Diet exercise and weight loss is the key to weight management, which is no small thing these days. Obesity in the USA is one of the greatest health problems of our time – perhaps not yet a full scale epidemic, but it’s clear we’re heading in that direction.
The answer to obesity is not to restrict the calories you consume, but to increase your expenditure of calories. If we become inactive, our energy balance is shifted toward a positive energy balance (meaning we consume more calories than we burn) and we store more fat.
Weight management is the process of ensuring weight stability over a lifetime and reducing health risks due to weight gain. Weight control should be considered a life-long activity, and prevention of future weight gain should be achieved using healthy eating and physical activity as cornerstones.
Is Exercise Necessary for Weight Loss?
Let’s see what happens if you diet without any extra exercise or physical activity.
We start out with two people struggling to lose weight.
The first person cuts back on calorie intake by cutting out sugar, bread, and soft drinks. He figures he’s looking at about a 500 calorie reduction each day but flatly refuses to add exercise.
The second person cuts back calorie consumption by 500 calories a day and starts walking about 2 miles a day.
Which one do you think will lose weight faster? It’s the first person — The one who refuse exercise!
Why? How could that be?
The answer is that it’s easier to cut 500 calories a day from your diet than burning off 500 calories with exercise. **To lose one pound of fat, you’re looking at walking about 3 miles a day for a week.**
Why Exercise is Important to Weight Loss and Weight Management
A person may need to lose 3 or 4 pounds to get back into a dress they wore 20 years ago just for the class reunion. When that’s the case, exercise is just not a factor because there is no call for long term weight management.
However, by only reducing your calorie intake to lose a couple of pounds, that weight is coming back just about as quickly as it left.
Why? Because you lost a couple of pounds simply by a severe reduction of calorie intake. You were able to lose that small amount of weight quickly — before your body caught on to your plans.
What Happens When Your Body Knows You Are Cutting Back On Calories?
However much you weigh now, you must have an adequate food intake to maintain that weight. It takes about 10 calories a day to maintain a pound of body weight. Let’s say you weigh 150 pounds. That means to continue weighing in at 150 pounds, you need about 1500 calories a day.
Your body is a fantastic piece of “machinery”. As soon as it realizes you have cut back on calories, it cuts back on metabolism.
Why? If there’s a food shortage, it doesn’t want you starving to death. To protect you, as soon as it senses a food shortage, it starts conserving energy. It does this by storing calories as fat cells for later.
What Happens When Your Energy is Depleted?
I don’t know about you, but when I realize my energy is on a downward spiral, I reach for food. And I already know what foods deliver a rush of energy to make me feel better quickly.
Sweet treats, sugary drinks, and everything that causes weight gain!
No one needs to teach you that more food equals more energy. It’s a natural response to eat more when we feel down. So, we naturally reach for somthing to eat, sometimes unconsiously. But, our body and brain have changed over the last week or so due to the calorie shortage.
Now, increasing your calorie intake can make you gain weight even faster than you did before. Not only do we quickly get back to the weight our body has become accoustomed to, but we gain even more.
Diet Exercise and Weight Loss = Weight Management
Now we are getting to why exercise is so important to weight loss and weight management.
I think most people know that a change in diet is the way to weight loss, but do not realize the role exercise plays.
We tend to think of exercise only as a way to burn calories, but it’s more than that. Exercise raises your metabolism More exercise will compensate the metabolic slowdown because you are burning more calories.
Metabolism is the process by which your body converts consumed food and beverages into a source of energy.
George Mason University
When you eat, your body has to do something with the intake of calories. It must either convert it to either stored fat, or metabolise it for energy. Physical activity or exercise forces your body to convert food to energy.
And the process last far longer than the 30 minutes you walked, or did some other form of physical activity.
The amount of calories you burn when exercising increases with regular physical activity. Even more important , it increases your resting energy expenditure, or the rateof calorie burn after you’ve finished working out and are relaxing.
Why Calorie Burn While Resting Is So Important
The quantity of energy you burn when exercising increases with regular activity.
Because resting energy expenditure contributes for 60 to 75 percent of your daily calorie burn, any increase in resting energy expenditure is critical to your weight-loss efforts.
However, it increases your resting energy expenditure. That means you burn calories after you’ve finished working out and are relaxing. As long as you exercise at least three days a week on a consistent basis, your resting energy expenditure will remain increased.
Walking briskly for two miles or riding a bike uphill are examples of intense activity that might boost your metabolism. Even tiny increases in energy expenditure, such as standing rather than sitting, might add up.
Another advantage of any type of regular physical activity is that it momentarily suppresses your hunger. Of course, many people joke that after a workout they are ravenous and immediately eat a snack.
Exercise, on the other hand, increases resting energy expenditure, so people continue to burn calories at a high rate. As a result, a light snack after exercise does not negate the benefits of exercise in terms of weight management.
Summary
Short-term weight loss can be achieved by fad diets that do not include regular exercise, a healthy food, and long-term weight control strategies. However, those are always temporary outcomes, and they frequently come at the expense of your health.
Your weight, food, and regular exercise habits will have a significant impact on your long-term health and well-being.
If you are searching for ways to stabilize your weight at healthy levels, improve your general health and maintain it, diet exercise and weight loss for weight management is the only logical route.