Excess fat hanging from your arms, stomach and legs can be cumbersome, embarrassing and unsightly. Getting rid of this extra fat can be quite difficult without a good weight loss plan and a strong level of commitment. The best approach to losing weight is to create a healthy diet plan for yourself, and engage in regular cardiovascular exercise. By cutting some calories out of your diet and burning further calories through exercise, your body will naturally burn away excess fat.
Step 1
Reform your eating habits by creating a new diet for yourself. If you have excess fat on your body right now, odds are that you are eating more calories than you need to, possibly even from unhealthy foods. Your new diet should consist primarily of fresh fruits and vegetables, healthy whole grains and simple carbs, and moderate amounts of lean meats like fish and chicken.
Step 2
Stop or drastically cut back on eating red meats and dessert items. Absolutely avoid fast food and soda. While these food types are tolerable once in a very rare occasion, they are both loaded with calories by volume. Fast food's concentrated level of calories and unhealthy fats make it difficult to burn off those calories before they are naturally stored as fat by your body. Also avoid eating processed dessert snacks and other junk food.
Step 3
Exercise your cardiovascular system by performing any activity that steadily raises and holds your heart rate at a near-maximum level for at least 20 minutes or longer. Swimming, jogging, speed walking, running, biking, rowing, and even intense aerobics all constitute cardio workouts. Along with the benefit of cardio activity for your heart, cardio exercise also burns a lot of calories compared to other exercises.
Step 4
Buy a gym membership and join a gym. Becoming a member of a gym is a great way to create incentive for working out. Find a decent gym with a staff that you like and modern fitness equipment that you can use. Better gyms will even have classes you can join for activities like aerobics, kickboxing, and yoga. You can even get a personal trainer to work one on one with you to lose weight.
Tips and Warnings
- Work through your weight loss with a friend if possible. Fitness partners can help you come up with meal plans and encourage you while exercising.
- Exercise is a strong component to weight loss, but it's impossible to specifically target fat loss with exercise. Fat loss is a result of your body burning calories held in reserve in your fat cells when energy from food calories is otherwise not present. In other words, you can only lose weight when you eat less calories' worth of food than you burn. Where you lose fat from while pursuing weight loss is largely directed by genetics.
References
- "Harvard Women's Health Watch": Abdominal fat and what to do about it
- Science Daily: Muscle Gene Influences Fat Storage In Mice; May Be Target To Prevent Or Treat Obesity And Diabetes; 2002
- Mayo Clinic: Counting Calories: Get Back To Weight Loss Basics
- "Time": Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin; John Cloud; 2009



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