The naturally small woman is the envy of every other woman, but many of us do not even understand why. While all of us regular Joes have to watch what we eat and exercise in order to maintain our sizes or to lose some of our current weight, the naturally small woman can sit at home all day long doing nothing at all and still keep small or petite. This is simply because she is one of those women with a higher metabolism rate than normal, and just by doing nothing at all she can naturally burn off as much calories as the woman who toils at her job for the entire day and then goes home to seek after the needs of her family.

The average woman on the other hand would have to work twice as hard as the woman with the higher metabolism to burn the same amount of calories. This means that in order to lose the same amount of weight, one woman would have to work twice as hard as the other woman. Likewise, the woman on the other end of the metabolism extreme would have the slowest metabolism of all, and would have to work the hardest out of all to lose some weight. The woman with the slowest metabolism is therefore the one who is likely to gain the most weight the fastest.

While the metabolism and the amount of work that we do influence the amount of calories that we burn, we also need to consider the amount of calories that we eat in the first place. You must remember that the key to losing weight is actually tipping the balance so the calorie scale so that you burn more than you eat. If you work harder but eat equally as 'hard', then you would continue to maintain the energy balance and not lose any of the extra weight that you might have! This is why many exercise programs advise you to go on diets once you have started exercising.

The bottom line therefore is that you have to burn more calories than you are eating in order to lose any weight. You can do this by either eating less calories or burning more calories. The best balance is a combination of both. In order to burn the calories, you have to exercise. The harder you exercise then the more calories you would burn and therefore the more weight that you would lose.