Combining Diet and Fitness

The bottom line, quite literally, is that people do not lose weight and keep it off by merely dieting. For starters, dieting does not build muscle. Conversely, you can actually lose muscle if you do not add exercise into your weight reduction plan. Once you lose muscle, you also lose any weight-loss edge you may have had, because muscle burns more calories than fat, even when you are sitting in front of the television. So, it is essential that you combine any diet program that you may be on with a balanced exercise program.

Keep it in Balance

Like dieting, exercise should not be taken to an extreme. Studies show that athletes who work out excessively often suffer from an increased number of colds and other respiratory illnesses, and have an increased risk of musculoskeletal injuries. Also, regardless of what sort of exercise program you decide to take on, you need to make sure that you are getting enough calories to keep going. An extreme low-calorie diet combined with a dose of unaccustomed exercise is a prescription for exhaustion. Not many people will keep up with an exercise regime if it feels akin to torture and is making them feel ill.

The Weight Loss Formula

Decide how much weight you would like to lose. Then, keeping in mind that it takes a deficit of approximately 3500 calories to lose one pound, decide how many calories you must both burn through exercise and cut from your diet. A safe guideline is no more than two to two and a half pounds per week. So, if you would like to lose two pounds a week, you will need to cut and burn 7000 more calories than normal. That amounts to 1000 lost calories each day. Instead of crash dieting, or overexercising, simply cut 500 calories from your diet, and add in 500 calories worth of exercise. If you are more than a few pounds overweight, you’ll be surprised at how quickly you can burn 500 calories through exercise. There are exercises that burn fat quickly and efficiently.

Types of Exercise

Find exercise that is suited to your climate, interests and level of fitness. You will want to do at least a half an hour of fat burning exercise every day. Basically, the longer you exercise, the more fat you will burn. For this reason, for weight loss purposes, it is better to choose an exercise that you can sustain for 45 minutes to an hour rather than one that you can only do for 15-20 minutes.

Remember, if you are not in the habit of exercising, you will rarely be sitting around the house and suddenly feel the urge to “just do it.” You can develop an exercise schedule to follow every day, and stick to it religiously, whether you feel like it or not. You will find that as you develop the habit, you will begin to feel better after exercising, and that it will eventually become its own reward. If you are a person who is easily bored, schedule one sort of activity for three days of the week, and another activity for the other days. If the activities use different muscle groups, that is even better. Cross training burns more calories than doing the same activity day after day. If you are obese, do not cross exercise off of your list. There are many exercises that severely overweight people can do safely.

You may want to take up a new hobby that will help you expend calories while having fun as well. Examples of fun hobbies that burn calories are gardening, carpentry and rock climbing.

Finally, incorporate some sort of muscle building activity into your exercise routine. You may want to lift weights at a gym or do squats or other isometric exercises that can easily be done at home. The more muscle you build, the more calories you will burn when you are at rest. It’s a nice feeling to go to bed at night knowing that your body is become a calorie burning machine!