Maybe you have only a few pounds to lose. You find most exercises difficult and boring. Do you really need to punish yourself with exercises when you can starve for a week and watch the weight fall off? It was once believed that cutting calorie intake was the only way to lose weight, that you would have to walk 32 miles to lose a pound, and that exercise only sharpened your appetite. But recent research shows that exercises sets up various changes in your body which help you to slim and balanced diet help you stay slim without starving yourself.
In people who take little exercises, appetite signals seem to go astray, so that you feel hunger inappropriately. Exercise actually improves the efficiency of the appetite regulation centre in your brain so that you feel hunger only when you need food. A complex series of hormonal changes occurs so that your body can distinguish between real hunger and false appetite. This is what happens when you exercise. Many scientists now believe that exercise lowers the ‘set point’, the point at which your weight tends to stabilize. Exercise is the only way of lowering this set point permanently.
Without exercise, attempts to slim demand enormous self-control and are likely to become increasingly difficult because body weight tends to return automatically to the set point. Strong-willed individuals who have endured the pangs of dieting may end up weighing less, but much of the loss will have been muscle. When muscle is lost by dieting the ability to burn up energy from food decreases and so less food must be eaten if weight is not to be put on more quickly than before. Those who do continue to diet successfully by self-starvation often acquire a rather drawn appearance, with thin sagging skin supported by insufficient muscle. The same loss of muscle occurs after years of a sedentary lifestyle, and to most people as they get older and take less exercise. The figure then begins to sag even though body weight may change hardly at all.
Exercise produces a better body shape and a more youthful appearance. Fat particularly tends to go from the hips with walking or running. Even if your weight changes only a little exercise will change your shape for the better. Exercise tones the body, alerts the mind, increase resilience to physical and psychological stresses, firms muscles, loosens joints, banishes stiffness and general aches and pains, builds up the efficiency of heart and lungs. Without exercise health suffers because it is impossible to balance the diet properly. A diet adequate in nutrients contains too many calories for someone who is inactive and so weight is gained. Alternatively, if the diet contains only the small number of calories necessary for a sedentary life then it is inadequate in nutrients and so health may suffer.
Exercise lowers blood cholesterol, helps overcome insomnia, regulates appetite and generates a vigorous and vibrant sense of wellbeing.
Filled Under: Fitness