for a few days, then solid food, and during this time you work out twice a day. You'll never see that mentioned in the ad or else people would say, “NO SOLID FOOD FOR HOW MANY DAYS?! Heck with that!”
Your body needs solid food – it burns more calories by having to work to break it down for digestion, whereas a liquid diet has nothing to break down. This means your body is not burning calories doing what it does best, and why not take advantage of every place you can burn a calorie or two?
http://www.officialacaidiet.com/index.php?id=One+Simple+Dieting+Rule