The math is pretty simple. One pound of fat equals 3500 calories. Want to lose a pound a week? Then you need to consume 3500 calories less per week than you use. That’s about 500 calories a day. You can lose one pound per week if you cut 500 calories from your normal daily diet and keep your activity level the same.

All right - that doesn’t sound like much, especially if you’re more than 25 pounds overweight. Study after study has shown, though, that those people who lose weight gradually - at a rate of 1-2 pounds per week -are far more likely to keep the weight off and maintain a normal weight for a lifetime.

So how much is 500 calories exactly? If you are going to reduce your intake of calories but 500 a day, you need to know what to cut out? Here is how you lose 500 calories a day

* Use milk instead of cream in your coffee. Savings? 50 calories in each cup.

* Skip the butter on your baked potato. Savings? 100 calories

* Drink fruit-flavored water instead of a 16 ounce soda. Savings? 200 calories

* Have a salad instead of that tempting Big Mac. The Big Mac equals 460 calories. A fresh salad with a light dressing? Less than 100! Savings? 360 calories

*You can walk right by that bag of potato chips. An average snack size bag of chips has over 300 calories. Savings? 300 calories

*Eat corn on the ear. There is 165 calories for every 1 cup serving of canned corn. An ear of corn has 85. Savings? 80 calories.

* Switch to low-fat cream cheese on your bagel. Savings? 90 calories per ounce.

* Love those fries and can’t give them up? Swap the skinny fries out for thick steak-cut ones. The thinner frech fries absorb a whole lot more oil than the thicker ones. Savings? 50 calories per 4 ounce serving

You cna also lose one pound a week if you up your activity level by 500 calories, if you want to look at it from a exercise perspective. How easy can that be? Have a look:

* Take a half-hour walk around the park. You need to aim for a pace that is little fater than a stroll, but not too fast, you don’t want to get breathless. Burn:160 calories.

*Go for a bicycle ride. Tackle a few moderate hills and aim for about five miles total. Burn: 250 calories

* Go dancing - and really DANCE. The longer you’re out on the floor instead of at the table drinking up high-calorie drinks, the more you’ll get out of it. The kind of dancing that makes you breathless and that warms up your body will give you a nice calorie savings. Burn: 400 calories for one hour

* Swimming is great for you, and a lot of fun, too. The resistance in the water means that you will be bale to burn more calories dancing or walking in it and you will avoid the stress impact on joints from aerobics. A few laps as a slow crawl is wonderufl-if you can get up to an hour you’ll be doing even better! Burn: 510 calories

* You should get out and do some gardening. An hour of working in your garden (i.e. bending over, and stretching) can burn up to as many calories as a brisk walk. Burn: 250 calories.

*Play a game of tennis. Hook up with a friend for a weekly tennis game and you’ll be amazed at the difference. An hour of vigorous tennis is one of the most effective calorie burners that are around. Burn: 800 calories

It’s important to keep in mind that all exercise/calorie numbers are based on a woman weighing 130 pounds. If you weigh more then you will definately burn more fat. Want an added bonus to burning calories through exercise? You turn fat into muscle whenever you exercise. Three guesses which kind of body tissue burns more calories - even when you’re not exercising. You got it - your body uses more energy to maintain and feed muscle than it does fat.

For best results, mix and match food savings with exercises that burn calories. Do keep in mind that eating less than 1000 calories a day for more than a few days will convince your body that it’s starving and slow your metabolism. Keep calorie ranges reasonable, and consult a doctor if you want a quicker, more drastic weight loss.

The balance between the effects of your body’s fat burning hormones and fat storing hormones is the determining factor in whether or not you lose weight.  While the individual fat buring hormones are greater in number than the fat storing hormones, the fat burners are weaker.  As a matter of fact, the entire effects of all of the fat burning hormones combined can be completely negated by a high level of insulin, the most powerful of the fat storing hormones.

Because of this, it is important to understand how the hormones that control body fat interact with each other and the factors that control the relative effects of these hormones. With this understanding, it will become much easier to spot the mistakes you may be making in your weight loss program and to correct those mistakes to obtain the most efficient fat burning.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to concentrate on maximizing the effects of the fat burning hormones. The primary ones are adrenaline, thyroid hormone, growth hormone, glucagon, testosterone, and insulin-like growth factor. While a detailed explanation of how each of these hormones works is beyond the scope of this article, there are some basic factors that will promote the fat burning effects of these hormones.

To stimulate the release of the fat burning hormones and to maximize the action of them, there are three major factors to consider. These are diet, exercise, and sleep.

With regards specifically to your fat burning hormones, the diet aspects may not be what you are expecting.  When it comes to the hormones that stimulate fat buring, the most important thing is keeping the liver as healthy as possible.  The liver processes and activates many hormones, including the ones that promote fat burning.  An overworked liver becomes less effective in processing hormones and the effects of the fat burning hormones may decline as a result.   Of course, drinking too much alcohol or consuming too many medications will hurt the liver, but many people are unaware of the damaging effects to the liver of a diet that is too high in fat and/or animal protein.

