You can’t beat a healthy diet if you want to lose weight. In fact, no matter how much you exercise, you won’t shed a pound if you’re eating a lot of high calorie junk food. However, exercise boosts your weight loss. Weight loss isn’t magic. It’s all about math. If you eat 3500 fewer calories than you expend, you lose one pound. While exercise burns a lot of calories, you’d have to workout for over two hours to burn off a Big Mac meal. To work off the calories in a white chocolate crème Frappuccino from Starbucks, you’ll have to go at high intensity for 50 minutes. You can see that, while exercise helps, eating healthy is top priority.
When you exercise, you’ll give your metabolism a boost.
While diet is important, you really need exercise to help take off weight and keep it off. When you use diet alone, the weight you lose isn’t always just fat. You can lose lean muscle tissue, too. Exercise not only helps burn calories but also builds muscle tissue. The more muscle tissue you have, the higher your metabolism is. That’s because muscle tissue also requires more energy for maintenance than fat tissue does. It means you’ll be burning more calories 24/7 and have more energy to be more active and burn extra calories, too.
Stress can mean belly fat.
That’s right! The hormones of stress, cortisol in particular, are associated with abdominal fat. When you workout, you’re burning off the stress hormones that cause the fight or flight response. It does more than that. It helps you relax, boosts your overall mood and makes you feel good. It can eliminate the need for stress eating and comfort food. Comfort food often includes high calorie things like ice cream, while stress eating may include crunchy food like potato chips. You can see that eliminating those can be a huge benefit.
Why do you want to lose weight? You want to look thinner, of course.
Sometimes, the scales aren’t the ultimate answer when you’re measuring your success. Sometimes, it’s inches, rather than weight. Exercise builds muscle tissue. Muscle tissue weighs more per cubic inch than fat tissue does. A container holding a pound of fat would have to be bigger than one containing a pound of muscle tissue. It’s lie comparing a container to hold a pound of steel to a pound of feathers. When you exercise, even if you don’t lose one ounce, you’ll still be thinner as your body builds muscle tissue. That’s the ultimate goal, isn’t it?
- What’s the best type of exercise? While aerobic exercise burns loads of calories, but those calories come from both fat and muscle tissue. Strength training also burns calories, while also building muscle tissue that boosts your metabolism.
- The body has two hormones that control appetite, ghrelin—the hunger hormone and leptin—the one that makes you feel full. Exercise reduces the amount of ghrelin the body makes.
- The longer you do your workout routine, the more efficient the body becomes and the fewer calories it burns. That’s why varying your workout regularly can help prevent plateauing.
- Exercise increases your energy level, so you’ll be more active even when you’re not working out in the gym. That means you’ll burn more calories even when you’re not trying.
For more information, contact us today at Body Sculptors Personal Training