Before starting on a colon cleanse for weight loss, it’s important to make a bit of a plan for how you’re going to approach weight loss in general. Starting a colon cleanse while beginning marathon training and cutting your daily food intake to 800 calories a day will definitely assist you with losing weight, but you’ll also likely hurt yourself in the process as you didn’t go about things intelligently. Colon cleanses can be an excellent weight loss tool, but as part of a weight loss plan everything must be approached properly to ensure success.

To your body, losing weight is just a question of mathematics. Your body really doesn’t care how many calories it gets as long as it gets the carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and related amino acids and vitamins necessary for health. Everything else will either get stored (causing you to gain weight) or expelled in your waste. If you consume too few calories your body will let you know by being hungry, fatigued and likely ill.

It’s been shown in hundreds of studies that a pound of body weight is equal to about 3500 calories. Whether you reduce your diet by 3500 calories in a certain timeframe or you exercise more frequently to burn the additional calories off – if you want permanently lose weight, you’ll need to ensure that you’re taking in fewer calories than you’re burning through your metabolism and exercise.

The best way to handle things would be to see a nutritionist or a physician before you start any dietary or exercise plan. A professional can help assess your current caloric intake versus your exercise and metabolism, and make recommendations of what steps you’ll need to take to help make the math work on your side.

One of the beneficial parts of exercising is that you don’t just burn calories when you’re performing the exercise. Your heart and metabolic rate will remain “up” for at least an additional few hours, sometimes even up to the next day depending on how hard you worked out. Your body needs to repair everything after your workout, and it will consume energy and calories to do so. Also, you’ve probably heard “muscle weighs more than fat” – muscle also burns more calories than fat. As you build out your muscle from exercising, your basal (or “resting”) metabolism will rise and you will burn more calories doing things like sitting around and sleeping.

Stop worrying about how fast you want to lose weight and worry more about committing to hitting your weight loss goals. You’ll feel a whole lot healthier for it!