Perhaps you or someone you know has tried the Atkins diet and did well at first, but then hit a point where the weight loss stopped. This is actually to be expected because the Atkins diet is very hard on the liver over the long-term. While the low-carb aspect of it is good, the excessive fat and animal protein, particularly combined with the lack of healthy nutrients from vegetables and fruits, will make the liver tired and sluggish, and the result is decreased effectiveness of the fat burning hormones.

There are other diet considerations when it comes to minimizing the effects of the fat storing hormones, but for maximizing the effects of how lose weight through fat burning hormones, the main dietary concern is to maintain healthy liver function.

The next factor in maximizing the work of the fat burning hormones is exercise. There is much debate over what type of exercise needs to be done to promote weight loss. Although the most popular view is that low intensity, high duration exercise, such as exercising for an hour or more at one’s “target heart rate” is the most effective type of exercise for fat burning, this is simply not true. Now before someone emails me research that proves this type of exercise burns the most fat, we need to make a distinction between the fat burned at the time of exercise and the overall fat burning effect of exercise.

Low intensity, long duration exercise does burn more fat than high intensity, short duration exercise or interval training during the exercise session. But because of the hormonal effects of high intensity exercise, the overall fat burning effects of high intensity exercise are considerably greater than for low intensity exercise, even when the low intensity workouts are much longer. High intensity exercise significantly enhances the function of certain fat buring hormones and raises the body’s metabolic rate for 12 to 24 hours, so increased fat burning continues for up to a day after the workout is completed. With low intensity exercise, the fat burning effects mostly stop at the completion of the workout. So, a single high intensity workout can produce many times the fat burning effects of a low intensity workout.

Closely tied to the effects of high intensity exercise on fat burning is the effect of sleep. One of the reasons that high intensity exercise stimulates metabolism is that it stimulates the release of growth hormone, which we mentioned earlier is a fat burner. This brings me back to the importance of the liver. The liver converts growth hormone to insulin like growth factor, which stimulates fat burning to keep your blood sugar levels steady when you go for long periods without eating. For most people, the usual time when they go the longest without eating is when they are sleeping. When you do not get adequate sleep, you don’t produce as much insulin-like growth factor, and therefore you don’t burn as much fat.

For the majority of people, about 7 hours of sleep per night is enought to provide maximum effects from the fat burning hormones.  Because of the effects of light on the pituitary gland (which produces growth hormone), nighttime sleep results in better production of growth hormone, and therefore results in better fat burning effects.  Night shift workers are advised to make their sleeping area as dark as possible for their daytime sleeping.

To sum things up, in order to maximize the effects of your fat burning hormones, the best action steps are to eat a healthy diet that supports the function of the liver, to do high intensity exercise, and to get adequate sleep.  Failure to do so will decrease the effectiveness of your fat buring hormones and frustrate your efforts to lose weight.

To get a free copy of Dr. Best’s Ebook that explains how hormones effect weight loss, visit his website and download The Total Solution For The Weight Loss Impaired. 

Exercise is crucial to take years off your age and to improve your health.Remember that motion is life, and life is about motion We are creatures designed to move.Moving stimulates weight loss by increasing your metabolism ten fold.

Muscle is the most metabolically active tissue in your body.Our bodies were not designed to just sit around and watch TV all day. Our ancestors were hunter/gatherers and were forced to walk an average of 9 miles a day. Their physical fitness levels were the equivalent to today’s professional athletes. During that time, it was survival of the fittest.

We have a different choice now: Be fit or be fat, and die a painful slow death filled with disease.Statistics show that 50% of people in the U.S. have heart attacks. By following a green weight loss program, you are able to lose weight naturally and permanently. Exercise is a crucial part of living a “green” lifestyle. Exercise should be performed with a wide variety of activities. Your goal is functional movement that not only makes you look younger, but will also protect you from injuries.Studies have been done where the heart was worked at a variety of intervals. Not just long distance running, not just sprinting, but a combination.Below are some simple exercise tips to improve your ability to lose weight and live healthier.

• Take a half an hour walk every day.

• Take the stairs instead of the elevator.

• Buy a pilates video and start doing it 4 times a week.

• When doing cardio, try running in intervals. Go fast for minute and then slow for two minutes then fast for thirty seconds then slow for one minute and so forth.

Not only can the fat melt away, but your health will drastically improve when you exercise. Especially in the high stress world that we live in you can make a huge improvement to your quality of life.

Dr Charles Livingston is a structure/function doctor who specializes in advanced nutrition and weight loss. He is also the author and creator of http://www.greenlifeweightloss.com which teaches healthy “green” principles for shedding weight fast naturally.