When many people think about eating less in order to lose weight, they often think only about the amount of calories they should eat. They often forget completely that exercise can be just as helpful in losing weight as their low calorie diet.
Exercise is an important part of any weight loss program as it has many advantages compared to using diet alone in order to lose weight. And you’ll lose weight faster with exercise as part of your weight-loss program.
Free Report: 6 of the Best Exercises for Fat LossExercise Burns Calories
If you only focus on diet when trying to lose weight, you are missing out on the important fact that exercise burns calories so you can afford to eat more.
Exercise can be aerobic exercise (like jogging, running, cycling, or swimming) or anaerobic (weight lifting). Both types of exercise will allow you to use your muscles to actually burn calories in the act of exercising, which means you’ll lose weight faster.
Exercise Builds Muscles
If you use exercise as a part of your weight loss goal, you’ll build muscle and will be physically stronger. You may find that, by exercising daily, you’re slimming down even if it doesn’t show up on the scale. This is because muscle is heavier than fat but takes up much less space. When you exchange fat for muscles, you’re adding something that’s much denser than fat. Your body will appear slimmer even though you won’t always see an actual weight loss.
Exercise Increases Your Metabolic Rate
Your metabolic rate is amount of calories you burn per hour. The more calories you burn per hour, the more weight you can lose. It turns out that exercise not only increases your metabolic rate during the time you’re exercising but that your metabolic rate stays elevated for several hours after the exercise is over with. This means that a half hour of exercise doesn’t just increase your metabolic rate during that half hour, but you’ll continue to burn calories at a faster rate in the hours after you have exercised.
Exercise Makes You Stronger
If you’re trying to lose weight with just diet restriction alone, you are essentially starving the body, which can make the body weaker. Exercise will help you be stronger by adding muscle and improving your endurance. A stronger body is a healthy body. You can use this added strength in your day-to-day activities rather than simply being starved and weak.
Free Report: 6 of the Best Exercises for Fat LossTypes of Exercise
To lose weight faster with exercise, there are basically two types of activities you should be practicing on a regular basis:
1. Aerobic Exercise
Aerobic exercise is any exercise that gets your heart rate going and increases your respiratory rate. This can involve just about any physical activity you can do. Popular aerobic exercises include things like swimming, brisk walking, and cycling.
Even fun activities like dancing and gardening can count as aerobic exercise as long as it feels like you are pushing yourself and bring up your heart rate and respiratory rate while doing the exercise. Not only does aerobic exercise help you lose weight by burning calories and increasing your metabolic rate, but this type of exercise is good for your heart and lung functioning.
Just a half-hour a day on most days of the week (about 5 days of the week) will help build your stamina and will help you lose weight.
2. Anaerobic Exercise
Anaerobic exercise involves things like lifting weights and using weight machines to build muscle mass. You’ll burn more calories doing anaerobic exercise than you will in doing aerobic exercise.
The goal of anaerobic exercise is to increase your muscle: fat ratio. You don’t have to build big, bulky muscles doing anaerobic exercise. Most people engaging in anaerobic exercise don’t bulk up their muscle but instead tone their muscles and slim down by replacing less dense fatty tissue with denser muscle tissue that takes up less space.
Anaerobic activities can be done as part of your exercise program by doing about 1-2 sessions of anaerobic exercise per week. In total, you should be doing aerobic exercise 4-5 days per week and anaerobic exercise about 1-2 days per week.
6 of The Best Exercises to Lose Weight Faster
Weight loss is a difficult thing. But you will lose weight faster with exercise. If you’re looking to change your habits, replacing sedentary activities with exercise can greatly improve your weight loss and long-term outcomes. And, some exercises actually burn more calories than others. To learn more, download my free report 6 of The Best Types of Exercise for Weight Loss.
