Weight Loss Secret...Incidental Exercise
Today,
our ever-increasingly sedentary lifestyle is causing a 'down-sizing'
in daily activity and a corresponding 'up-sizing' in our body sizes and
the readings on our scales.
This article explains one of the main reasons many of us are getting
fatter and provides some suggestions for reversing this trend.
Finally it describes what exercises are best to do to lose fat and provides
5 easy steps to looking and feeling great.
What's making us fatter?
Over the past 50 years humanity's pursuit of 'convenience' may seem to have
made life much better for a lot of us, but all this convenience has come at
a huge cost.
Just think about how much easier life is with access to elevators and lifts,
automatic carwashes, remote controls, home delivery services, internet shopping,
electric golf buggies, restaurant drive-thru's, lawn-mowing services, house-cleaning
services, clothes dryers, cordless phones and the like.
While all these things make life simpler, easier and save us time, they also
cost us valuable energy and fat burning potential. Combined with our access
to large quantities of inexpensive calorie dense foods, our life of convenience
and ease is the main reason that collectively we are getting fatter.
Incidental exercise, or the exercise we get doing daily activities, can make
a big difference between being overweight and losing or maintaining weight.
Engaging in more incidental activity can help boost our daily calorie expenditure
and keep our metabolism (fat burning engine) fired up through the day and in
doing so help us reverse the trend and lose
weight.
Increasing our incidental exercise
While saving time and effort in today's hectic world seems important and desirable,
what's more important is maintaining good health so that we can be around to
enjoy all the convenience!
The key to increasing incidental exercise is planning to change some of our
daily lifestyle habits and acting on those plans.
The idea here is to try to replace a few 'convenient' activities each day
with something that will cause us to 'move more'.
For example, while we are speaking on a cordless phone we could pace up and
down the hallway or office.
Here are some more examples we all might like to try:
- Instead of take the lift or escalator we can walk up or down the stairs
- Go for a 10 minute walk during our lunchbreak
- We can get off the bus one stop early and walk a little further to work
- We can take the dogs for an extra walk during the week
- Leave the remote control on top of the TV and get up every time we want to change channels
- We can have a piece of exercise equipment strategically placed in front of our TV & actually use it
- Park our car a little further away in the shopping centre car park from the entrance
Can you think of some other things that you can do to increase your incidental
exercise each day?
'Huffy Puffy' exercise - how much should we do?
In addition to increasing our incidental exercise, we might need to do some 'Huffy
Puffy' exercise each week if we have weight loss or improved health and fitness
related goals.
Generally speaking if we want to lose weight and get fitter and healthier
we should aim to do a minimum of 100 minutes of cardiovascular or 'Huffy Puffy'
exercise each week.
Contrary to the implied suggestion of many articles we read on exercise for
weight loss, that there is an 'ideal amount of time for each workout' and that
our exercise should be 'continuous blocks', we need to remember that any exercise,
no matter how short, is better than none and that at the end of the day, it
all adds up.
What really matters is the total amount of exercise (incidental and 'Huffy
Puffy' that we do).
Depending on our lifestyle and what we can fit into each day or week, our
100 minutes can be split up into 10 x 10 minute sessions or a mixture of 10,
20 and/or 30 minute sessions.
I get my clients to write down "10 minutes" 10 times on a piece of paper at
the beginning of each week and simply cross each one off after they have completed
10 minutes of exercise.
According to the clients that do this, it is not only
a very effective way of making sure they're getting enough exercise each week,
but it's also so simple!
What exercise is the best exercise to do?
This is the most common question I am asked by clients.
And the answer is simple...something you enjoy!
I love to run, but if you hate running and I was to tell you that you needed
to run every week, chances are you either wouldn't do it, or it wouldn't become
part of a long term lifestyle change for you.
And that's the real secret to long term weight loss - long term lifestyle
changes.
If you do something you love, such as dancing, roller-blading, swimming, ice-skating,
cycling, rowing, skipping, boxing, aerobics, walking, etc, then you are more
likely to make it part of your weekly activities instead of something you 'do'
whenever you wake up feeling less that pleased with your health, fitness or
appearance!
Five easy to follow steps to look good and feel great!
Life doesn't need to be complex and neither does weight loss. Here are five
very simple steps to take to look and feel great:
- Move: Just Do Something
- Move More: Aim for a minimum of 100 minutes of 'Huffy
Puffy' exercise every week
- Move More Often: Aim to do something everyday
- Move Quicker: Aim to go faster over the same distance
or further in the same time
- Move Differently: Choose different activities or do the same activity differently. E.g. Run or walk a different way everyday, run hills, flat, sand, slower for longer and shorter and quicker
Conclusion
Today, our ever-increasingly sedentary lifestyle is causing a 'down-sizing'
in daily activity and a corresponding 'up-sizing' in our body sizes and the
readings on our scales.
This article explained one of the main reasons most of us are getting fatter
and provided some suggestions for reversing this trend through a combination
of incidental exercise and what I call 'Huffy Puffy' exercise. Finally it described
what exercises are best to do to lose fat and provided five easy steps to looking
and feeling great which all revolved around moving more.
As well as helping us to achieve our weight loss and health goals, an added
benefit of moving more is that we actually end up with more energy to do more
throughout our day and who doesn't need that!
Happy moving and thanks for visiting weightloss.com.au.
© Copyright Ultimate Weightloss.
This article was written by Scott Haywood.
Scott is the editor of weightloss.com.au. Scott has developed an expertise in fitness and nutrition, and their roles in weight loss, which led him to launch weightloss.com.au in 2005. Today, weightloss.com.au provides weight loss and fitness information, including hundreds of healthy recipes, weight loss tools and tips, articles, and more, to millions of people around the world, helping them to lead happier, healthier, lives.
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