Exercise and Healthy Eating to Lose Weight

If you’re ready to try healthy eating to lose weight, don’t forget about the importance of exercise. It’s true that if you follow a healthy eating plan, you can lose weight with or without exercise. But exercise has many benefits that shouldn’t be ignored when you’re trying to lose weight and improve your health.

Healthy eating to lose weight is designed to provide you with the right balance of foods and fewer calories than you burn. So if you exercise, you’re burning more calories, and you can actually eat more food and still lose weight. A sedentary person needs fewer calories than an active person. So a sedentary person can gain weight eating fewer calories than an active person. You’ll be able to enjoy a wider variety of foods, and more frequent treats, if you’re getting some exercise.

Another big benefit of exercise that goes along with healthy eating to lose weight is how exercise boosts your metabolism. People with a higher metabolism burn more calories all the time than those with a slower metabolism. If you exercise for 30 minutes, you’ve burned more calories from the exercise. But the metabolism boost you get from that exercise lasts two to three hours after the exercise. If you like to have a snack now and then that might not be part of your plan for healthy eating to lose weight, this is the time to indulge—when your metabolism is cranked up from the exercise.

Some exercises are ideal for keeping your metabolism running high. Lifting weights and building some muscle, for instance, help your metabolism a great deal. When you build lean muscle tissue not only does it take up much less room than fat tissue, but it’s active tissue. It uses energy to exist and move. Fat tissue doesn’t. So your lean muscle tissue uses calories all the time. The more lean muscle you have, the hotter your metabolism burns. Combine weight training with healthy eating to lose weight and you’re attacking the problem from two different angles.

Aerobic exercises like walking, running, swimming, cycling and other activities boost your metabolism, too, while they burn fat. If you’re planning on healthy eating to lose weight, you should do one of these exercises at least 3 to 4 times a week. You don’t have to do the same exercise. You can do something different each time to keep it interesting. But do make aerobic exercise part of your fitness plan. Then you’ll be giving your heart and lungs healthy exercise while burning fat and boosting your metabolism.

Weight training should be done about 3 times a week, too. It’ll make you stronger and better able to do the aerobic exercises for longer periods of time. And you’ll be toning up the muscles you already have plus building new muscle tissue that actively burns calories all day long. Exercising regularly combined with healthy eating to lose weight is the best combination for losing weight and getting yourself in great physical condition.