Anyone who is serious about losing weight needs to understand that you must exercise to lose weight. It can't be done properly through diet alone. The question then is: What kind of exercise and how much? It's significant to understand that there are many health benefits from physical activity even if you do not lose weight. Imagine having less abdominal fat and lower blood pressure. Through proper exercise you can improve the ratio of good blood fats to bad ones and can increase protection from heart disease and cardiovascular diseases. In short with proper exercise you'll feel better and increase your chances for a longer life. The weight loss is just another benefit! An exercise program must be something that continues forever and not for just a few weeks or months. But don't worry. This doesn't mean you have to follow a rigid diet and exercise plan constantly. It just means that it needs to be a consistent element in your life. The challenge with weight loss exercising is: - determining how much we need to do for weight loss purposes. - arriving at the place where we truly enjoy physical weight loss activities. There needs to be a certain level of intensity involved in the activity you are doing if you want to actually lose weight through exercising. Simply taking the dog out for a 30 minute walk isn't going to do much good for weight loss purposes. It is better than doing nothing at all though. You may have heard that walking 10,000 steps per day is a reasonable goal to shoot for. A good brisk walk of 30-60 minutes will accomplish that. However to really lose weight through exercise you must do more than aerobic exercising. At some point you'll need to add resistance training or some kind of weight lifting. You actually burn 50 more calories per day with muscle than you do with fat. So you must begin to replace your body fat with muscle. You can only do that through some type of weight program. You can even accomplish this without a home gym or weight set. Push ups are a great form of resistance training. Start slowly and gradually build to as many as you can do each day. Of course if you can go to a gym 3 days a week do it. Making it fun is the best way to exercise to lose weight. Exercise with someone. Go dancing. Ride a bike. Play tennis. The more you do the better.
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