Does Exercise Help You Stick to Your Diet?

 

When I hear that a friend or a buddy is about to go on a diet, I always get curious. Diets are such strange things, requiring such changes to habits and outlook that I always want to hear the details. How are you going to go about losing weight? What are you changing, what are you leaving the same? Are you planning to just calories, are you planning to eat different kinds of food? Are you going to exercise, and if so, how often and doing what? This for me is crucial, since so many people misunderstand the role that exercise can play in losing weight. In today's article I'm going to take a look at one of the most unappreciated roles exercise can take in your losing weight, and help you appreciate its impact.

First, let's clear a myth out from the question. Exercise does not really help you lose weight directly. Those who can burn hundreds upon thousands of calories through exercise are usually in fantastic shape already and able to maintain high levels of intensity. Those who are novices and just starting out can't exercise hard or for long. They can only exercise for about thirty minutes for low intensity, and lose only a hundred or so calories at a time.

So does that mean you should not exercise? Hardly. Exercise plays a wonderful role in helping you lose weight. When you are sticking to a new meal plan it is incredibly easy to become discouraged and lose interest and motivation. However, if you have begun to exercise as well, having gone to the gym in the morning will help you stick to your diet because you will think, "Hey, I already hit the gym, I can't blow my diet today."

So exercise can help you stuck to your diet. This is actually a fundamentally crucial aspect of successful weight loss, because the best diet is the one that you stick to, regardless of the details. Whether you are cutting carbs or fat or whatever, in the long run most diets work as long as you can stick to them, and thus exercise can prove crucial in helping you lose that weight and not quit. Also, one habit can reinforce the other, and so being successful at exercise can help you become successful at dieting in the long term, which is a crucial link that most people fail to appreciate until it's too late.

 

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