Exercise for Fitness

Exercise for fitness helps your weight loss by burning up some calories and improving your general health, especially the condition of your heart and lungs. It’s called burning fat. That sounds good, but please realize that exercise won’t do much for you on its own - especially if you‘re still eating too much of the wrong types of food.

The key to fitness weight loss is a sensible and nutritious eating plan, where the type of food you eat is tailored to give you all the nutrients your body needs, and where the amount of food you consume is actually reduced and limited.

A healthy lifestyle is all about balance. Balanced nutrition. Quality food in moderate amounts, and a moderate amount of safe and sensible exercise.

The exercise part comes from changing your lazy habits so more of the food you eat gets used up as fuel… Because if you don’t use it up, it gets stored as FAT to keep your body alive in time of famine. And how many of us in our opulent Western society have ever had to live through a famine? We may have viewed some 30-second news grabs on the TV showing starving black children in Africa someplace, and that’s it.

In the meantime, food is so easy for us to access. It’s in the refrigerator waiting for us now. It’s at the supermarket, the fast food franchise down the block. Heck, all we’ve got to do is pickup the phone and have it delivered within 30 minutes or it’s free!

So we sit on the couch on our fat backsides, watch more TV and stuff our faces with food we don’t need. In fact we’d be better off with much less food, but we’re habitual about our eating. We enjoy eating. It comforts us when we’re alone or depressed… and when we’re feeling angry or tired or sad or whatever.

When we need to go anywhere we hop in the car and drive. Heaven forbid we should actually walk anywhere, like our grandparents used to do.

Our grandparents probably walked to school and even walked to work. A century ago, people didn’t have elevators and escalators (moving walkways and staircases) everywhere. They walked up and down the stairs. They burned up the energy from the food they ate. In fact, at the time of the Great Depression (1920s and 1930s), many people were darned lucky if they could eat enough fuel for the energy they had to burn up each day, just to stay alive.

There were a lot of skinny people around in those days, believe me.

It’s all so much different from today, where we can all eat so much food and yet we burn up so little of it. No wonder we’re so unfit. It’s no wonder we’re piling on the pounds.

We need more fitness, and we need more weight loss. But hey, we’re human. We want it the quick way, the easy way out. That magical diet pill. Results without effort.

Yes, you can go pay for a subscription to Gloria Marshall or Jenny Craig. Or you can join Weight Watchers. It all sounds so easy, and it is. Pretty much. And yes, it works for some, but not for as many people as the promoters would like you to believe. Many people join for several months and diet to lose weight. Then, when the course they just paid for is over, they go back to their old ways and guess what, the pounds pile back on again.

Everyone knows exercise is important, but what's the right way to go about it? 

One question I am often asked is, How often should I exercise?