A healthy diet is crucial for losing weight. It keeps you in a calorie deficit, as your body needs to burn more calories than it consumes to lose weight. Once your body burns through those calories, it uses fat.
However, not everyone can lose weight just by dieting alone. Diet-resistant individuals or adults with obesity need to add exercise to their weight loss program to see results. A study in the journal Biomedicine found that vigorous physical activity significantly affected weight loss in women who didn’t see results with dieting. Exercising boosted their skeletal muscle metabolism, which helped them see results.
With a higher metabolic rate, diet-resistant individuals can expect to burn more calories. This would enhance the effects of a good diet, helping them finally burn more calories than they consume and, eventually, lose weight.
Here are tips that can help you maximise exercise and start seeing weight loss results:
Eat mindfully
Eat mindfully to maximise the number of calories your body burns through exercise. Pay attention to how much you eat, what you want to eat, and when your body is no longer hungry.
Though this ultimately means watching your food, following fad or overly restrictive diets won’t help your workout. You miss out on proper nutrition and the energy that could enhance your performance while working out. Instead, WeightWatchers notes that weight loss programmes are most effective when you shift your mindset. Think of foods as‘‘nutritiou’’ and‘‘less nutritiou’’, not as‘‘goo’’ and‘‘ba’’. This way, you add low-calorie weight-loss foods such as protein and fibre and decrease calorie intake.
Add strength training to the mix
Aside from the classic cardio workout sessions, incorporating strength training into your exercise routine can boost or fuel your weight loss progress. This is especially important since weight loss results in a decrease in muscle mass and a drop in metabolic rate.
Strength training helps you recover and enhance that muscle mass. A University of New South Wales study on strength training discovered that doing that exercise induces a 1.4% reduction in body fat. Compared to cardio, which still has benefits, strength training burns fat in addition to increasing muscle mass. It kickstarts a cycle of muscle mass and metabolic rate increase.
Track your progress
Tracking your progress can help you adjust your workouts to keep up with your ever-changing body weight or mass. This can help you avoid hitting a weight loss plateau in the long run. For example, thinner people usually consume fewer calories than the average, which can facilitate weight loss. Thus, to lose weight, they need to increase the intensity of their exercises over time.
For example, if your chosen exercise is running, our article on “Running for Weight Loss” recommends slowly increasing your mileage over time. Once the run becomes easy and your weight loss starts to plateau, you can ramp up your runs in small increments.
It can be frustrating not to see results even after putting so much effort into controlling your calorie intake. Fortunately, there are several ways to boost your diet with exercise and significantly lose weight.
