Do you feel like you are exercising enough to support your lifestyle?
Meaning: you can eat junk food as long as you hit the gym, right?
Let’s look at it this way: a moderately obese person doing one hour of moderate intense physical activity will lose about 350 calories in one hour.
However…most drinks, snacks and other processed foods consumed by the same person load him up with 70 calories in a minute. So….in 5 minutes, all the exercise that you have done is gone and you are loading up on calories again.
Wow. And people wonder why they are gaining weight?
People eating CRAP food (Calorie Rich and Processed) and exercising will not benefit if their diet is not handled. Sometimes eating processed food is associated with the Emotional status of a person, so we have to see what emotional issues are part of the problem and work with the person in a 4-dimensional way, assessing Body, Mind, Spirit and Emotion.
That is why mixing up exercise while listening to music, or a podcast or watching a video is more enjoyable and people will stick to this better.
Reframing exercise as a play than work will work better.
Let us look at this in two different ways.
Body Fat= Calories in – Calories out
or
Body Fat= Food+Beverages – Metabolism – Exercise – Other Movements.
Let us talk about other movements like Standing, Moving or fidgeting: these can burn lots of calories and definitely improve your metabolism.
This is NEAT (Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis).
Basically, NEAT is the sum of calories burned by everything we do that is not sleeping, eating, or sports like exercise.
So, to lose weight…. do not sit for a long time. Are you going to the gym for an hour every morning, but then sitting watching hours of TV? Do you find yourself sitting 8 hours every single day at your office?
Here is something interesting: we burn 3 times more calories per minute just standing up than sitting down!
That is why they have created standing desks or even treadmill desks. They have a sit/stand desk.
Also, taking 5 minutes every hour to just walk around is not only great for burning calories, but it can prevent the stiffening of arteries that comes along with prolonged sitting.
People should be encouraged to do aerobic exercise before sitting down for an excessive amount of time and if that is not possible, sitting should be replaced by standing.
When strength training was put in practice and people were weighed, they did not lose any weight, but instead, they lost lots of visceral fat as they gained lots of muscle mass. This is the direction you want to go–burning fat and gaining muscle!
Look at exercise that will make you stronger and energetic and lose body visceral fat and gaining muscle mass.
Sometimes when we look only at losing weight, we don’t realize that our behaviors are only helping us to lose muscle mass but not fat, and that is bad for our health.
One of the reasons exercise is a lifesaver is that it doesn’t just affect overall weight. It can also get rid of the most dangerous body fat- that visceral fat slithering around our internal abdominal organs.
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