All too many of us remember our diet but forget about weight loss and exercise. Whenever you think about being on a diet, you think of “what am I going to eat”. You dread the feeling of how much you’ll need to change the foods you eat.  You fear you’ll be starving yourself in order to lose a few pounds on the scale.

With such a focus on food being at the root of a diet, very few people give enough consideration to weight loss and exercise. In order to lose weight, with or without the use of diet pills, exercise is critical for increasing your metabolic rate. In this way, your body becomes efficient at burning body fat.

Can You Achieve Weight Loss Without Exercise?

The basic issue with weight loss and exercise is that the vast majority of people think they don’t like to do it. They don’t want to feel short of breath, nor do they want to sweat. Also, finding time for exercise between work and relaxation can be quite a challenge.  This is particularly true when you don’t have the motivation to do it in the first place.

At the same time, exercise is one of the best direct paths to weight management. Research shows that when you want to lose weight, diet plays the largest role in your success.  However, this isn’t to say that you should focus on weight loss without having to do any exercise at all.  There are three main reasons for this:

1. Physical activity is key to mental and physical health.
2. Your regular workouts burn fat, meaning that they help to make your eating strategy even more effective. In fact, it can even mean that you can eat more while still losing weight.
3. It’s not just about exercise for weight loss. Diet may be most important for losing weight, but exercise is most important for maintaining it. Research has shown that if you don’t want the pounds to come back, your activity level will play a critical role in your success.

How to Exercise for Weight Loss Without Hating It

The trick is to find exercises you like and to build up those exercises to increasing levels of intensity as you get leaner and more in shape. Even if you think you hate all physical activity, you’re wrong.  There is something out there you’ll love. You won’t know what it is until you try it.

There are two primary types of exercise, anaerobic exercise and aerobic exercise.

Anaerobic Exercise

People who want to lose weight should engage in both types of exercise. With anaerobic exercise – also known as strength training – you strengthen your muscles through the use of muscle building.  It also includes stretching, flexibility, range of motion, balance, and toning exercises. These include:

• Lifting weights
• Pilates
• Yoga
• Weight machines

Your heart rate increases a little bit and you generally don’t get short of breath. Many forms of anaerobic exercise will strengthen your muscles. Stronger lean muscle means you burn more calories per pound of body weight. This increase in metabolism due to more muscle works 24 hours a day, so is critical if you want to burn excess fat.

Depending on your beginning strength level, you can start with some simple Pilates to tone your muscles or work with machines with ever increasing levels of weights so that you can build some muscle mass. Toning muscle makes you feel better and look better right away.

Aerobic Exercise

Also known as cardio, aerobic exercises help you build your cardiovascular strength. Your heart rate increases, your respiratory rate increases, and you strengthen muscles to some degree. That said, muscle strengthening typically doesn’t occur as much as with anaerobic exercise.

There are virtually hundreds of activities to choose from in aerobic exercise. Commonly used exercises include:

• Walking
• Running
• Jogging
• Cycling
• Swimming

Although you can include more esoteric exercises like:

• Golf
• Rowing
• Skateboarding
• Skiing

All these activities get your heart pumping and are excellent in preventing heart disease. They enhance your lung capacity and burn calories both during the exercises and for a few hours afterwards.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, a healthy diet includes both dietary and exercise components. There are different tips of advice as to how much you should exercise but a minimum of three times per week for a duration of at least 50 minutes each time is recommended.

Some experts recommend up to seven days a week, alternating between aerobic and anaerobic exercises every other day. For example, you could run or bicycle three days a week and alternate that with weightlifting or Pilates in between those days. It sometimes helps to change it up a bit and do biking one week, running the next and swimming the next.

Have exercise be a part of your life by bicycling to the grocery store or walking instead of riding in the car. Get your family involved in a more active lifestyle. It is good for the family and healthy for you as well.