Control Your Weight Using These Physical Activities

Physical activity is not only important for overall health but also a critical element in maintaining a healthy weight or losing weight in a healthy way. Exercise can burn calories, firm and tone muscles, and strengthens the body.

Aerobics

Exercise is an important component to weight control. By burning calories through exercise, you are able to eat more and therefore add more nutrients to your diet. If you have lost weight and are trying to maintain the weight loss, you're likely to need more than the minimum recommended amount of exercise.

Rena Wing, a professor of psychiatry at Brown Medical School in Providence, R.I., helped develop the National Weight Control Registry. It gathers information from 3,000 American adults who have lost an average of 60 pounds and kept it off for an average of six years. People on the registry exercise for about an hour or more a day (the equivalent of walking four miles) and burn off about 2,800 calories per week on a variety of activities.

Aerobic exercise speeds up the heart rate and breathing. It is good for the heart and helps burn calories. Your body uses those calories for the energy it needs to keep your heart and lungs pumping faster. How many calories you burn during cardiovascular exercise depends on how much you weigh and the intensity level you maintain during the exercise.

Body sculpting

Along with burning calories, you should do exercises that increase Strength and flexibility. Exercises that strengthen the body help build and maintain bones, decreasing the risk of osteoporosis (progressive Boss of bone density). Strength exercises may be done with weights or weight machines, or by using your own body as resistance. Repetitive activities that require strength, such as carrying the groceries, count, too.

The more muscle in your body, the more calories you burn. Muscle weighs more than fat. So, when you build muscle through exercise, your weight may not drop, even though your body looks more toned and lit. How you look and feel is much more important than the number you see on the scale.

Stretching, dancing, yoga, and pilates are ways to increase flexibility. Increased flexibility will make your muscles longer and leaner and decrease the likelihood of injury from exercise.

Q & A-

Question: I've been exercising all year and I feel really good about my improved fitness level and how my body looks. But I've gained weight! How can that be?

Answer: With all the exercise you've been doing, you've been replacing fat with muscle. The proof is in the way you look and the fact that you're stronger than you were before. Muscle weighs more than fat. So the rising number on your scale may show that you're more muscular than you were before. Unless you've beefed up enough to be a professional body builder, your body mass index (BMI) is still in the healthy range. So don't worry about the scale; be proud of how good you feel.

EXERCISE BENEFIT

Regular exercise makes most people look better, but more important it improves their physical and mental health. They don't just look better, they feel better.