Exercise Your Weight Loss
Weight loss, more importantly fat loss cannot be sustained unless you begin to make exercise a daily habit. This doesn’t mean that you have to follow a structured exercise program at the gym or at home seven days a week but that your mind is always proactive in making exercise part of your day. Taking the stairs instead of the elevator, walking to work or simply moving around the office as often as possible burns many calories. Even fidgeting while watching TV can burn a few extra calories and helps you achieve your fat loss goals. Your objective should be to move your body as often as possible and understand that restricting calories without a proper combination of resistance and aerobic training only leads to fat and muscle loss. Furthermore, since benefits of an exercise session occur after the workout, it is important to fuel your body with a proper combination of low glycemic carbohydrates, lean protein and good fat. Antioxidant supplementation will also help you recover from your workouts. Working out too much or too fast, will lead to a state of overtraining which diminishes the benefits of following regularly scheduled workouts with adequate rest periods. Let’s take a closer look at why exercise is important to weight loss and how muscle adapts during a training session.
Can I lose weight without exercising?
As a trained exercise specialist this is the worse thing that anyone can say to me. Just taking a superficial look at our bodies tells you that our bodies were engineered to move, not to sit around and constantly toy with the converter or take the car to the corner grocery store. Today we are fortunate to know exactly why regular exercise or physical activity is beneficial to health and how a lack of exercise can deteriorate our health. We need to move to stay healthy and fit regardless of what we eat. Food alone cannot stimulate the muscle growth you need to increase your metabolism or slow down the age-related loss of muscle we naturally experience. Furthermore, food alone cannot help remove wastes from the body, exercise the heart so that it maintains its strength and strengthen your immune system to fight the common cold or different viruses. You can lose weight by simply eating the right foods, along with losing valuable metabolically active muscle. However, over time, your metabolism will begin to decrease and you will slowly start to regain weight. In order to offset the weight gain, you eat less of the right foods you were eating and begin to lose weight again. This is a vicious cycle that does not have a happy ending and will not help you permanently lose weight. There are so many things in the world that we do not have control of. One thing we have some control over is what we eat and how we exercise our body. If you want to permanently change your life, your health and your waistline, do yourself a favor, eat the right foods, take the right supplements and most importantly start to move your skillfully engineered body.
Do I gain muscle during the exercise session?
In order to gain muscle you must engage in regular resistance training two to four times per week. Three times per week is ideal. When a muscle is inflicted with the stress of a workout session, it undergoes a process known as the General Adaptation Syndrome or GAS (no laughing please). The muscle is broken down and requires adequate nutrition to heal, repair and grow. In time, usually 24 to 48 hours, the muscle adapts and becomes stronger and wiser than it was prior to the workout session. If a second resistance training session occurs prior to the muscle’s ability to heal and grow, your results will be halted and your progress stunted. The process of training a muscle before it is properly healed leads to a term known as “overreaching” and eventually “overtraining.” We have all heard the saying “less is more,” well this also applies to exercise. Our muscles heal and grow for 24 to 48 hours after the workout session, not during the session. This is why it is important to perform your resistance training program every other day or at least alternate the muscle groups you exercise if you train two days in a row. As for low to moderate cardiovascular activity, our bodies replenish their energy stores quite quickly so cardiovascular sessions can be performed on a daily basis. However, once again, be careful and make sure you give your body adequate time to rest and recover. Listen to your body and it will let you know when it needs a day off from training.
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Concluding remarks
Exercise isn’t fun, but it is important to maintain your health, functionality and quality of life. Permanent weight loss is best achieved by carefully restricting the amount of food you eat, but more importantly by making better choices. Once your choice for better nutrition is complete, it is time to make exercise a part of your life. Your body is with you for life, so provide it with the movement it requires for optimal function. Also, since the benefits of exercise are experienced days after the workout, make sure to schedule days of rest and lower intensity workouts to provide adequate time for your body to heal. Exercise for a better life and for permanent, sustained weight loss!
