How to Lose Weight

If you have not exercised for a long time then you should start slowly. Do not shock your system by charging straight into a vigorous workout when your body is totally unprepared for such an effort. You will only injure yourself and dent your enthusiasm for the next session. Slowly build up your fitness level.

If you have any reason to doubt your body's ability to start an exercise routine then see a doctor and get a check-up before you start.

Eating for Exercise

I have already described how the body uses carbohydrates for energy and protein for growth and repair. This has implications for exercise.

You need energy to exercise. Therefore, before you exercise you should eat some carbohydrates. This is why serious endurance athletes such as marathon runners and cyclists go carb-stacking before they race. You should not eat for an hour or two before exercise as digesting food while you exercise can give you a stitch.

After you have exercised, your body needs to recover. You should eat some carbohydrates to replace the used energy and some protein to repair and build muscle. One of the hardest things to understand is that you do not get fit while you exercise, you get fit after exercise as your body recovers. This is when muscle will grow and arteries will expand. If you do not give your body the fuel to repair itself after exercise then you will not get the full fitness benefit.

Warm Up and Warm Down

You should do a warm up before vigorous exercise to prepare your muscles for the effort. You should spend at least 10 minutes doing a warm up routine to slowly increase your heart rate and blood flow to your muscles. This will allow you to perform better and reduce the risk of injury.

Similarly, you should warm down after vigorous exercise. When your muscles work hard, they release waste products such as lactic acid that will lie around your muscle cells. If you do not do a warm down to work out these waste products then your muscles will ache later. Ten minutes of gentle exercise and stretches should be sufficient.

Pace Yourself

I will keep on pushing this point -- you should not think of exercise as a short-term activity while you lose weight. You should be thinking about making exercise a regular part of your life. There is no point in charging in at full pace if you cannot keep that pace up for the long-term.

You should exercise at a level where you get maximum benefit while still maintaining the enthusiasm to keep going. If you make your exercise sessions torture, you will only break your will to continue and maybe injure yourself. You should pace yourself at a level you can maintain for the long-term.

Aerobic Exercise

To get the full cardiovascular benefit from aerobic exercise, you should spend at least 20 minutes exercising with your heart rate 50% above its resting rate. If your resting heart rate is 80 beats per minute, then you should spend at least 20 minutes exercising at over 120 beats a minute. Many exercise machines include a built in heart rate monitor.

Still, any exercise is good and uses calories. The number of calories you use will vary depending on your size, fitness level and how hard you work. You should only take the following as a rough guide:

	Gentle	Moderate	Vigorous
Aerobics	250	450	800
Cycling	300	700	1200
Football	400	700	1000
Rowing	450	900	1400
Running	400	750	1100
Strider	400	800	1200
Swimming	470	700	1000
Walking	150	225	300

Many exercise machines give a calorie count as you go. You should take this figure with a pinch of salt. They can only make a calculated guess and in my opinion, the companies that produce these machines like to overstate the calorie count.

Anaerobic Exercise

To get the full muscle building benefit from anaerobic exercise you need to push weights that are close to the maximum you can lift. You should set the weights at a level where you can do 8-10 repetitions. Once you can do more than 10 repetitions, you should increase the weight a little.

Remember, you get the benefit from the exercise after you have finished when your body repairs and builds muscle. You need to eat some lean protein (chicken, fish or lean beef) soon after anaerobic exercise to get the full muscle building benefit.

Your muscles will take two or three days to recover fully. If you are training every day, you should break your workout sessions down to work on different muscle groups. For instance, the first day you could work on your arms, the next day work on your legs, the next day work on your chest, back and abs.

I want to lose weight from my tummy.

I hear this so often. What exercise can I do to lose weight from my tummy / buttocks / flabby arms? Unfortunately, it does not work like that. We cannot choose where our bodies burn fat.

Just because you are doing sit-ups, it does not mean that you are going to burn the fat around your stomach muscles. You can use exercise to tone up muscles so they look better but that does not mean you will burn the fat around them.

When we exercise, our muscles first use energy from the glycogen stored in our muscle cells. When that is gone, the muscles start drawing energy from the glucose in our blood supplies. As our blood sugar levels start to drop, our bodies signal the fat stores to start releasing energy into the bloodstream. The bloodstream delivers this energy to your muscles. It does not matter which muscles you are exercising. The fat can and will be burned from all around your body.

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