A healthy diet is crucial in losing weight. This is because a diet keeps you on 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 proceeds to use up 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 in order to see results. A study on exercising in the journal eBioMedicine found that vigorous physical activity had 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 boost the effects of a good diet and help them finally spend 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
To maximise the number of calories your body burns through exercise, make sure to eat mindfully. 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 the food that you eat, know that 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 ‘nutritious’ and ‘less nutritious’, not as ‘good’ and ‘bad’. This way, you add low-calorie weight loss foods such as protein and fibre and decrease calorie intake along the way.
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 then, a drop in metabolic rate.
Strength training helps you recover and enhance that muscle mass. In fact, a University of New South Wales study on strength training discovered that doing that type of exercise induces 1.4% reduction in body fat. Compared to cardio–which still has its own set of benefits–strength training burns fat on top of increasing muscle mass. It kickstarts a cycle of muscle mass and metabolic rate increase.
Track your progress
By tracking your progress, you can adjust your workouts to keep up with your ever-changing body weight or mass. In the long run, it can help you avoid hitting a weight loss plateau. For example, thinner people usually consume fewer calories than average. This facilitates their weight gain. To lose weight, they thus 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 that you slowly increase your mileage overtime. Once the run becomes easy and your weight loss starts to plateau, you can further ramp up your runs in small increments.
It can be frustrating to not 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.
