In order to lose weight, you must eat fewer calories than you burn or burn more calories than you eat. You could simply do this by eating fewer calories. However, in order to accelerate or maintain your weight loss, you should also burn more calories.
Your body burns calories with three mechanisms:
* Moving your body,
* Digesting your food, and
* Staying alive
To burn more calories and lose weight, you should increase the calories burned in all three mechanisms.
Resting Metabolism
Your resting metabolism burns calories just keeping you alive. Your body must perform many processes to keep you functioning, including pumping blood, breathing air and producing waste.
Most of the calories you burn are burned performing your essential body processes. These calories are burned while you are sleeping, sitting, talking, or exercising. Your resting metabolism is working twenty-four hours a day. Your resting metabolism is determined primarily by your genetics and your muscle mass.
Digestion
After you eat or drink, your body has to digest and process the food. The calories you burn digesting and processing your food is called the thermic effect of food. Thermic simply means related to or associated with heat. The thermic effect of food is determined primarily by the amount and type of food you are eating.
Moving
At least eighty percent of the calories you burn daily are burned secondary to your resting metabolism and the thermic effect of food. The rest of your calories are burned moving your muscles and limbs.
Any time you move a muscle, you burn calories. The more often you move your muscles, the more calories you will burn. You can also burn more calories by using more muscles or using larger muscles.
The calories you burn moving have the greatest potential for increase, so you should focus your efforts there. You do this with by increasing your everyday activities and by exercising.
Exercise can be broken down into strength training exercises, core training exercises, and aerobic exercises. You should adopt an activity plan that incorporates all three.
You must create a calorie deficit to lose weight. A calorie deficit is created by eating fewer calories than you burn. To do this you should decrease the calories you eat and increasing the calories you burn. Your body has three different mechanisms for burning calories: staying alive, digesting food, and moving. A successful weight loss activity plan must address all three.
