Becoming fit and healthy is a desire we all have. So how come some people manage it better than others?
Doing lots of cardio exercises, jogging, running, swimming, power walking, spending hours in the gym doing repetitive machine and weight workouts seem to suit some people fine, they thrive on it, and good luck to them. For the rest of us, well... booooring!
Boredom is one of the main causes of killing enthusiasm and interest, which we need to have if we are going to maintain any kind of fitness regime. If you are one of these people, then finding a routine that can be accomplished quickly and with as much variety as possible is essential.
It's important to note that exercise without proper nutrition is just doing yourself a huge disfavor, combining both will give you the best and quickest results, and if weight or belly fat is a problem, then both are a real necessity, you can't do it effectively with either exercise or nutrition on their own.
Think about it, we cannot become healthy and fit by ignoring nutrition. Since the advent of mankind, we have thrived on eating natural unprocessed foods, indeed, only 70,000 years ago there were only about 2,000 humans beings on this planet, since then, the population numbers have exploded, we now populate the entire globe and up until half-way through the 20th century, we did this by eating only natural unprocessed foods, without any kind of supplements or manufactured diets whatsoever.
Losing weight can be a problem for some people, whether its just toning up the abdomen or struggling with obesity, there are a lot of misconceptions out there. One of the biggest is using exercise to get rid of fat. Exercise alone will not get rid of fat, at least, not in a healthy way.
A study done at the Peninsula Medical School in Plymouth, and presented at the European Congress on Obesity, studied 300 children over five years and concluded "They will lose more weight through healthy, lifelong changes to their diet than physical activity." Brad Metcalf, who led the research, said: "Our explanation is that fat kids are inactive because they are fat and not fat because they are inactive.
Exercise, on it's own, will lose weight, the problem is that not all of that weight will be fat, some of it will be muscle mass as well and the leaner we are the less fat and the more muscle mass we lose, not forgetting that some of the weight lost will also be water .
Once again we are back to the nutritional argument, we need to eat the proper natural nutritional food as well as exercise to minimize the loss of muscle mass while exercising.
The types of exercise are important as well. Not all exercise is good for weight loss, weight training or resistance training is the best because, coupled with the correct nutrition, building muscle and strengthening bones and joints (which also has the added benefit of offsetting osteoporosis) allows for a natural weight loss without the loss of muscle mass, indeed it will tone and build muscle instead.
Women have some concern about "bulking up" when weight training is mentioned, this is another misconception, women don't have enough testosterone, which is essential for building the kind of muscles associated with bodybuilders. For instance, men can get that rippled six-pack abdominals - women get that flat sexy stomach, not the six pack. Muscle strengthening will occur and some gain in muscle mass as well, but the gain will be nowhere near as much as for men.
