People that are overweight focus on trying to lose weight. This is often the wrong way to look at it. When you lose weight you lose a combination of fat and muscle. Now muscle is not what you should be losing and you should be doing everything to hang onto it. You did not get overweight by having too much muscle, you became overweight because your body is carrying too much fat, and it is the fat you should be concentrating on losing.

If you have been trying to lose weight and you step on the scales after a month to find you have lost 10 pounds, you might feel pretty good about yourself. The problem is that at least half of the weight you have lost could be muscle. Muscle is living active tissue and it needs calories to stay on your body. Fat however is just dead weight that sits there as stored energy. When you go on a low calorie diet, your body will think it is starving. It will then begin to take the calories from the protein stored in your muscles to compensate for the calories it is not getting through food. This will make your muscles smaller and weaker. Small and weak muscles burn far fewer calories than bigger and stronger muscle.

In the long term this will affect your abilities to lose fat. If you look at long distance runners, you will see that they are very thin and have little muscle tone. This is because all they do is cardio for long periods of time. Lets face it not many people will want the body of a long distance runner. If you look at sprinters you will see that they have very different physiques. They look lean, muscular, and strong. This is because they need powerful muscles to generate the power to run short distances at great speed. They use training routines which not only stop them from losing muscle, but increase it. Most of us would rather have the body of a sprinter than a long distance runner.

You must include a weight training routine in your weight loss program. This will not only help you lose weight and keep muscle, it will also leave you in a situation where you won't have to cut back on large amounts of calories from your diet. All you will have to do is to replace the calories you get from bad food with calories from good food. This will stop you and your body from feeling miserable because you are starving yourself.

Many diets call for large reductions in calories. Now while you may lose some weight in the short term, the muscle loss will ensure that you don't lose much more weight in the long term. The reason low calorie diets exist is because they cater for peoples demands for a quick fix for weight loss. The truth is that there is no such thing as a quick fix when it comes to losing weight. If there was, why aren't all the quick fixes out there working? Why are more people gaining weight rather than losing it? Why does the weight loss industry continually bring out new diets or products, while there are already so many out there claiming miraculous results?

The answer is simple; they don't work for the vast majority of the people that want to lose weight. If you really want to lose weight, you don't need fad diets and pills. All you need is a sensible approach, with the knowledge that if you keep doing what you have set out to do over a period of time, then the results will come. Also the results you get will be far longer lasting and not just a flash in the pan which disappear after a month or two.

Look at you diet and figure out what you need to drop from it. Decide what good foods you are going to add to your diet. Eat sensibly by never missing breakfast. Eat smaller meals 4 or 5 times a day instead of 2 or 3 large meals. Your body is happier with smaller meals because they are easier to digest and less can be stored as fat. A big meal is harder to digest and once your body has used what it needs, what it doesn't get rid of through waste, it will store as fat. Sensible eating is not some secret you have to pay for. You already know what is bad in your diet and what is good.

As well as cardio you must include a weight training routine in your exercise program. The more muscle you have the more calories you will burn, it's that simple. Do you want a lean, muscular, and healthy body or do you want a thin, soft, and flabby looking body? Training for muscle will give you the first; not training for muscle will give you the second. Remember lose fat not weight.