by Vea Terrie

Created on: February 17, 2010

You finally did it! You stuck with your diet, lost the excess pounds and you look great. Now the hard part begins—maintaining your ideal weight. You do not want to become a victim of the yo-yo syndrome, continually losing and regaining excess weight until your body becomes a distorted mass of hanging flab and unsightly bulges. You do not want to spend the rest of your life counting calories to avoid overeating and you do not want to feel guilty about eating an occasional desert that was not plucked from a tree or picked from a vine. However, you live in the real world where everything you do has a food connection.

The solution to your dilemma is simple—exercise. Even if exercise was a contributing factor in the success of your weight loss, it continues to offer additional benefits. Every pound of body fat replaced with new muscle tissue results in a permanent increase in your resting metabolic rate (RMR). Your RMR equals the amount of calories your body uses at rest (not engaging in any activity) to keep your heart, lungs and other organs and body parts in working order. Muscle tissue burns more calories than fat, because it is metabolically active. While one pound of fat only burns 3 calories per day at rest, one pound of muscle tissue burns 30 to 50 calories per day at rest.

Without additional dieting, regular exercise, especially strength training, will replace fat tissue with muscle tissue without any change in your weight. However, you will notice a positive change in you body. One pound of muscle tissue is denser than one pound of fat and requires less space. As you replace fat with muscle, you become thinner and shapelier even though the number on your scale has not changed. By adding just 5 pounds of new muscle, you burn a minimum of 150 additional calories daily. This makes maintaining your weight loss achievable without calorie counting and affords you the worry-free flexibility of eating that occasional fast food treat or calorie-rich desert.

Strength training is the best type of exercise to engage in for adding new muscle tissue. A thirty-minute workout 2 to 3 times a week is sufficient. The National Academy of Sciences recommends one hour per day of exercise that includes your daily activities, such as housecleaning, and more physically demanding endeavors like cycling to achieve your one-hour goal. To be effective, exercise must involve continuous, non-stop physical activity for a specified period. If you have a sedentary lifestyle, begin with low intensity activities and gradually work your way up to more rigorous forms of exercise. However, before beginning your exercise regimen, consult your healthcare provider to rule out any health risks that may prohibit or limit your participation.

Exercise offers many more benefits than those related to weight loss and weight maintenance. Improve your cardiovascular health, decrease blood pressure, increase HDL (the good cholesterol) and lower your risk of stroke. Regular exercise can prevent osteoporosis, help with insomnia, and it offers diabetics the benefit of improved sugar control.

What does exercise have in common with dental exams? They both provide health benefits, but are too often put off until the damage of neglect becomes evident.

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