If you are trying to lose weight, you are not alone. Weight loss is a goal many people share. People want to lose weight to look better (or to look like the ultra-thin cultural "ideals" of beauty perpetuated through the media), to feel better, to stay or get healthier, and to live longer.
Weight loss can improve your blood pressure and blood fats (cholesterol, triglycerides) and, if you have diabetes, can contribute to improvement in your blood sugar levels. Fortunately, the evidence we have on weight loss and diabetes indicates that improvements in blood sugar can occur with relatively modest weight losses of from 5 to 15 percent of body weight.
Search Your Soul
In the quest to lose weight, it is important to ask yourself some questions:
* Do I have realistic goals for weight loss?
* Am I working to lose weight for healthy reasons?
* Am I using methods to lose weight that are safe and healthy (and working on lifestyle changes, not temporary fixes)?
* What am I going to do to keep the weight off (again, working on lifestyle changes)?
It is important to consider the issues raised by these questions as you work on losing weight and keeping it off. Although obvious, it warrants repeating: Losing weight is difficult, and keeping it off is even harder. It is possible, but it takes a commitment to lifestyle change, including a regular exercise program. A little soul-searching can be worthwhile as you develop the program that's right for you.
Get With The Program
Before we begin the judging to determine best and worst exercises, it is important to understand and accept three points.
The first is that physical activity is an important piece of a larger program. The research on weight loss leaves no doubt that the best way to lose weight and maintain weight loss is to reduce calories and increase physical activity--not focus on one or the other.
People who use diet alone are often successful at losing weight (say, 15 pounds in three months), but most often gain back everything they have lost and more. In addition, some of the weight they lose can be lean tissue (protein from muscles and organs, minerals, and bone) and water, which is not desirable weight loss.
Those who use exercise alone often see only a small amount of weight loss (say, 1.5 pounds in three months), but they are more likely to maintain their losses. Muscle does weigh more than fat. So exercise may yield less weight loss, but still improve your health by increasing your muscle mass.
Optimizing your weight-loss efforts requires a combination of healthy diet and physical activity that will allow you to benefit from both strategies.
The second point is that, along with changing your food intake and increasing your physical activity, you can adopt behavioral strategies that have been shown to help with weight loss. These include:
* Self-monitoring, which means keeping records not just of your blood sugars, but also of the foods you eat and physical activity you perform
* Stimulus control, which means increasing your cues for appropriate behaviors and decreasing those for inappropriate ones
* Setting short-term, realistic goals
* Maintaining ongoing contact with a support system
The final point to keep in mind is that being physically active yields benefits other than weight loss and maintenance, especially for people with diabetes. Regular physical activity can contribute to your blood sugar control, improve your blood pressure and blood fat levels, and improve your quality of life and sense of well-being.
Consider Your Diabetes Needs
Participating in exercise when you have diabetes requires some special attention. Discuss your exercise plans with your health care team and get the go-ahead from your physician before starting a new exercise program.
You may need to have some tests done to be sure that it is safe for you to exercise. This is especially true if you have any complications from diabetes.
If you use insulin or diabetes pills that increase insulin output by the pancreas, it is important to work with your health care team to determine whether adjustments in medication are needed to prevent low blood sugars during or after exercise. When working on weight loss, it is better to reduce your medication to prevent low blood sugars than it is to increase your food intake to treat lows.
Your health care team can work with you on these concerns. Don't let the attention you need to give these issues discourage you from exercising. The extra effort is worth it.
Understand The Effects Of Exercise
How does exercise help with weight loss and maintenance? Exercise does help you lose weight by burning calories, although this effect is rather small. Walking for 30 to 45 minutes, for example, will burn 200 to 300 calories.
Given that you need to burn or reduce intake of 3,500 calories to lose a pound of fat, this will take some time with exercise alone. Again, you will lose that pound and others more quickly by both consuming fewer calories and burning more through exercise.
More importantly, exercise increases the rate at which your body burns calories when you are not exercising (your "resting metabolic rate") because it builds muscle. Because muscle uses more energy than fat; people who are regular exercisers burn more calories just through day-to-day living than do those who are sedentary. The increase in muscle that occurs with exercise explains why weight loss may seem slow and small with exercise but why exercise is such a key in keeping weight off once it is lost.
Review Your Options
Now let's take a look at some different activities and see how they measure up. In evaluating various physical activities, we must consider not only the activity itself (mode), but also its intensity (how hard), duration (how long), frequency (how often), safety, and desirability.
Aerobic activities. Activities such as walking, cycling, and swimming, when done at a low-to-moderate intensity (50 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate or at a level that allows you to hold a conversation while exercising), are referred to as aerobic exercises. When these activities are done for at least 30 but preferably more like 60 (or more) minutes most days of the week, they get top scores for helping with weight reduction and maintenance.
These activities use large muscle groups and are continuous. They provide the greatest opportunity to burn calories during the activity safely and will contribute to increasing muscle mass, which in turn increases resting metabolic rate.
The intensity level needs to be low to moderate so that the activity can be sustained for 30 or more minutes safely, allowing adequate caloric expenditure. Doing an aerobic activity most days of the week is also necessary to burn enough calories to contribute to weight loss and maintenance.
Anaerobic activities. What about activities done at high intensity, such as sprinting or riding your bike at an all-out sprint? Done at this intensity, these are referred to as anaerobic activities. They will burn calories and build muscle, but it is very difficult to sustain these activities long enough to get the benefits that can be more easily gained by lower-intensity, longer-duration aerobic activities. As a result, these activities get a low score for helping with weight loss and maintenance.
Resistance exercises. Resistance exercises are those that build muscle strength and endurance. These include exercises such as crunches and leg lifts, which use the body's own weight as resistance, as well as exercises using weights, elastic bands, or even heavy cans of food to provide resistance. These are an important part of a well-rounded exercise program because they increase healthy muscles, which are better than fat tissue at burning calories.
It is recommended that you do resistance activities at least two days each week. They should include a minimum of eight to 10 exercises (total) involving legs, arms, hips, shoulders, abdomen, back, and chest with a minimum of one set of 10 to 15 repetitions to near the point at which you could not lift the weight again. Be sure to discuss this with your health care team to make sure your blood pressure does not go too high.
A program that combines resistance activities with aerobic activities is the best formula for achieving and maintaining a healthy weight.
When selecting resistance exercises, beware of activities and equipment that claim to "spot reduce" or remove fat from specific places on your body. Let's be clear: While these activities will tone and build muscle, they will not "remove" fat from specific locations. When you lose body fat, you lose it from all over your body. This underscores the importance of combining aerobic and resistance activities.
