Maintaining Your Energy Levels while Dieting

One of the hardest things to do is to lose fat and not feel weaker in the process. Cutting calories can have many negative effects and lethargy is definitely in the top 3.

Keeping up your energy levels is critical to your work, exercise programs and family life, so it makes sense to adopt some specific strategies to deal with this problem.

Using stimulants, unfortunately, is the traditional – but wrong – way to deal with this problem. Caffeine in sugary soft drinks, coffee and diet sodas might pep you up now, but you will pay later.

What goes up, must come down. Crashing down in this case. Worse, it breeds dependence and a need to use greater amounts to get the same effects.

What you need are really two separate strategies – one for your diet and another for your exercise program.

Let’s start with diet. The big mistake most people make – especially those that are not in the obese range, but still overweight – is cutting too many calories in the beginning. Even when well along in your fat burning program, cutting too many calories is counterproductive in terms of feeling energetic – in fact, it probably won’t help you cut any fat either.

The reason has to do with your BMR – Basal Metabolic Rate. This is the minimum number of calories you need to get throughout the day. This amount does not include any calories burned by exercise. Your BMR is highly dependent on your metabolism, weight and activity level, but you can check this calculator to get a general idea: www.bmi-calculator.net

Learn more about BMR here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate

Once you know your BMR, you can begin to make a plan to eat the right amount of calories to burn fat, yet not get super fatigued in the process. It’s really simple – eat your BMR (or close to it) in calories daily and use exercise to burn fat.

If you cut too many calories – this amount will vary from person to person – your body’s metabolism actually slows down to compensate. The result: you feel weak and tired. Worse, you burn no fat in the process.

Exercise actually gives you more energy, not less, so use it to perk yourself up when feeling sluggish. But you need to eat right. The correct mix of protein, carbs and fats is essential to getting good results from your fat burner program.

Today, restricting carbohydrates – carbs for short – is all the rage. Basically, you avoid or severely limit foods that have carbs. This removes a huge amount of food from your diet and can really work to burn fat. This diet regime makes sense if you need to cut overall calories to get down to your daily BMR, but can hurt your energy levels – especially if you need the carbs to do your workout.

Carbohydrates are your body’s energy source, so you need to eat some – especially if you exercise and lead and active lifestyle. So when cutting items to get down to your BMR, fats should take precedence over carbs. Fats are highly concentrated calories your body does not need – it can produce all the fats it needs from the carbs you eat.

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