Do remember that muscle weighs more than fat so you may not see a reduction of total weight due to build up of muscle at certain points. Muscle also increases metabolic rate which means you will burn more calories even at rest whereas, as pointed out above, strictly dieting will push the body into "starvation" mode which decreases the metabolic rate and can cause the body to actually hoard calories.

Thus to truly "loose weight" one must combine exercise with diet. To keep that weight off one must do a "lifestyle" change meaning that eating habits have to change.

And this whole thing about "good calories" and "bad calories" is silly. A calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree centigrade. The calorie measure used commonly for the energy content of food is actually a kilocalorie or 1000 real calories. This is the amount of energy required to raise 1 kilogram of water (about 2.2 pounds) 1 degree centigrade.

Where people tend to confuse things (and where diet books are flat out wrong) is the form in which the calories are obtained from food. There are carbohydrates (complex/simple), protien, and fat. Carbohydrates and proteins perform the same basic function. They provide the body with energy and essential ammino acids, lipids, etc.


However each is not created equally in terms of caloric density. A gram of fat contains 9 calories. A gram of protein has 3.5 calories. A gram of carbohydrate has 4 calories. Thus different foods contain different amounts of energy. For example a small piece of chocolate can have many more calories than a similarly sized piece of lettuce. However, since calories are a measure of energy, there cannot be, as some diet books claim, different types of calories. A fat calorie has the same amount of energy as a protein or carbohydrate calorie. But since the piece of chocolate is more caloricly "dense" than a similar sized piece of lettuce, because of its fat content, you can gain more weight (take in more calories) from consuming a pound of choclate than a pound of lettice.