Many diet fads have come and gone through recent decades. There's always a new "quick fix" around the corner. Unfortunately, most of these "quick fix" diet plans give only temporary results and the leave many dieters frustrated and even worse off afterward. A truly realistic diet plan is for a lifetime. It's about changing your eating habits and food choices. It's about nutrition and exercise that becomes part of a totally new lifestyle...a lifestyle of health and vitality! One of the first indicators of whether you have a "healthy lifestyle" is maintaining a healthy weight.
However, maintaining a healthy weight does not have to be complicated. The truth is that weight is controlled by calories in versus calories out. Not to say that where the calories come from is not also important. Your calorie sources certainly directly affect your health. But what the scale reads is directly related to the amount of calories consumed versus the amount that are burned.
So to see a reduction in weight, you should decrease your caloric intake appropriately while also increasing the amount of calories burned. About 60% of calories burned by an individual are due to the Resting Metabolic Rate (RMR). These are the calories you burn while you relax, and especially while you sleep. The RMR cannot be totally influenced by physical activity. RMR is mostly affected by genetics, age, gender, surface area, and hormones.
About 30% of the energy a person uses comes from physical activity. This is an area that can be greatly influenced by an individual's exercise regimen, or lack of.
An easy way to quickly start making positive effects on the 30% that you can control is utilizing the F.I.T.T. principle. This stands for Frequency, Intensity, Time and Type.
Frequency: As you might expect, this refers to how often you will exercise. After any form of exercise is performed your body completes a process of rebuilding and repairing. So, determining the frequency of exercise is important in order to find a balance that provides you just enough stress for the body to adapt and also allows you enough rest time for healing.
Intensity: Defined as the amount of effort or work you must invest in a specific exercise or workout. This too requires a good balance to ensure that the intensity is hard enough to overload the body but not so difficult that it results in over training, injury or burnout. Taking on an exercise programme that results in injury can make you have to stop your programme for a long time or lose interest in it altogether.
Time: Again, this is rather self-explanatory. Time is simply how long your individual session should last. This will vary based on the intensity and type.
Type: What type of exercise will you be doing? Will an exercise session be primarily cardiovascular, resistance training or a combination of both? And what specific exercises will you perform? Always take the precaution of consulting your family physician for his or her advice, especially if you have a history of hypertension or cardiopulmonary disease.
Use the F.I.T.T. principle, together with sound nutrition, to start making positive changes in your weight and health immediately. It can help guide you in choosing aerobic and anaerobic workouts (both important variables to see decreases in weight and in body fat) that will be the most effective to help you meet your goals. For more resources on Fat Loss and Nutrition, see Get Lean.
