Exercise is Essential

In addition to diet products and supplements, exercising is critical. Dieting without exercising will cause you to lose both fat and muscle. Maintaining muscle by exercising increases your body’s lean muscles, giving you a higher metabolism.

Here are some exercises choices:

Aerobics

These exercises raise your heart rate, and include aerobic classes, treadmills, stationary bikes and stair-climbing machines. You need to raise your heart rate to its “fat burning zone’ and keep it in the zone for at least 20 minutes. To calculate your body’s best “fat burning zone,” all you need to do is deduct your current age from 220 and multiply the result by 70 percent (.7).

One way to raise your heart rate to the fat burning zone is interval training, exercising at a moderate to high intensity for a short period (30 seconds to one minute) then resting for the same amount of time and back to your exercise. This “work/rest” model – interval training – done for about twenty minutes is a great aerobic workout.

Resistance Exercise

Resistance exercise (weight training) helps restore muscle to bodies, so in turn it:  

• Reduces body fat and increases metabolism, 
• Increases energy and
• Enhances bone density to lower the risk of osteoporosis.

Anaerobics

Like resistance and weight training, anaerobic exercise burns sugar and builds muscle. Anaerobic exercise is brief strength-based activity, such as sprinting or weight training. With anaerobic exercise, your body burns sugar for energy, not fat. So by building muscle mass, your body burns more fat simply because it has more muscle. Anaerobics increase your metabolic rate.

For lasting results, it’s critical to lose fat while you retain muscle. As we age, we lose muscle mass, which must be rebuilt with exercise. You will be limited to eating less just to maintain your current weight. This is why we need both aerobic and anaerobic exercise. This is particularly important for women over 35.

Avoid too much – or too little – exercise

Like your overall health, you should put a personal exercise plan into place with the help of a fitness expert. We recommend you consult a local health club to learn how to exercise for best results.