The benefits of exercise are well-documented, but one of the most common questions people ask is “Does exercise help you lose weight faster?”. The answer is yes, but it is important to understand how exercise affects weight loss.
Keep reading and discover the benefits of exercising when dieting, including how regular exercise can help you drop pounds faster.
Does Exercise Help You Lose Weight Faster?
The key to losing weight is always the same, burning more calories than you consume. When you’re using more calories in a given day than you ate, that’s known as a calorie deficit.
There’s three ways to get your self into a calorie deficit:
- Simply reduce the amount of calories you consume each day until you reach your desired weight.
- Continue consumming the same amount of calories and exercise more until you reach the point of a calorie deficit.
- Reduce calorie consumption while adding regular exercise to your dieting regime. This is by far the best way to lose weight. It’s the best for several reasons, which you’ll see farther into the post, but, you’ll also lose weight faster this way.
So, you can now see that either cutting calories or using exercise to burn more calories than you eat will cause a calorie deficit.
Let’s take a closer look at each of the options above, and see which one will produce the fastest results:
- One option is to drastically cut back on what you eat to the point of starvation, or a “starvation diet to lose weight.” This is dangerous to health and life both short term and long term and sets you up for eating disorder addictions.
- Another choice is to continue eating the items that contributed to your weight gain and start working out. The issue with this is that most people would need to engage in an extremely rigorous exercise regimen that last for hours each day to burn off the calories consumed.
- You will undoubtedly lose weight faster if you reduce your calorie intake and work out for 30 to 60 minutes on most days of the week. Working out to lose weight will start utilising fat reserves as fuel as a result, and you’ll quickly discover many more advantages to consistent exercise.
5 Ways Exercise Helps You Lose Weight Faster
The more you can change the ratio of calories consumed to calories used, the faster you’ll reach your weight loss goals. And exercise is the way to turn up the volume.
1. Exercise Burns Calories
When you are dieting for weight loss, exercise is one of the most important things you can do to speed up the process. Here’s why:
When you work out, your body burns calories to fuel your muscles. In addition, regular exercise can also help to raise your metabolism, which means that your body will continue to burn calories even after you’ve finished working out.
If you’re wondering how much exercise to lose weight, there’s no real answer to that. It’s generally considered that by reducing your calories by diet or exercise by 500 calories a day, you could lose about a pound a day.
2. Exercise Tones Your Body
It’s possible, and likely, that when you lose weight without exercise you will lose fat in various places of your body. However, this oftens leads to having sagging skin which doesn’t benefit your appearance, especially if you would like a flat tummy.
Toning your body means that you will lose excess fat around your body, and reduce rat around muscles that hide definition and shape.
Cardio exercises like running and swimming help to burn calories and promote weight loss, while strength-training exercises like lifting weights help to build muscle mass and tone your body.
By including both types of exercises in your routine, you can lose weight while also achieving the toned look you desire.
3. Exercise Speeds Up Metabolism
Metabolism is the process by which your body converts food into energy. When you’re metabolic rate is low, your body body tends to store more food as fat than it uses for energy.
On the other hand, when you can increase your metabolsim, your body uses more food for energy. This can result in using up all your latest meal intake, and causing your body to resort to using stored fat for energy.
Exercise speeds up the metabolism process, causing more calories to be used long after your workout has ended, turning you into a fat-burning machine.
4. Exercise Increases Muscle Mass to Improve Metabolism
Muscle mass is often associated with physical strength and fitness, but it also plays an important role in metabolism. In fact, muscle tissue is one of the body’s most metabolically active tissues, meaning that it burns more calories than other tissues, even when at rest.
The more muscle mass you have, the higher your resting metabolism.
Muscle cells are more efficient than fat cells at using calories for energy, so increasing muscle mass can help boost your overall metabolism. And, as you get older, you naturally lose muscle mass, so maintaining a healthy level of muscle mass is essential for keeping your metabolism up.
5. Exercise Curbs Your Appetite
Exercise helps to reduce your appetite, which can lead to eating fewer calories and the unhealthy carbs you crave. These effects combine to create a powerful tool for weight loss.
When you think about appetite, you might not automatically think of exercise. However, there is a strong link between the two. Numerous studies have shown that exercise can lead to a reduced appetite, which can cause you to eat less and automatically cut calories.
But how does this happen?
- One theory is that exercise increases levels of certain hormones, such as leptin and peptide YY, which are known to suppress appetite.
- Strenuous exercise can cause temporary changes in gut hormones that also help to reduce hunger.
Whatever the mechanism, the result is clear: regular exercise can help to control weight by reducing appetite.
The importance of creating a calorie deficit
For anyone trying to lose weight, creating a calorie deficit is essential. This means consuming fewer calories than your body burns in a day. Creating a calorie deficit forces your body to start burning stored fat for energy, leading to weight loss.
The bigger the calorie deficit, the faster the weight loss. However, it’s important to create a deficit that is sustainable over the long term.
If the deficit is too large, it can lead to unhealthy levels of weight loss, fatigue, and other negative side effects.
For most people, a deficit of 500–1000 calories per day is a good starting point. By making small changes to your diet and lifestyle, you can easily create a calorie deficit and start losing weight quickly.
The impact of exercise on weight loss over time
Exercise is often touted as a key ingredient in any weight loss plan. And while it is certainly true that exercise can help to speed up calories burned and promote faster weight loss, the impact of exercise on weight loss is often overstated.
In reality, the role of exercise in weight loss is more complicated than simply burning calories. In order to lose weight, individuals need to create a calorie deficit, meaning they must burn more calories than they consume.
For some people, this can be accomplished through diet alone. However, exercise can play an important role in weight loss by helping to increase metabolism and reduce appetite for fast weight loss.
Additionally, exercise can help to build muscle, which helps to burn more calories even at rest.
Conclusion
No doubt, we all want to lose weight faster. But, get real, your body didn’t accumulate all that fat overnight, and it’s going to take a while to get it off.
All health information indicates that 1-2 pounds a week is the way to lose it and maintain or even improve your health. However, without an exercise program to help with calorie burn, it can seem like weight loss isn’t happening at all.
So, to answer your question, does exercise help you lose weight faster, I’m saying yes, because it will help you get into a caloric deficit.