Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Eating right is much easier than exercising. Just have a decent calorie deficit every day and go about your life, there's no need to bother with gyms or equipment or any of that ****. I'm speaking from first hand experience as this is what I've done for the past few months and the weight has melted off.
As has been said, reducing calories is the most important factor in losing weight. Exercise burns calories, but not as many as you can eat. It takes about 15 minutes of vigorousexercise to burn off a 12-oz regular soda, thirty minutes for a small candy bar. Much easier not to have eaten it in the first place.
But the body is designed to hold on to fat--just in case this year is a bad harvest and a long winter--so if you do nothing but cut calories, your body will reduce your metabolism to conserve calories. If you reduce calories too much, your body will even burn muscle to conserve fat. Anorexic people who doen't exercise are often thin--but still "overfat" because their bodies have burned as much or more muscle than fat.
That's where exercise comes in to keep your metabolism high.
I'll add, too, that at 37 your body has switched to an "old" mode of a permanently reduced metabolism that makes it much harder to lose fat and gain muscle than it was when you were younger. For me, it was like someone flipped a switch when I was about 32. For the most part, forget about gaining muscle--it becomes incredibly harder to build muscle in your late 30s and older. But exercise still works to keep your metabolism up...you'll just have to do more than a younger person.
Exercise, though, has two other purposes. One is to improve your cardiac fitness--build a strong heart. The other is to improve your overall strength. So you're exercising for three very important reasons, with cardiac fitness and overall strength being more important than losing fat alone.
One thing that has worked wonders for me is the constant use of a heart rate monitor. I use it for all exercise, including weight training. The heart rate monitor tells me when to start another set. When my heart rate after a set has dropped to the point that it "bounces," it's time for the next set.
I never do cardio without my heartrate monitor. Eventually you learn how your heart responds to various levels of exercise even to the point that you can see when adrenaline kicks in, then again when serotonin kicks in.
It's one way I can tell when I'm ready to start exercising after a cold--if your body is suffering internal stress, you'll see it as a difference (usually thready or rapid)--in your usual heart rate response to exercise.
The most important thing, though, is that your heart rate will tell you the difference between working hard and merely breathing hard.
I gave an analogy to my friend: calories is like credit card debt and exercise is like paying your credit card debt. No matter how much you burn or debt you pay off, it doesn't matter unless you stop charging to your card or eat less calories.
Seems like you have plenty of good advice here. In he gym, multi joint (compound) exercises. For every push, use pull exercise to complement. Example: Bench press is compound push, pull up variations with feet on the ground, are a compound pull. I like the pull up/dip assistance machine. Most gyms have them. Stay completely away from Olympic weights until you REALLY know what you are doing. Work on your joint mobility as a priority. At your age is should not be too bad, but many times folks think they are working on something but they are not because their joints can't get into position.
Mobility exercises are not resistance exercises and they can be far more strenuous over a session. Warm up completely before starting any mobility, resistance, or stretching exercises. Lot's of resources on the web. Walk alot. As much as you possibly can.
For weight loss, your shoes and your body are the best equipment. Do total body workouts at high intensity levels with a mix of resistance and cardio. The key is to keep your body moving, keep your heart rate up, and mix up the exercises.
That's really hard to measure. I would say any equipment that help you perform compound exercises (List of Compound ExercisesFitness Qi) is good for weight loss.
Eat less calories and you will lose weight. Any exercise equipment will do the job to burn the extra calories.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
