About a 40% of Canadians are overweight. And society puts a lot of pressure on us to be fit and even skinny, especially on women.

So after a while you just give in and decide to lose those extra 10 pounds that simply refuse to go away no matter what.

What are the options?

First obviously, there is exercise. This is the best option. Slowly as we start putting on muscle, we will burn more calories than before. The proportion of burnt of a pound of muscle vs. a pound of fat is of 20 to 1 calories. Heaven for a weight loss.

There is also the calorie reduction programs that work well in the long term but as downside, they are very hard to follow. The problem is that the restriction in fat, meats, sugars and carbs makes us very hungry. The pangs are enough for many of us to drop the diet after a couple of days.

Another problem with the caloric restriction is that if the intake is not above a certain limit the body will reduce the metabolic comsumption of energy making the weight loss inexistent after a while. In other words, the body thinks there is starvation and takes extra care in the use of the fat. In this cases, the loss is mostly water and muscle.

This is why most everybody ends up gaining back the lost weight and then some more. (as said before, the less muscle the less calorie consumption).

Besides the problem with counting calories is that you have to be some sort of genius or spend at least two hours a day making up a journal to determine if you are following correctly the regime.

A rather innovative and widespread type of diet is the low-carb diet. I will talk about this in more detail in my next blog.

But no matter what is your weight loss method of choice, I recommend you this website as the perfect place to start your loss-weight journal. They provide you with caloric intake by type of food, daily charts and other great tools that may help to keep close track of your diet and exercise.

http://www.my-calorie-counter.com/calorie_counter.asp