Do One Thing to Burn Fat Faster

With the New Year comes the old tradition of making resolutions.  For many people, those resolutions include taking better care of themselves and losing weight.  We have heard time and time again that to lose weight you need to cut your calorie intake and increase your calorie burning capacity.  So if we don't want to starve ourselves, we need to offset our calorie intake by doing the one thing that will help burn fat faster -- exercise.

Any kind of exercise burns calories while you're doing it, but the most potent and long-lasting fat burners are created after strength training.  That makes your muscles your body's best bet for optimum fat burning.  So now the question is, how do we add more muscle instead of just maintaining what we have?  The answer is exercise -- strength training in particular, but also cardiovascular and flexibility training.  All three components of exercise are needed to burn fat optimally.

Exercise increases your metabolism so that you burn fat at a higher rate than if you didn't exercise and reduces your appetite.

Exercise stimulates the release endorphins, the chemical that makes you feel good.  When released, endorphins give you a sense of control which help to decrease the need to eat out of control.

When you exercise and burn fat, you lose the extra weight that puts stress on the joints in your body.  You'll feel less pain in your knees, hips, back and ankles and will help you feel good about exercise so that you will have the desire to exercise more.

Muscle is the primary energy consumer for your body.  By regularly doing strength training, you create more muscle mass and muscle mass is what you need to help you burn fat.  More muscle means your body uses more energy (burns fat) and stores less fat.  And that makes it a more efficient exercise for burning fat than cardiovascular training.  As you age, your muscle ages too and loses a little bit of the proteins that make up your muscle.  Exercise rebuilds and maintains proteins and muscle mass to prevent weight gain as you age.

A good program to follow would be 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise a day (such as walking) to rebuild stamina and strength-based proteins and 30 minutes of strength/resistance training a week to rebuild strength-based proteins (two 15-minute sessions or three 10-minute sessions each week would be a good start).

So this year, resolve to be good to your body, do the one thing to lose weight -- exercise (especially strength training) to burn fat faster.