Losing weight is a pastime that an enormous number of people are in various stages of attempting.
Some will succeed and happily show off their new, slim figures to all who will take notice.
Most people however, will fail for a variety of reasons, but it seems the main one of those is that they didn't stick to the diet, or program that they were on for long enough.
But there is an even more basic reason many people fail to lose weight and that's because they didn't address the simple fact that they needed to burn more calories, which are units of energy by which we measure the fuel that our bodies use, than they were consuming.
Here we take a look at how to lose weight by knowing your calorie intake limits.
You hear this scenario all the time, where an overweight person claims that they don't know why they are so overweight because they eat so little.
Many people discount this as a simple lie and that the person must be eating a mountain of food in secret.
But it may not be a complete lie.
You see, while you cannot be overweight if you eat very little, you can be overweight if you eat normally but do absolutely no exercise whatsoever.
This is because the rule of weight loss is set in stone, like the law of gravity will make a ball fall to the ground when you let go of it.
That law says that if you consume fewer calories than your body burns, you will lose weight.
Conversely, if you consume more calories than your body burns, you will gain weight.
There can be no exception to this because your body cannot create mass out of nothing.
It needs fuel in the form of the sugars, proteins and carbohydrates in food to convert into energy, muscle tissue and fat to store.
When it gets more fuel than it can use up, it stores the excess in fat cells, for times when it is getting less fuel than it needs.
The problem with our Western way of life is that we rarely give our bodies the chance to dip into its reserves, because we're never hungry.
Now it stands to reason that if we provide a certain amount of fuel for our body to burn, and it burns it through exercise, or by excessive use of its muscles, then it will require more fuel in the form of food in order to keep going.
If we deprive it of that fuel, the body will keep taking from its stored up supplies in the fat cells until that is all gone.
That's when a body looks lean and mean! From that example, you can clearly see that you must lose weight if your body burns more calories than it consumes.
Now let's turn it on its head and come at it from the other direction.
If we do no exercise, then our bodies don't need very much fuel to operate.
If we sit in a chair all day for our job, then come home in the evening and spend it slumped in a chair in front of the TV before going to bed and repeat this every day, then our bodies require only a small amount of fuel to function.
Consume more than is needed and it gets stored as fat.
Keep this up and over time the weight will pile on until the body becomes clinically obese.
The rub is that the more overweight we become, the more lethargic we become and are even less inclined to do any exercise.
It's a vicious circle spiraling out of control.
So it's important to know how many calories your body needs to function each day and that figure is personal to you.
A nutritionist or dietitian can run tests and define what your personal calorie intake can be to prevent weight gain.
Then by including some light exercise in your day, you will burn more than you are consuming and you will lose weight.
It's really that simple, after all.