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Exercise for Weight Management
Over 90% of successful dieters exercise. Dieters quickly learn that exercise is just too valuable a weight loss tool to forgo. Strength training increases the rate at which your body burns calories, and aerobic exercise allows you to burn a large number of calories in a short period.
Weight loss is simply a matter of calories in versus calories out. To lose weight, it is necessary to consume fewer calories than are expended. It takes a deficit of 3500 calories to lose one pound. Assuming you are now consuming just enough calories to maintenance your current weight, you either have to burn 3500 additional calories, consume 3500 fewer calories, or some combination of the two, to lose one pound.
Strength training builds the muscle that constitutes the furnace in which most calories are burned. Fat tissue burns very few calories. It is therefore important to build as much muscle as possible. Don't worry about building too much muscle. Very few people, particularly women, have the kind of genetic base which can make that a concern. However, a new exerciser should be able to increase their muscle mass by at least 10%. If that happens and your activity level is held constant, your metabolism will be 10% higher. You’ll burn 10% more calories than you otherwise would. This is surely an easy way to burn between 150 and 300 additional calories a day. (To learn more about your metabolism, click here.)
Aerobic (or cardiovascular) exercise refers to the rhythmic use of large muscle groups as required by activities such as walking, swimming, or biking. Aerobic exercise has the huge advantage of burning calories in a quick, concentrated way. Depending on intensity and other factors, a 45-minute cardio session can easily burn between 250 and 500 calories. This can have an immediate, quite meaningful impact on your total calorie balance. Cardio is also generally very convenient. Walking, for example, requires no equipment, possibly not even a change of cloths, and can be done most anywhere.
If you diet and do not exercise (and strength training is particularly important here), 20 to 30% of weight loss will be from lean muscle tissue. This is counter productive because it lowers your metabolism. If the dieting is severe, the lack of food may cause the body to think there is a famine. It responds by slowing down bodily processes to survival mode, reducing the energy supplied to your muscles, thereby lowering your metabolism even further. Repeated cycles of this kind of dieting (so called yoyo dieting) can make weight loss virtually impossible. Sometimes it is necessary to back up and reestablish your natural metabolism before you can move ahead and make any progress on losing weight.
Overall, the best weight loss strategy is to cut calorie intake moderately (never more than 500 per day below maintenance) and burn an equal number of calories through exercise, divided evenly between cardio and strength training. If your goal is to lose a pound a week, burn 250 calories a day through exercise, while reducing food intake by 250 calories a day. The goal is to integrate safe, efficient, exercise into a daily routine that you can maintain for the rest of your life.
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