Healthy weight loss requires a combination of regular exercise and a balanced diet with reduced caloric intake. Aerobic exercise produces healthy weight loss in a straightforward way. When you start exercising, you burn more calories, and that translates into burning fat to achieve weight loss. Aerobic exercise also produces other benefits like improved stamina and overall health.
Identification
Aerobic exercise is any physical activity that raises your breathing and heart rate for a sustained period that can range from a few minutes to several hours. For basic physical fitness and weight loss, you can choose from many types of exercise, including walking, jogging, swimming and cycling. The Mayo Clinic recommends at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise per day.
Function
When you start walking or any other aerobic activity, you'll notice your heart rate increases along with your breathing rate. You begin to breathe more deeply as well. Your lungs absorb more oxygen, and your blood flow increases to carry the oxygen to your muscles. There, the oxygen is combined with fat or some other form of stored energy to power your efforts. You burn calories, and thus you tend to lose weight as a result.
Exercise Program
If you are not in good physical condition, be careful to avoid overdoing aerobic exercise when you begin. The Mayo Clinic says you can start with as little as a five-minute walk a couple of times each day. Gradually build your workout to at least 30 minutes five days each week. For healthy weight loss, gradually increase the intensity of your workout until your target heart rate, or THR, is 60 to 70 percent of your maximum heart rate. You can estimate your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220 for men and 226 for women. To start with, keep THR down to 50 to 60 percent of your maximum heart rate. You can estimate your heart rate by taking your pulse as you walk for 15 seconds and multiplying the result by four.
Benefits
If you want to shed pounds, the most important benefit of aerobic exercise is you lose weight in a healthy manner. However, you also benefit from improved heart function, blood flow and reduced risk of heart disease. Aerobic exercise helps control conditions like high blood pressure. It improves your level of physical fitness and your chances of living longer.
Diet
A healthy diet with reduced calorie intake is absolutely necessary as a complement to aerobic exercise to lose weight. Don't try to starve yourself or rely on fad diets. Eat appropriate amounts from each food group each day as recommended by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Make a point of eating breakfast. This will give you energy for aerobic exercise as well as other daily activities and will reduce hunger cravings. The key to effectively managing diet is to reduce portion sizes and so reduce calorie consumption. Reducing calories consumed will reinforce your calorie-burning aerobic exercise so you lose weight in a safe and healthy manner.
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