Increased physical activity, including regular exercise, can help set yourself up for permanent weight control. It can boost metabolism and lead to improvements in physical fitness. It can also decrease your risk for diabetes, heart disease and other chronic diseases as well as cancer.
There are many health benefits associated with increasing physical activity and regular exercise, such as, reducing stress, reducing hunger hormones as well as increasing metabolism and reducing weight. In addition, increased physical activity also decreased risk for diabetes, heart disease and other chronic diseases as well as cancer.
Exercise and stress reduction can help control hunger hormones; in turn, this can help prevent constant hunger and stop overeating. Taken together, exercise-associated health benefits can lead to lasting weight control.
Exercise is not the best method for rapid weight loss. Instead, you can lose weight quickly by following a strict diet.
In spite of that, dieting is not the best solution for lasting weight control. Dieting leads to feelings of deprivation and most people can’t stick to a strict diet long term.
What’s even worse?
Dieting usually doesn’t lead to lasting weight control — especially when it involves deprivation and starvation — because it slows down metabolism. Another negative effect of dieting is not having enough energy for physical activity. Inactivity further leads to even slower metabolism and slower weight loss.
Since strict dieters usually do not feel good while dieting, weight gain eventually results due to cheating and even binge eating. Despite their good intentions, dieters usually end up abandoning their strict diets.
After ending their strict diets, ex-dieters are even more capable of gaining weight easily due to their slower metabolism
3 Reasons Why Increased Physical Activity and Exercise Can Lead to Lasting Weight Control
- Physical activity and exercise can increase metabolism and boost weight loss up to 5 times faster. Resistance training can lead to faster metabolism even hours or days after exercising. Long workouts are not required to improve metabolism. For example, starting with just 10 minutes a day and increasing to 30 minutes of interval walking can boost metabolism and increase weight loss.
- Physical activity and exercise can help control hunger hormones and stop overeating. Aerobic exercise can suppress appetite by decreasing the hunger hormone, ghrelin. In addition, moderate aerobic exercise can activate insulin sensitivity which can prevent increased hunger and overeating.
- Physical activity and exercising regularly can reduce your stress. In turn, stress reduction can lead to belly fat reduction as well as appetite control and lasting weight control. Stress management is absolutely necessary for weight management.
- Endorphins are released during exercise. Endorphins are neurotransmitters which function as natural stress killers.
- Stress reduction can help decrease levels of hunger-promoting ghrelin. Chronic stress increases ghrelin levels. By reducing stress and ghrelin, increased hunger and overeating can be avoided.
- Stress-associated hormone, cortisol, has been shown to directly cause the build-up of belly fat. In addition to controlling hunger and appetite associated with ghrelin, stress management is absolutely necessary for decreasing belly fat and lasting weight control.
Without increased physical activity and regular exercise, lasting weight control is almost impossible to achieve. Due to slower metabolism associated with strict diets, dieters end up gaining more weight after abandoning their diets. Strict diets are too hard to follow long term.
Health benefits associated with exercise and physical activity — including, reducing stress and reducing hunger hormones as well as increased metabolism — can lead to lasting weight control.
In addition to weight and stress management, increased physical activity also decreased risk for diabetes, heart disease and other chronic diseases as well as cancer.
Studies have shown that being sedentary increases cancer risk. In contrast, increased physical activity decreased cancer risk, including risk for breast and colon cancers as well as stomach, esophageal, kidney and endometrial cancers.
Even short workouts can increase your weight loss and metabolism. If you don’t have time for a regular workout, there are easy ways you can increase your physical activity using NEAT movements.
Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT) are small movements, such as, tapping your feet, stretching your legs or standing. These short bursts of “exercise” throughout the day can burn as many as 500 extra calories a day or even more.