Your Reward For Lifting Weights Weight Loss

By Derek Fatham

Diet and exercise are two keys to losing weight. When thinking of exercise for weight loss most people make the mistake of only adding aerobic exercises. It seems they forget the benefit of lifting weights weight loss goes faster.

By lifting weights you are building core strength in your body. This is a key to reaching and maintaining your ideal weight. By building muscle, you are turning your body into a fat burning machine that has a lower set point of weight to maintain.

The body turns the energy in the food we eat into glucose. If we have too much glucose, the body then stores that energy as fat. Exercise causes your body to turn that fat back into energy. As fat is broke down you loose weight. In addition you build muscle. The exercise makes little tears in the muscle that your body repairs by building more muscle.

Have you noticed that once you get fat, it seems like everything you eat makes you more fat? Walk through a movie theater snack bar and smell the popcorn and you gain five pounds. That is because it takes fewer calories to maintain fat that it does to maintain muscle.

Now how about that basketball player that can eat five Big Macs with large fries every meal without ever gaining an ounce. You see, he is all muscle. Since it takes more calories to maintain muscle than fat, he can get by with it. He gets his workout and those muscles burn up all the extra calories.

How can you get that kind of metabolism? Start lifting weights. Begin a routine every other day where you get a full body workout. As you exercise, fat starts changing into muscle. Since muscle weighs more than fat, you may actually start to gain weight. That is okay, because in just a little while, all that muscle is going to eat away the fat. Your body will need more energy that you can eat, so it turns to fat to maintain the muscle that you have built. Then you will start losing weight and gaining the body that you have always wanted.

Regular weigh lifting boosts your metabolism. There is a four to six hour residual window after every exercise session that your body is in full burn mechanism. Calories are burned like crazy during this time.

If you are tired of yoyo dieting or are stuck on a plateau in your weight loss, try adding weight lifting to accelerate your weight loss. You will be building muscle while you lose weight. The additional toning will be great when you reach your goal, you will be able to show off those six pack abs and great arms and legs.

Before beginning any exercise program, you should talk with your doctor. He can make sure that there are no physical reasons that you should not attempt that exercise program. If you are healthy otherwise, he will be glad to see you attempting to get your weight under control. - 29951

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