Excercise To Lose Weight

People who lose weight by changing their diet alone, without becoming more active, are missing out on an opportunity to boost their weight loss, general health and energy levels – as well as having some fun while they’re shaping up.

Out Inactive Society

The twenty-first century environment can be hostile to people who want to make healthy food choices and control their weight. In the same way, making time to be active can be difficult when many of us have sedentary jobs, drive cars, use labor-saving devices and spend our leisure time watching TV or going out for meals.

Fifty years ago, activity was an essential part of most people's lives; they walked or cycled everywhere, did many household chores by hand, and had physically demanding jobs. Today, it takes effort to build exercise back into our lives.

Studies show the number of people choosing active pastimes such as swimming, yoga and keep fit has increased, but not enough to compensate for the overall decrease in activity as part of daily routines. About two-thirds of men and three-quarters of women do less than the level of exercise recommended to maintain health: 30 minutes of moderate activity a day at least five days of the week. One-third of men, and between a third and a half of women, are officially 'sedentary', doing less than 30 minutes of activity per week.

Physical inactivity is just as important as smoking and an unhealthy diet in the risk it poses to the nation's health and well being. Making time to be active is important for everyone who wants to live a long and healthy life, but for people who want to lose weight, exercise has a vital role to play. This is because the key to losing weight successfully is to create an calorie deficit so we expend more calories than we take in as food. Changing your diet to control calorie intake is one side of this energy equation: becoming more active to burn off more calories is the other.

Why Exercise?

Every movement we make, from changing the TV channel using the remote control to running a marathon, burns calories. When deciding to lose weight, some people immediately think of exercise as the solution, on the basis that going for a run or a gym workout a few times a week is a more appealing option than changing their diet. However, it takes a great deal of exercise to burn fat by activity alone. To use up around 3500 calories (the equivalent of 1 pound of fat) the average person would need to spend nearly 7 hours running or dancing energetically.

This is another aspect of the genetic legacy that we have received from our ancestors – survival in an environment where food was scarce ensured that human beings evolved to be very efficient at storing energy and fat, and spending it slowly. So while it takes only a few minutes to eat 1000 calories’ worth of food, it takes a lot longer to burn off 1000 calories in activity.

Losing weight by changing our diet is therefore likely to be a quicker process than by exercising alone, and many people find that they can lose weight successfully without doing any extra activity at all. All the evidence suggests, however, that people who combine diet and exercise are more successful not just at losing weight, but also at keeping it off, than those who lose weight by dieting alone.