Incidental exercises to treat obesity due to a stable and routine lifestyle that lacks flexibility
Today, our increasingly stable lifestyle causes `` downsizing '' in
daily activity and `` enlarged '' scenes in our body sizes and readings on our
tables.
This article explains one of the main reasons why many of us are obese,
and offers some suggestions to reverse this trend. Finally, it describes the
best exercises to do for fat loss and provides 5 easy steps to
look and feel great.
The reason of getting fatter
Over the past 50 years, it seems that humankind's quest for
"comfort" has made life much better for many of us, but all this
comfort has come at a great cost.
Just think about how much easier life is with access to elevators
and lifts, automatic carwashes, remote controls, home delivery services,
internet shopping, electric golf buggies, restaurant drive-thru's, lawn-mowing
services, house-cleaning services, clothes dryers, cordless phones and the
like.
While all these things make life simpler, easier and save us time, they
also cost us valuable energy and fat burning potential. Combined with our access
to large quantities of inexpensive calorie dense foods, our life of convenience
and ease is the main reason that collectively we are getting fatter.
Incidental exercise, or the exercise we get doing daily
activities, can make a big difference between being overweight and losing
or maintaining weight.
Engaging in more incidental activity can help boost our daily
calorie expenditure and keep our metabolism (fat burning engine) fired up
through the day and in doing so help us reverse the trend and lose weight.
Increasing our incidental exercise
While saving time and effort in today's hectic world seems important and
desirable, what's more important is maintaining good health so that we
can be around to enjoy all the convenience!
The key to increasing incidental exercise is planning to change
some of our daily lifestyle habits and acting on those plans.
The idea here is to try to replace a few 'convenient' activities each
day with something that will cause us to 'move more'.
For example, while we are speaking on a cordless phone we could pace up
and down the hallway or office.
Here are some more examples we all might like to try:
· Instead of
take the lift or escalator we can walk up or down the stairs
· Go for a 10
minute walk during our lunch break
· We can get
off early and walk to work instead of getting on the bus
· We can take
dogs for an additional outing during the week
· Leave the
remote control on top of the TV and get up every time we want to change
channels
· We can put
some effective exercise equipment in front of our TV and use it to exercise
while watching TV so that we don't get bored
· Park our car
a little further away in the shopping centre car park from the entrance
Can you think of some other things that you can do to increase your
incidental exercise each day?
How much should we do the "Huffy Puffy" exercise?
In addition to increasing spin-offs, we may need to do some `` Huffy
Puffy '' exercises each week if we have weight loss or better health and fitness
goals.
Generally speaking if we want to lose weight and get fitter
and healthier we should aim to do a minimum of 100 minutes of cardiovascular
or 'Huffy Puffy' exercise each week.
Contrary to the implied suggestion of many articles we read on exercise
for weight loss, that there is an 'ideal amount of time for each
workout' and that our exercise should be 'continuous blocks', we need to
remember that any exercise, no matter how short, is better than none and that
at the end of the day, it all adds up.
What really matters is the total amount of exercise (incidental
and 'Huffy Puffy' that we do).
Depending on our lifestyle and what we can fit into each day or
week, our 100 minutes can be split up into 10 x 10 minute sessions or a mixture
of 10, 20 and/or 30 minute sessions.
I get my clients to write down "10 minutes" 10 times on a
piece of paper at the beginning of each week and simply cross each one off
after they have completed 10 minutes of exercise.
According to the clients that do this, it is not only a very effective
way of making sure they're getting enough exercise each week, but it's
also so simple!
What is the best exercise to do?
This is the most common question I am asked by clients.
And the answer is simple...something you enjoy!
I love to run, but if you hate running and I was to tell you that
you needed to run every week, chances are you either wouldn't do it, or it
wouldn't become part of a long term lifestyle change for you.
And that's the real secret to long term weight loss - long term lifestyle
changes.
If you do something you love, such as dancing, roller-blading, swimming,
ice-skating, cycling, rowing, skipping, boxing, aerobics, walking,
etc, then you are more likely to make it part of your weekly routine rather
than something you do whenever you wake up and feel dissatisfied with your health,
fitness, or appearance!
Conclusion
Today, our increasingly stable
lifestyle causes `` downsizing '' in daily activity and `` enlarged '' scenes
in our body sizes and readings on our tables.
This article explains one of
the main reasons why many of us are obese, and offers some suggestions
to reverse this trend. Finally, it describes the best exercises to do
for fat loss and provides 5 easy steps to look and feel great.
As well as helping us to achieve our weight loss and health
goals, an added benefit of moving more is that we actually end up with more
energy to do more throughout our day and who doesn't need that!
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| Incidental exercises to treat obesity |
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