Low Calorie Dieting - Beginner's Guide

Everyone who struggles with weight control knows at least one person who appears to eat truckloads of food but never gains a pound. It’s maddening, isn’t it — especially when that other person eats so much of your favorite junk food! Pinpointing the exact reasons why one person gains weight at the mere sight of a doughnut while another person can freely indulge is difficult, but the personal food choices you make and exercise habits you practice on a regular basis greatly impact it. Furthermore, you may not know enough about someone else’s habits to judge. But differences in the less obvious, and less controllable, metabolism, basically how the body uses food to create energy, also greatly affect how a person loses or gains weight.

In the following sections, I define metabolism, describe its relationship to calories, and explain why some people gain (and lose) weight more easily than others.