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Should I Diet Or Exercise

1st July, 2010 - Posted by health news - No Comments

Everybody wants to know what is the best way to lose weight? Is it diet or exercise? The short answer is that both ways may help you to lose weight, but neither one will work unless you understand some basic principles of how the body uses and stores calories.

Everybody’s body functions with something known as the basal metabolic rate. This is the number of calories every living person needs to survive. This number is the bare minimum needed for survival and does not do anything else. Even walking to the fridge for some tempting snack or a cold one, and then back to the sofa for the next TV show would be considered exercise, just as doing a six pack ab exercise program is considered exercise when computing your BMR. The BMR is what it takes for your heart to work and your body to breathe and does not allow for anything else. Your BMR decreases with both age and the loss of muscle mass. People who are more toned have a higher basal metabolic rate. Women and men have different formulas to compute their BMR.

A detailed analysis of a person’s basal metabolic rate can be done but it requires a complete physical history of a persons’ body. There are formulas that can help a person figure it out and a search on the internet or some time spent checking out the message boards at biggest loser weight loss forum can help a person determine their basic metabolism rate. To find the numbers of calories we actually burn in a day we need to multiply our BMR by our activity. Figuring out this lets you know what your body uses up. This is the number that we have to know in order to plan a program to lose weight.

This does not clear up the question about whether diet or exercise is better. Dieting all by itself will lower the BMR. The smaller number is not as good at losing the pounds because you are not eating enough. Very restrictive plans can actually harm a person by altering their thyroid output.

Exercise without also reducing calories will result in very slow weight loss You do not burn enough calories without very rigorous exercise. The extra activity causes a person to up the amount of calories that they put into their body to keep functioning. A person should try to reduce their caloric intake by about three hundred calories when they want to lose the pounds safely.

The bottom line concerning calories and weight loss is very simple. You need to create a deficit of calories in order for the fat to be used. When you take in more energy than you use, it is stored as fat in our bodies. It is essential to get the right amount of exercise in combination with the right foods.

The best way to control your basal metabolic rate is to add some workouts to a proper meal plan and raise your number higher. Fad diets are not recommended. There are many helpful sites on the internet such as http://www.fatlossfactor.com, for someone who needs guidance in coming up with a plan to lose the unwanted weight they are carrying.

If you are able to create a deficit of around five hundred calories daily to lose one pound of fat a week. The combination of exercise and calorie reduction will give you the results you are looking for with the added benefit of becoming much more fit in the process.~The answer to the question is to do a little of both to make sure that you are safely losing the weight that you want to.~A healthy lifestyle includes both eating right and regular activity and will result in a fit and trim body.} A little effort will go a long way towards happy weight loss.