Being overweight or obese is a very depressing situation. It can significantly lower your self esteem. In turn, depression or a low self esteem can lead to you letting go and eating foods that will double or even triple your calorie intake. This can bring you to a more depressing state. To combat this cycle of eating, you will need to watch and burn what you eat. Exercise in combination with a healthy diet will enable you to most of the unwanted fat clinging to your body. Typically, many nutritionists recommend that you burn 500 more calories than your total daily calorie intake to lose weight effectively and regularly. In order to do this properly you need to know what exercises can provide the best exercise to calorie burn ratio. Be ready to apply some basic math skills to find these out.
- Know your food. Before anything else, you will need to know exactly how many calories do you consume daily. Whether you are on a diet or not, you need to know this to figure out how many more calories you will need to burn. Typically, most health professionals will advise you to burn 500 more calories than you take in. This will enable you to achieve a significant loss in weight from exercise in an acceptable timeframe. Know the estimated calories of the food you will eat so that you can arrive at your estimated daily calorie intake. Then add 500 more calories to the total and this is how much you will need to burn daily through exercise.
- Check online. There are many free publications and informational websites on the Internet that can provide you the calorie content of each food and the calories burned by the common exercises. Some websites will even provide a calorie calculator that will compute the calorie burn of your desired exercise based on the intensity and duration of the activity.
- Compute the ratio. Let’s use “X” to stand for your exact weight. Use “Y” to stand for the calories burned per pound every minute (check the Internet for activities and their calorie burned per pound per minute). Now, we will use this formula: “X” multiplied with “Y” = “N” which stands for total calories burned per minute. Now use “N” and multiply it with the number of minutes of the activity. The corresponding product will be total calories burned for that specific activity.
- Freedieting.com. If you want to know more about how many calories you should burn and what exercises are suitable for that, check out this website. The site contains a list various activities and its corresponding calorie burn dependent on the length of the activity. The site provides an online calorie burn calculator as well.
A healthy lifestyle consisting of great exercise regiments will help anyone avoid unnecessary health risks that accompany obesity. If you eat a lot, that is perfectly all right for as long as you engage in daily activities to burn what you eat. Know your food and activities and what they can do for you.