When you aim for a long term healthy ideal weight, diet and exercise cannot be separated from the process. Fad diet such as Grapefruit Diet or Cabbage Soup Diet don not include exercise in their program since they only aim for short term fast weight loss. If you have made decision to start a healthy long term diet, you should pay attention to these points:
1. Do not use sweat as indicator! Some people use sweat to measure their exercise; “you have enough exercise if you sweating a lot”. Wrong! Sweating is a way of your body to cooling itself, it doesn’t mean that you have burned enough calories with your exercise session. The right way to measure exercise is using target such as heartbeat rate or schedule.
2. Don’t skip your weight training; cardiovascular exercise combined with weight training is considered the best method to burn calories. Indeed, cardiovascular exercise such as jogging or biking can burn calories faster, but there is benefit in gaining muscle through weight training since a person with more muscle will burn more calories throughout the day.
3. If you are a women, doing weight training will not make you bulky; some women are afraid of this issue and thus skipping weight training. Don’t worry, this is just another myth since most women don’t have enough testosterone (male hormones) to become bulky. If you are training and your body really become bigger fast, try reduce your meal portion and weight you lift, then increase the repetition.
4. Do not over do it; while it is good to exercising on regular basis, you don’t want to over do it. When you exercise, you are damaging your muscle a bit. Your body will repair this damaged muscle over time with good rest and nutrients, but if you keep up the exercise session without giving your body a chance perform a repair, it will end up harming your body and your progress. A good healthy exercise only consist of 3-4 sessions per week.
5. If you are not used to exercising, do a low intensity cardio; advanced method such as High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is a good way to obtain fast weight loss, but it can be hard for you since it combine high intensity with lower intensity training, thus put much stress in your body and make it harder to regulate appetite. Low intensity exercise such as walking or light jogging is indeed can’t burn much calories, but it will burn more fat for fuel and it put less stress in your body, make it easier to regulate appetite.
6. Walking is a nice start; for most people with sedentary lifestyle, it will be impossible to start with all the heavy exercise such as weight lifting or the HIIT; even jogging is considered too hard for people who didn’t used to any physical activities. Walking allowed you to workout at a steady and consistent pace, which is required to burn fat effectively. The good thing is you can do it while doing other activities such as chatting or shopping. Before you move to more advanced exercise, try get used to walk first and increase the duration of the session.
7. Make sure you eat before any exercise session; it is a bad idea to start an exercise with empty stomach since foods are required to provide your muscle with energy to work efficiently, even if it is a morning session. Eat small meal such as toast, oatmeal, or fruits one to three hours before exercise.
8. Set up a target for your exercise; when you already get used to certain type of exercise, sometimes you will forget that you have been doing the same type exercise for so long and your body already get used to it, make it less effective. Make a target, check your progress, measure your heartbeat to make sure you are in the targeted zone; if not you might want to increase the level a bit.
A healthy long term weight loss is impossible if your diet doesn’t include a good portion of exercise. Pick your diet program carefully, make sure it is also contain a good healthy exercise.
