Exercise to Lose Weight

One of the most important factors in the process of losing weight in the long term is exercise. While eating a healthy, calorie controlled diet is of course of huge value, as long as you eat sensibly and combine that with daily exercise, you will easily be able to maintain a healthy weight without needing to stress over gaining a few pounds here and there.

This article looks at the importance of weight loss exercise as part of your natural lifestyle and the many benefits that you will gain from it.

Now that doesn't necessarily mean you need to go to the gym and work out every day, although that will certainly benefit you. But it does mean that you need to participate in some daily activity that is strenuous enough to get your heart beating fast, make you sweat and cause you to breathe faster and more deeply.

exercise to lose weightThis is because the exercise that you do every day has to be enough to burn off an equal number of calories as that which you consume in order to maintain your body's equilibrium. It necessarily follows therefore that in order to lose weight if you are overweight, you need to burn more calories than you consume.

Fundamental Health Facts

This is a fundamental fact of health and it cannot be refuted with excuses, no matter what they may be. If you have a physical disability that prevents you from undertaking any form of exercise, then you must eat a low calorie diet or see your weight balloon in very short order. But even physical handicaps can be circumvented in most cases as there are exercises that you can do even when moving your limbs is difficult or not possible in extreme cases.

This may sound harsh, and the focus of this article is not aimed at the physically handicapped, but if you are alive, then you can breathe and if you can breathe, you can perform exercise using your lungs as the focus to cause the body's muscles that surround them to do work. Deep breathing is one of the main focuses of yoga and it is an exercise form as well.

However, if you are able to perform exercise of any kind and you are concerned about your weight, then you should seriously consider undertaking some of any kind that is available to you. This is essential because exercise where muscles are forced to work harder than when you are completely at rest, then they burn energy and the energy that your muscles burn is measured in calories.

Calories are what you consume and what your body then burns both as part of its normal function and as a by product of exercise.

Burning Calories

When your body is forced to burn more calories than it would when at rest, a chain reaction is set up whereby the body's functions are heightened to cope with additional load placed on its muscles by the exercise. The more strenuous the exercise and the longer the period of exercise, then the more heightened the body's functions become in order to accommodate this shift in behaviour.

Not only do the muscles that are doing the extra work burn more energy, but the body's metabolism is raised in order to cause the body's systems to produce more energy to be made available for those muscles to continue working at their new higher rate.

When your metabolism is raised through regular exercise, your body becomes more efficient at using the energy it consumes. This means it burns more of the calories that it intakes to do the work of exercising.

The knock-on effect of this is that your body will get to a stage where it is burning more calories than you are consume g and when that happens, it needs to get more energy to keep fuelling the muscles doing the exercise. This comes from your body's own store of energy, which is stored up in fat cells.

Yes, the penny has dropped, I hope.

This is one of the most important weight loss advice you're ever likely to get. By forcing the body to use its store of energy to enable your body to keep exercising past a certain point, then your store of fat cells will start to become depleted.

This happens at a relatively slow rate, but it becomes steady and measurable over time. It is measurable not just in what you see on the scales, but what you see in the mirror when you look at yourself.

Building a Slimmer Body

When you have been exercising regularly for several weeks, you may not, initially see any reduction in weight but you will see a firming and toning up of your body. This is because the exercise is causing your muscles to get stronger and when they get stronger they grow in mass.

Muscle tissue weighs more by volume than fat, which is why even though you are depleting your fat store, you are not losing pounds to begin with as the volume is being replaced with muscle mass. These stronger muscles are responsible for making your body look more tomes, firmer and leaner looking.

After a while of doing physical activity for a healthy weight, that figure will of course be reduced as well. But in the process, you will look tons better because all of the old flabby areas will now be firmed up and you will fit into a smaller size of clothes with s slimmer waist, smaller buttocks and thighs, firmer chest and back. Your face will appear slightly slimmer too and if you were getting a double chin or saggy jowls, these will firm up and your face's younger form will return as it appears slimmer too.

The beauty of doing regular exercise coupled with a healthy diet is that you lose weight naturally, slowly and steadily. This means that your skin has a chance to also firm up as the fat deposits are reduced and doesn't lead to the condition that affects crash dieters where the skin is not given time to regain its shape in time with the reduction in body size, leading to saggy skin on both the body and the face.

So next time you're sitting at your desk thinking about this, do more than just think about it. Get up and find some time to do some weight loss exercise and you will, over time, be very glad you did.