Exercise: Good For Losing Weight or Keeping it Off?

 

Let's say you have decided to go on a diet. You have finally reached your limit, heard one too many hippo jokes at work, finally failed to fit into your largest pair of pants, realized that you are eating more than everybody else at the table combined or have received a really intense warning from your doctor. The time has come! Time to lose weight, so you resolve to go on a diet and lose eighty pounds over the course of the next year. Congratulations! But how to ensure that your diet is successful? Exercise is a great way to do so, and in today's article we are going to take a look at how exercise can help you both lose weight and keep it off.

First off, exercise by itself will not help you lose much weight directly. If you are out of shape and overweight you will not be able to exercise for sustained periods of time, and so will burn only a couple of hundred calories per workout. When you think about how a pound of fat has 3,500 calories, you will quickly see that light exercise won't make much of a dent. However, exercise is fantastic at helping you stick to your diet, because by building one healthy habit you create a desire to adhere to another one. If you hit the gym in the morning, you will be less likely to blow your diet that night, as you won't want to waste the effort that went into your first success.

Even more important however is the role that exercise can play in keeping weight off once you have lost it. Study after study have shown that losing weight is much easier than keeping it off, since everybody knows somebody that has lost weight only to put it back on months later. Exercise has been shown to be crucial in maintaining new and lower weights.

So how do you keep the weight off? Research has shown that about forty to seventy minutes of exercise each day so that you burn about 2,500 calories a week will help you maintain your new and lowered weight. This means that you must stay committed to your new weight, not just lose and then forget about your new habits. If you are able to do the exercise however you will quickly realize that your new lifestyle will ensure that you stay slender and svelte. 

 

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