If you want to get and stay healthy, you need to change your lifestyle. Exercise, a healthy diet, adequate sleep and elimination of bad habits, like excess alcohol or smoking, are important. When it comes to losing weight, your diet is responsible for the majority of your success, with exercise next in line. (Easing up on the alcohol is also extremely important, too! It’s high in calories.) You’d have workout for long hours, like Olympic swimmers, to burn the calories you need to shed those pounds. Since most people don’t have the time to be in gold medal training, changing your eating habits is top priority.
Don’t believe the hype.
There’s been a recent research report that exercise alone can help you shed those extra pounds. Unfortunately, according to most other researchers, the results were bogus. That isn’t saying that exercise provides no benefits. The benefits are huge. It’s just that you need to eat healthy to get the maximum weight loss results. The study was funded by Coke, so getting the right results was important to their bottom line. Healthy eating means elimination of sugary products, including soft drinks. Just one can of Coke contains 150 calories. If you drink several throughout the day, you can reduce your caloric intake significantly by switching to water. Coke took a proactive approach to divert the attention from sugary products that could result in a tax, like cigarettes have.
Processed foods may be higher in calories, but also have other weight loss dangers.
The easiest way to prepare meals may or may not be the best. If easy means slicing and dicing fresh fruits and vegetables, you’re in like Flint when it comes to the weight loss game. If it means popping a TV dinner in the nuke, rethink your position. Refined or processed foods are often high in sugar, fats, chemicals and calories, while being low in nutrition. They increase inflammation and that can cause fat to accumulate on the abdomen, belly fat. Go with foods that are closest to natural. Steaming veggies provides variety, so does grilling. Best of all, both are quick and relatively easy.
One study showed that women who only exercised actually gained weight in some cases.
There was a study that requested a group of overweight women to workout at close to maximum potential, but NOT change their eating habits. At the end of the study, 70 percent gained weight. That doesn’t mean that exercise packs on the pounds, but it could mean that the women who exercised packed in the calories after a good workout. If you spend an hour in the gym, but reward yourself with fries or a donut, you’ll probably gain weight.
> The average person would have to walk briskly for 45 minutes to burn off the calories from just two Oreo cookies. They’d have to walk briskly for almost two hours to burn off an average serving of fries.
> One bottle of Pepsi is 250 calories. Just do 400 sit ups and you’ll burn off the effect of those calories.
> Not only does eating junk food pack on extra calories, put sugar and chemicals into your body, it does nothing for providing nutrition. There’s a link between lacking vitamin A, C, D and E, as well as magnesium, and weight gain.
> Eating healthier not only helps shed pounds, it also improves your overall health. Combine it with regular exercise and you have a dynamic duo for both your health and weight loss program.