One Of The Best Exercises To Lose Weight

Chocolate

There’s a bloke I work with who can’t understand how I can eat crisps and chocolate on my lunch breaks and not get fat. This guy is often on a diet, has cut out chocolate completely from his diet. Something I find virtually impossible to do, I have a sweet tooth and just love chocolate. He also goes out jogging and plays football when he can. Both he and I are of a similar age so it’s not the age difference that means I can indulge in chocolate and other junk food, and not put on any extra weight. And although I’m on the lean side naturally, I could still put on extra weight, as my brother can testify to. He managed to get a ‘pot belly’. My ‘secret’? I use one of the best exercises to lose weight.

Whilst aerobics or cardiovascular exercise is the generally recommended way to lose weight and keep it off, there is a better and faster way to lose fat and keep it off. And that is resistance or weight training. Now as I’ve pointed out in another post, whether you’re male or female it’s a complete myth to think that just because you start working out with weights you’ll get big and bulky. And that men should train with heavy weights and women should use very light weights. Even for men, to get big with weight training takes years of dedicated effort, and for women they have to take steroid supplements and the like.

Aerobics Is Not The Only Way To Lose Weight

Now to burn off fat you have to increase the rate at which you burn calories and/or cut down on the amount you eat. Muscle or lack of it plays a large part in raising or lowering your metabolism. The rate at which you burn energy while resting, or engaged in little or no activity. The more muscle tissue you have the faster your metabolism, and the less muscle tissue you have then the lower your metabolism. Just one pound of extra muscle would burn around 10-20 calories per day, without you having to do anything else. While a pound of fat only burns around 5 calories a day.

Muscle Makes You Look Slimmer

Not only does that extra pound of muscle burn more calories than that pound of fat, it also takes up around a third space under your skin. The more muscle tone you have the slimmer you’ll look. Someone carrying an extra 20 pound of muscle is going to look slim compared to someone else who is carrying an extra 20 pounds of fat. Yet if they both stood on some scales they would register the same bodyweight! And their BMI would probably be similar.

Now I’m not suggesting that we should all give up aerobics completely in order to lose fat and burn up those extra calories, and just start lifting weights. Several aerobics sessions a week are good for maintaining and improving cardiovascular health. However if we only focus on aerobics for fat loss we’re missing out an important part of the exercise process in losing fat and keeping it off.