Diets And Exercise - How To Incorporate Exercise And A Healthy Diet In Your Lifestyle

When combined, a healthy diet and regular exercise can go a long way in helping you to avoid becoming overweight, and as such, it can help you to minimize the risk of heart failure, stroke, and even diabetes. Even though this is common knowledge nowadays, many people find it almost impossible to give up their sedentary lifestyles, and because of this, approximately 300,000 Americans die each year from diseases related to unhealthy diets and lack of physical exercise.

Surprisingly enough, it's actually quite easy to incorporate a healthy diet and regular exercise into your daily routine so that you can remain in good health. The following tips can certainly help you to achieve that goal:

1) Start off slowly

Essentially, this applies to exercise and diet in that just as you should increase your level of exercise gradually, so to should you start making gradual changes to your diet, rather than cutting back significantly right from the beginning. Bear in mind that your current eating habits have been in place for ages and it will take time for you to change them.

2) Water

Even though the vast majority of people are aware of the fact that it is necessary to drink a sufficient amount of water each day, not everybody realizes just how essential this is in terms of helping to regulate metabolism. Ideally one should drink between eight and ten glasses of water each day. On the other hand, don't be tempted into thinking that more is better because excessive amounts of water can in fact end up flushing much needed nutrients out of the body.

3) Initial changes

Rather than begin with a vigorous exercise routine, you should instead start off by making gradual changes to your daily routine. For example, you could begin by using the stairs rather than the elevator whenever possible. Likewise, instead of driving down the road to the café, you could take a brisk walk instead. Of course, it certainly wouldn't do you any harm if you included a short jog before and after work.

4) Changing your diet

This of course is something you should do by reducing the size of your meals gradually, while at the same time beginning to eat five meals per day rather than three. Contrary to what you may believe, this will not result in you putting on weight, but instead, it will simply help to ensure that you remain full all day, and this in turn means that you'll be less tempted to eat snacks. Furthermore, eating five small meals rather than three large meals also helps to optimize your body's metabolism.

5) Increasing exercise levels

Once you've become accustomed to doing some light exercise each day you should then begin incorporating 30 minutes of cardiovascular exercise into your daily routine. If for some reason you find that you cannot sacrifice 30 minutes at any one time of the day, then you can of course split this into shorter sessions. For example, you could do three sessions each day with each session lasting ten minutes. If possible, try to include a little bit of a variety in order to prevent your sessions from becoming monotonous. If you go jogging for example, you could consider doing so with your pet or you could invite a friend along for company. Above all, you need to realize that in order to achieve weight loss, there are many options available to you over and above joining a boot camp.

6) Introducing healthy foods

Now is also a good time for you to start introducing foods which you know are healthy, while at the same time cutting back on those things which are unhealthy, such as caffeine, sugar, alcohol, foods which contain a lot of saturated fat, and excessive salt. Rather than having these, you can rather focus on fresh fruit and vegetables, lean meat, cereals, and low fat dairy products.

7) Weight training

In addition to the diet and exercise changes you've already made, you should also begin including a certain amount of weight training. Even though this may not sound appealing to you, you need to realize that increased muscle mass means more efficient weight loss and this of course means you'll have less to worry about in terms of many chronic diseases. Additionally, you need only do one or two sessions each week, so all things considered, some weight training can be extremely beneficial

Nobody is saying that it is always easy to make these changes to your lifestyle, because we all know that temptation awaits around every corner, but if you do become a victim of temptation, rather than despair, simply start again.

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