Diet and exercise can not be separated when you aim for a long term healthy weight loss. There are weight loss programs that don’t including exercise in the process such as Grapefruit Diet or Cabbage Soup Diet, but usually those programs only aim for a fast short term weight loss. If you do have planned to start a long term healthy weight loss program, which obviously will include exercise, there are a few things you should know beforehand:
1. Do not use sweat as indicator! Some people use sweat to measure their exercise; “you have enough exercise if you sweating a lot”. Wrong! Sweating is a way of your body to cooling itself, it doesn’t mean that you have burned enough calories with your exercise session. The right way to measure exercise is using target such as heartbeat rate or schedule.
2. Weight training is an important part of exercise; when you are trying to burn calories by exercising, cardiovascular exercise and weight training are the best. While cardiovascular exercise such as jogging or biking are considered the fastest way to burn calories, do not ignore weight training. A person with more muscle gain from weight training will burn more calories throughout the day even when doing nothing.
3. A regular weight training will not make a woman’s body become bulky; this is just another exercise myth that have successfully made lots of women to avoid weight training. Most women do not have enough testosterone in their body to become bulky. If you have a regular weight training session and found out that your body become bigger fast, you might want to eat less, reduce your weight lifting, and increase the repetition.
4. Put a limit in your exercise schedule; when you perform an exercise session, you will damage your muscle a bit. This damaged muscle will repaired by your body with enough rest and nutrients, but if you have a tight exercise schedule such as every morning and evening your body can’t keep up with the reparation. Recommended healthy exercise only consist of 3-4 sessions a week.
5. If you are not used to exercising, do a low intensity cardio; advanced method such as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is a good way to obtain fast weight loss, but it can be hard for you since it combine high intensity with lower intensity training, thus put much stress in your body and make it harder to regulate appetite. Low intensity exercise such as walking or light jogging is indeed can’t burn much calories, but it will burn more fat for fuel and it put less stress in your body, make it easier to regulate appetite.
6. Start your exercise by walking; most people with sedentary lifestyle may be found it hard to begin with all the heavy exercise such as weight training or the HIIT; sometimes even jogging is still too hard for unfit people who didn’t used to any physical activity. Walking allowed you to workout at a steady and consistent pace, which is required to burn fat effectively, and it can be done while chatting with friends or shopping. Get used to walk and try to increase the duration before you move to the more advanced exercise.
7. Make sure you eat before any exercise session; it is a bad idea to start an exercise with empty stomach since foods are required to provide your muscle with energy to work efficiently, even if it is a morning session. Eat small meal such as toast, oatmeal, or fruits one to three hours before exercise.
8. Create a target for your exercise; when you are doing the same exercise over and over again, your body will get used to the activities and make it less effective. Create a target by checking your progress and measure your heartbeat. If it is outside of your targeted zone, increase the level a bit.
A healthy long term weight loss can only be obtained with a combination of good diet and exercise. Select your weight loss program wisely, make sure it is including a good portion of healthy exercise.