Physical Activity That Promotes Weight Loss

Exercise reduces the risk of chronic disease, makes you feel better, boosts your mental acuity, and helps you sleep better. You park your car in the back of the parking lot when you go to work, you use the steps not the elevator, and you walk with others sometimes during lunch. Yet, like 27 million other Americans, you're obese with no relief in sight. Whether you're earning more than most, meeting every deadline, or just won a literary contest for best self-published novel, your sedentary life style actually shortens your life and prepares you for type 2 diabetes, heart valve or peripheral vascular disease, colon or stomach cancer, brain damage, or stroke.

Personal Trainers

A personal trainer can analyze your nutrition, your lifestyle, your weight loss, and your physical activity level to develop an effective exercise plan for you. It's easy to get discouraged, especially if you followed your exercise routine for six weeks and you didn't lose any weight. "Certified personal trainers" enthusiastically offer personalized, scientifically-based exercise plans and equipment to help you meet your fitness goals. Personal trainers help you burn calories and build muscle mass, but you have to do the exercise yourself. An inexpensive gym memberships includes free personal trainers.

Fitness Watches and Online Applications

You can wear an inexpensive or expensive watch that tells you how many calories you burn during each activity. You'll know without any doubt what physical activity is more effective. You may need to lose misconceptions. A pulse rate higher than 100 is regarded high if you're sedentary, overweight, or suffer from a heart condition, but it's normal and desirable while you're exercising. Unless your doctor restricts your activities or a medical condition leads to chronic fatigue, you'll benefit from brisk daily exercise.

Increase Your Strength and Endurance

Exercise maintains your bones, joints, muscles, and tendons to keep your body moving, burn calories, and reduce pain and swelling. You can walk and bicycle farther than you might think. Just keep doing it. If you can walk two miles, you can walk five miles. Exercise helps you with metabolic changes, improves your coordination, and reduces your doctor bills,

Plan to Overcome Obstacles

Planning and scheduling your physical activities may help you meet your goals, but you'll only really commit to exercise you enjoy doing. Meeting a friend to walk, play tennis, or go bowling combines physical activities and socializing. An hour at the gym can be just as entertaining and beneficial, but it's not sufficient to meet your fitness goals. If you find you miss important phone calls or time at the gym interferes with other obligations, you may find it beneficial and more efficient to do aerobics, use home exercise equipment, and walk near your home.

Use Your Fitness Watch to Optimize Your Physical Activities

Your inexpensive watch that tracks your pulse rate, steps taken, and calories burned shows you that you burn more calories moving a 40 pound bag of sunflower bird seed than cleaning the house for an hour. Walking around your grocery store, selecting groceries, and carrying them to and from the car burns as many calories as working out in the gym for an hour. You can see that you burn more calories on a short brisk walk than on a half hour stroll. If your ride a stationary exercise bike, you burn significantly more calories pedaling at speeds of 20 miles per hour for ten minutes than leisurely pedaling for a half hour.

Online Fitness Tracking Applications

Numerous online applications can help you meet your goals and measure the calories you burn while exercising. Returning to my fitness pal online, you can record your time spent exercising by type of activity for an estimate of the number of calories burned. Runkeeper is a simplified online application that simply tracks the number of steps that you walk or run during a day with an estimate of the number of calories burned during the activity. Online applications can remind you when it is time to exercise and lists gyms and physical activities available free or at low cost in other cities while you're traveling.

You'll find, as I did, that if you exercise faithfully for two hours each day, even the most stubborn pounds will come off. Looking forward to friends and planned activities may help you pass up lunch with friends, craft beers, or your neighbor's well-intended cookies or cherry pie. Weight loss through exercise is an accomplishment as important as any other.