If you’re a client in Alexandria, you’re already aware of the benefits of exercise, which includes helping you to lose fat. Unfortunately, exercise alone won’t make the biggest difference. You need to eat healthy, too. In order to shed one pound, you need to eat 3500 calories less than you burn. Exercise increases the amount of calories you burn and provides other benefits, but for the best results, changing your eating habits is necessary.
Besides burning calories, exercise also helps balance your hormones.
An imbalance of hormones can make you gain weight. If you have an imbalance of estrogen to progesterone, you’ll gain weight easier and it will pack on around your hips. Too much cortisol—the stress hormone—puts fat on your abdomen. Weight gain over your entire body indicates low thyroid. Luckily, exercise can help regulate all those problems and get your hormones back into balance. It also can trigger the creation of hormones that make you feel good, and when you feel good, you look good.
Build muscle and boost your metabolism.
The right type of workout can burn fat and build muscle tissue. The more muscle tissue you have, the more calories you burn even when you sleep. That’s because muscle tissue requires more calories than fat tissue does. Aerobic exercises, such as running, won’t do it. That’s because when you run, you’ll burn calories from all sources, lean muscle tissue and fat. Strength-building exercises builds muscle tissue while burning huge amounts of calories, even after the exercise ends!
You’ll look thinner, even if you don’t lose one single pound, when you workout.
As noted before, exercise builds muscle tissue, burns calories and makes it easier to keep weight from returning. It also makes you look thinner even if you don’t lose a single pound. That’s because muscle tissue weighs more per cubic inch than fat tissue does. One pound of muscle tissue would fit into a much smaller container than one pound of fat tissue. The same holds true for your body. If you weigh 130 pounds and you have a high percentage of muscle tissue, you’ll wear a smaller clothing size than someone who has a higher percentage of fat tissue.
- You can lose weight easier when you combine exercise with a healthy diet. Just cutting out processed food and sugary products—including soft drinks—will give you a great start on the road to weight loss.
- HIIT—high intensity interval training—that varies the intensity of an exercise from pushing yourself as hard as possible to moderate recovery and back—can get the best results, particularly when combined with strength training.
- Two hormones that affect how much you eat are ghrelin and leptin. They’re the hunger and satiety hormones. Exercise and reducing sugar helps regulate them and gets you back on the road to weight loss.
- When you workout, you’ll boost your energy after just a few weeks. That extra energy means you’ll be more active and that burns more calories, too.