Permanently Losing 100+ Pounds

On Exercise

Much to the dismay of all those struggling with weight, it turns out our bodies are extremely efficient users of fuel. For example, a calorie is actually a unit of energy or heat. A gallon of gas contains about 31,000 calories. If we could drink gas instead of eat food, our bodies would get more than 300 miles per gallon.

How do we get our bodies to burn more calories? Increased physical activity, in other words exercise, is one sure answer. In keeping with our gas guzzling analogy, the more you drive a car, and the faster you rev it up, the more gas it uses. The same is true for our bodies. Note that both duration and intensity are factors; and they not only affect the calories we burn while exercising, but also after. Unlike cars, our bodies do not just shut off when we finish our workouts. Once our metabolisms get revved up, they stay that way for a while.

Exercise also maintains, and can in fact increase muscle mass. Muscles burn more calories, even at rest, than fatty tissue. Not to mention that they take up far less space per pound, and enable us to do more things. Muscles are cool. Women needn’t worry about ending up looking like Arnold Shwartzenager, by the way. Without the aid of steroids, most women’s bodies do not have enough testosterone for that.

It's All About Intensity

Any exercise is better than none. As I mentioned above, however, intensity is a large factor in how much we accomplish with that exercise. I think it is safe to say that one of the goals of every person on this board is to lose weight and keep it off. Part of what we must do to accomplish that goal is raise our metabolisms. According to a good bit of research, low intensity exercise doesn’t do much towards that end, whereas moderately high intensity exercise does.

Our bodies have a set point; a weight at which the body wishes to remain. During a weight loss effort, when we hit that point, we plateau. The number of calories we burn during exercise becomes less important than the rate we burn calories both during exercise and the rest of the day. We need to increase our metabolisms in order to decrease our set point and body fat.

That said, how hard should we be working? Well, according to most everything I have read, our heart rate should increase to between 70 and 80 percent of our maximum. The problem is, for me at least, it is difficult to take an accurate heart rate while exercising. Fortunately, there is an easier way to tell if we are working hard enough. There should be a definite feeling of fatigue, and we should be breathing very deeply; through the mouth, not the nose, BTW. We should be able to talk, but not want to.

Maintaining exercise at this level can be difficult, but not impossible. It won’t happen over night though. We can build up to it slowly by pushing our threshold every so often. Therefore, I propose that we challeng ourselves by pushing of the threshold a little.

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