Losing Weight and Calories
I dont think it is a stretch to say that we all have looked at our bodies at one time or another and thought to ourselves that maybe it was time to lose some weight. Ever noticed how many commercials or infomercials there are now that target the healthy lifestyle. The irresistible offer that most of these vendors are trying to get across is the guarantee that you will succeed when you are exercising to lose weight. We've made our decision and have decided to go for it. What's the next step? Let's break this exercise stuff down into its basic elements.
If your plan is to lose weight by exercising you need to be able to track your calories. In other words, you need to consume fewer calories than your body burns each day. Its pretty simple math. There are many different factors on each side of the body math equation though that can speed this weight loss up or slow it down. Let's take a look at some of the most important factors.
The Key Variable You Should Know About
- Calorie Intake Or Consumed Factors
- Calorie Burning Factors
What are calorie intake factors and how do they impact weight loss? You can picture these in terms of food (calories) going into your body. You have 100% control over this type and it does require some planning and management on your part (i.e. your daily food consumed). The basic requirement for your body's systems to perform each of their functions (i.e. to inhale and exhale, to maintain a heart beat etc), is that they must have a minimum amount of fuel (or calories). The term for this minimum calorie level or steady state is basal metabolic rate. Let's take a sedentary person as an example. If this person wanted to reduce their weight, they would have to eat fewer calories than their body's basal metabolic rate. On the other side, if you wanted to increase your weight, you just need to eat more calories than your body burns. As was stated earlier, the game of losing weight is merely knowing how to use your math skills.
Before we proceed though one thing needs to be made clear, all calories are different. You can have good calories (fruits, vegetables, lean meats etc) and you can have bad calories (candy, chocolate bars, greasy fatty foods). Obviously you can consume more calories if they are in the beneficial calorie category.
Lets talk about the other side of the equation or calorie burning factors. Your body is one incredible machine. We are able to either speed up our calorie burning (otherwise known as metabolism) or we can even slow it down. Speeding it up will usually mean weight loss, while slowing it down could mean piling on those unwanted pounds. For the remainder of this article we'll talk about how to speed up our metabolisms so that our bodies burn more of the calories that we feed it with the end result being weight loss. How can we force our bodies to consume more of the calories than we ingest? Quite simply through exercise. So the next time you see someone exercising, you now know that they are trying to boost their metabolism so that their bodies consume at or above their base metabolic rate. These people are trying to lose weight by exercising.
So the term exercise is a very broad way of defining calorie burning. Depending on the type of exercise being performed, you can have a very large range of calories being burned off. On one side of the spectrum you can have the person that uses walking as their main exercise. If walking at a normal pace, they will be burning off fewer calories than someone who is jogging or sprinting. What if you only want to do one type of exercise, can you still vary the calories burned while doing it? Absolutely, simply by modifying the time that you are exercising. Instead of a 30min walk, you can go for an hour walk. Again, it's simple math. If you are moving at the same pace or rate and you double the time that you are going for, then you are also doubling the calories burned as well.
Repetition Is The Mother Of Skill
To figure out how many pounds your body can lose you just need to know the amount of calories going into the body and the number of calories that your body is burning. The best part about this process is that we control both the number of calories consumed (directly through diet) as well as the number of calories burned by the body (indirectly by exercise which increases the body's metabolism). If you can take in less calories than your body burns, you will lose weight.
The best thing that you can do for your body is to develop a healthy lifestyle. When you start on the healthy lifestyles road, you will be more conscious of the amounts and types of food you eat and you will also be more active and participating in an exercise of some type on a regular basis. You will know that you have achieved it when eating is fun for you and you get excited to do something physically active like go exploring the back woods or walking with the family on the local trails. If you get to the point where you no longer think that you have to be exercising to lose weight but you still keep exercising, then congratulations because you have made it!
I dont think it is a stretch to say that we all have looked at our bodies at one time or another and thought to ourselves that maybe it was time to lose some weight. Ever noticed how many commercials or infomercials there are now that target the healthy lifestyle. The irresistible offer that most of these vendors are trying to get across is the guarantee that you will succeed when you are exercising to lose weight. We've made our decision and have decided to go for it. What's the next step? Let's break this exercise stuff down into its basic elements.
If your plan is to lose weight by exercising you need to be able to track your calories. In other words, you need to consume fewer calories than your body burns each day. Its pretty simple math. There are many different factors on each side of the body math equation though that can speed this weight loss up or slow it down. Let's take a look at some of the most important factors.
The Key Variable You Should Know About
- Calorie Intake Or Consumed Factors
- Calorie Burning Factors
What are calorie intake factors and how do they impact weight loss? You can picture these in terms of food (calories) going into your body. You have 100% control over this type and it does require some planning and management on your part (i.e. your daily food consumed). The basic requirement for your body's systems to perform each of their functions (i.e. to inhale and exhale, to maintain a heart beat etc), is that they must have a minimum amount of fuel (or calories). The term for this minimum calorie level or steady state is basal metabolic rate. Let's take a sedentary person as an example. If this person wanted to reduce their weight, they would have to eat fewer calories than their body's basal metabolic rate. On the other side, if you wanted to increase your weight, you just need to eat more calories than your body burns. As was stated earlier, the game of losing weight is merely knowing how to use your math skills.
Before we proceed though one thing needs to be made clear, all calories are different. You can have good calories (fruits, vegetables, lean meats etc) and you can have bad calories (candy, chocolate bars, greasy fatty foods). Obviously you can consume more calories if they are in the beneficial calorie category.
Lets talk about the other side of the equation or calorie burning factors. Your body is one incredible machine. We are able to either speed up our calorie burning (otherwise known as metabolism) or we can even slow it down. Speeding it up will usually mean weight loss, while slowing it down could mean piling on those unwanted pounds. For the remainder of this article we'll talk about how to speed up our metabolisms so that our bodies burn more of the calories that we feed it with the end result being weight loss. How can we force our bodies to consume more of the calories than we ingest? Quite simply through exercise. So the next time you see someone exercising, you now know that they are trying to boost their metabolism so that their bodies consume at or above their base metabolic rate. These people are trying to lose weight by exercising.
So the term exercise is a very broad way of defining calorie burning. Depending on the type of exercise being performed, you can have a very large range of calories being burned off. On one side of the spectrum you can have the person that uses walking as their main exercise. If walking at a normal pace, they will be burning off fewer calories than someone who is jogging or sprinting. What if you only want to do one type of exercise, can you still vary the calories burned while doing it? Absolutely, simply by modifying the time that you are exercising. Instead of a 30min walk, you can go for an hour walk. Again, it's simple math. If you are moving at the same pace or rate and you double the time that you are going for, then you are also doubling the calories burned as well.
Repetition Is The Mother Of Skill
To figure out how many pounds your body can lose you just need to know the amount of calories going into the body and the number of calories that your body is burning. The best part about this process is that we control both the number of calories consumed (directly through diet) as well as the number of calories burned by the body (indirectly by exercise which increases the body's metabolism). If you can take in less calories than your body burns, you will lose weight.
The best thing that you can do for your body is to develop a healthy lifestyle. When you start on the healthy lifestyles road, you will be more conscious of the amounts and types of food you eat and you will also be more active and participating in an exercise of some type on a regular basis. You will know that you have achieved it when eating is fun for you and you get excited to do something physically active like go exploring the back woods or walking with the family on the local trails. If you get to the point where you no longer think that you have to be exercising to lose weight but you still keep exercising, then congratulations because you have made it!
Source...