Читать книгу The Big Healthy Soup Diet: Nourish Your Body and Lose up to 10lbs in a Week - Linda Lazarides - Страница 23

The more accustomed your body gets to hard exercise, the faster your cells will use up and burn calories. But your cells do not just step up their metabolism during the period of exercise itself. Your metabolic rate remains high for up to 15 hours afterwards—so your calories will be burned up faster even while you are asleep.

To help you lose weight, exercise must be regular, and hard enough to make you sweat or breathe faster for at least 20 minutes, about three times a week. Examples are weight or circuit training, hill-walking, jogging, swimming and aerobics. You should also walk briskly or cycle whenever you can, use stairs instead of lifts and elevators, walk up escalators, do the housework twice as fast, and go dancing instead of sitting in pubs and bars. Try to park your car a few minutes’ walk from where you’re going. All these things make a difference.

Experts in physiology have known for years that a body with more lean tissue (also known as muscle) makes for a more rapid metabolic rate. But both men and women start to lose muscle in their 20s, which is why, by middle age, it can be so hard to lose weight. Muscle can only be regained by exercising. In a study carried out by Tufts University, eight men and four women aged 56 to 80 carried out strength-building exercises for 30 minutes three times a week for 12 weeks. This boosted their resting metabolic rate by an amazing eight per cent, and they had to consume an extra 300 calories a day to keep their body weight at the same level. Their muscles did not grow any larger on this programme, but they did become stronger and more metabolically active.

Strength-building exercises involve sustaining a muscle’s effort—holding the muscle in its position of maximum tension for as long as possible. Weight-lifting is the best-known but not the only form of strength-building exercise. The body’s weight itself can be used to sustain maximum muscular effort—for instance in sit-up exercises which involve remaining in the stomach muscles’ position of maximum effort for a count of 10.

Most people live within reasonable distance of a local health club with a gym. An instructor is always available to give a supervised training programme to meet personal requirements, and teach clients how to follow it.

Women please note that a few hours’ strength-building a week is very unlikely to result in hard muscles! On the contrary, improving the lean-to-fat ratio gives a woman a great shape and makes her feel lighter and more energetic for the simple reason that her muscles will find it easier to carry her around.

Strength-building exercises are best combined with exercises designed to build cardiovascular fitness. You can tell roughly what your level of cardiovascular fitness is by how easily you get out of breath. Cycling, swimming, running, aerobics and rowing are all suitable forms, and it is surprising how quickly your fitness improves if you practise any of these a few times a week, even if only for 20 minutes.

If you find it hard to motivate yourself to exercise alone, try finding an exercise partner who agrees to meet up with you on a regular basis.