Diet and Exercise – The Rules You Must Follow for the Best Result

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. Weight training is an important part of exercise; when you are trying to burn calories by exercising, cardiovascular exercise and weight training are the best. While cardiovascular exercise such as jogging or biking are considered the fastest way to burn calories, do not ignore weight training. A person with more muscle gain from weight training will burn more calories throughout the day even when doing nothing.

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. Put a limit in your exercise schedule; when you perform an exercise session, you will damage your muscle a bit. This damaged muscle will repaired by your body with enough rest and nutrients, but if you have a tight exercise schedule such as every morning and evening your body can’t keep up with the reparation. Recommended healthy exercise only consist of 3-4 sessions a 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. Begin your exercise by walking; if you are one of the sedentary people you may find it hard to begin with all the advanced exercise such as weight training or the HIIT; some people even have difficulties with jogging as a start since they didn’t used to any physical activities. Walking is a way to workout at steady and consistent pace; this is important when you want to burn fat effectively, and you can do it while doing other activities as well such as shopping or chatting. Get used to this exercise and try to increase the duration before you move to the more advanced exercise.

7. Eat before start your exercise; do not start your exercise with empty stomach, foods are required to provide the energy for your muscles to work efficiently, even if you perform exercise early in the morning. 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.

There is no healthy long term weight loss without paired by a good exercise routine. Choose your weight loss program wisely and make sure it’s also containing a good portion of exercise.