Diet And Fitness Program
There seems to be an awful lot of focus in the diet industry on simply dieting as a way of losing weight. Now, I can agree that a good, healthy, calorie controlled diet will be very effective at helping a person to lose weight, but I would argue that the most effective way to lose weight is to combine a healthy, calorie controlled diet with vigorous exercise to help boost the metabolism and tone up the muscles.
The first thing for anyone to do when starting a diet and fitness program is to weigh themselves and work out their body fat composition or percentage. This is useful data to have to ensure the correct amount of calories are consumed. My theory is that most people who give advice about weight loss base their calorie intake on well known formulas which were calculated for the aid of sports nutrition. As most people are not professional athletes, these figures somewhat overstate the calorie needs for regular men and women.
To work out these figures, see my helpful article what is my resting metabolic rate to work out what your resting calorie needs are. Now, bear in mind that these figures have been calculated for sporstsmen (& women) who have probably got a bodyfat percentage of around 10%. So, if you have a body fat percentage higher than that (most likely if you are looking to lose weight), then you will need to reduce your resting metabolic rate to compensate for the fact that lean muscle burns more calories resting than fat does. For example, if your bodyfat is 30%, then I would reduce your resting metabolic rate by 22% ((90%-70%)/90% lean muscle mass) which is the difference in your body’s lean muscle mass compared to an athlete of 10% bodyfat.
To help your body burn this fat, you will need to get some exercise. For this, the best thing to do is to pursue a combination of resistance training (weights) and high intensity cardio vascular exercise. The best weight training program to follow would be a four day routine, which would incorporate an all over body workout split over two days, then repeated so you workout the whole body twice a week.
For cardio vascular fitness, a combination of high intensity sprint intervals will result in the most effective fat loss, read my interval training for beginners for some instructions unless you already know about interval training. It’s difficult to do high intensity training like this more than twice a week, so it may be worthwhile doing some regular steady state cardio work – jogging or cycling – or simply doing an aerobics/boxercise/step class down at your local health club. The key to this is regular, intense exercise four days a week, but don’t treat the other four days as “slobbing around” days, it’s always a good idea to go for a good walk on these days, half an hour to an hour will help with your weight loss goals whilst not ruining the required recovery needed to deal with the four intense exercise sessions you will be doing.
One Response to “Diet And Fitness Program”
May 27th, 2009 saat: 8:55 pm
This is helpful information for my readers. Thank you for your contribution to Take Charge of Your Health Care Carnival.
Leave a Reply