A pound of fat contains 3500 calories. So when you see people selling products that suggest that you can lose 5 pounds a week, it means that you will need to reduce 17,500 calories a week. That is a huge amount of calories to reduce. It is also an amount that your body cannot sustain.

This is why so many low calorie diets fail in any long term results, and this is why you stop losing weight after a few weeks. Your body just cannot handle this type of weight loss, so it slows down your ability to burn calories. When this happens, you will not only fail to lose body fat, but will probably start to gain fat.

The recommended method and more sustainable method is to aim for a loss of 2 pounds of fat a week. This means getting rid of a thousand calories a day. If you do this just by removing these calories from your diet, you will lose muscle as well as fat. This is something that should be avoided.

So what's the answer? The thing to do is to split this method. This means that you cut 500 calories from your daily diet, and lose the other 500 calories through physical activities (exercise). The thing to keep in mind is that fat is stored energy, and you need to use this energy to reduce it. So if you exercise you will start to lose body fat.

You should increase the calories that you get from protein and reduce the calories that you get from carbohydrates and fat. This will minimise your muscle loss and increase your fat loss. Because you have cut back on fat and carbohydrates, there will be less chance of them being stored as fat.

As for exercise, you need have to make sure that you don't only focus on cardio work, use a program of weight training in your workouts. This will help with keeping muscle and boosting your metabolic rate so that you burn more body fat.

If you follow these training methods you will find that in a couple of months you calorie requirements will increase. This is fine because all it means is that your body is asking for more calories to cope with the exercise that you are doing. You can do this without gaining fat. So at the end of the day, not only will you lose body fat, you will also after a short time go back to eating more calories.