Quick Weight Loss Tips

Controlling Your Weight

The key to weight control is keeping energy intake (food) and energy output (physical activity) in
balance. When you consume only as many calories as your body needs, your weight will usually
remain constant. If you take in more calories than your body needs, you will put on excess fat. If
you expend more energy than you take in you will burn excess fat.

Exercise plays an important role in weight control by increasing energy output, calling on stored
calories for extra fuel. Recent studies show that not only does exercise increase metabolism
during a workout, but it causes your metabolism to stay increased for a period of time after
exercising, allowing you to burn more calories.

How much exercise is needed to make a difference in your weight depends on the amount and
type of activity, and on how much you eat. Aerobic exercise burns body fat. A medium-sized
adult would have to walk more than 30 miles to burn up 3,500 calories, the equivalent of one
pound of fat. Although that may seem like a lot, you don’t have to walk the 30 miles all at once.
Walking a mile a day for 30 days will achieve the same result, providing you don’t increase your
food intake to negate the effects of walking.

If you consume 100 calories a day more than your body needs, you will gain approximately 10
pounds in a year. You could take that weight off, or keep it off, by doing 30 minutes of moderate
exercise daily. The combination of exercise and diet offers the most flexible and effective
approach to weight loss and weight maintenance.

Since muscle tissue weighs more than fat tissue, and exercise develops muscle to a certain degree,
your bathroom scale won’t necessarily tell you whether or not you are “fat.” Well-muscled
individuals, with relatively little body fat, invariably are “overweight” according to standard
weight charts. If you are doing a regular program of strength training, your muscles will increase
in weight, and possibly your overall weight will increase. Body composition is a better indicator
of your condition than body weight.

Lack of physical activity causes muscles to get soft, and if food intake is not decreased, added
body weight is almost always fat. Once-active people, who continue to eat as they always have
after settling into sedentary lifestyles, tend to suffer from “creeping obesity.”