Exercise to Lose Weight

How to exercise to lose weight

Discover how you can drop a few pounds through exercise. This article includes detailed workout guides that you can do at home without spending a single penny.

Exercise to lose weight

Exercise will help you to burn fat. To get you on the path of dropping a few pounds, I want to first tell you about how these exercises will help you lose weight. Once you understand the basics, I will guide you through the best exercises to lose weight naturally.

How exercise will help you lose weight

Your body stores calories from food as energy in the form of fat. It uses these calories to perform everyday functions. These functions include moving around, recovery, digestion and brain power. Did you know that the brain uses more energy than the rest of the body in relation to its size? Fat is basically a storehouse for future energy. The more calories you eat from food, the more calories get stored in the form of fat.

In order to lose weight, you need to burn more calories than what you take in. If you can do this, your body will have to start using your fat stores for energy. Exercise helps you to do this in a few ways:

Exercise burns calories

Firstly, exercise burns a lot of calories. This will increase the number of calories that your body burns in a day. When calories burned are higher than calories consumed, you will lose weight. You can see which exercises burn the most calories here.

Exercise increases your metabolism

Secondly, exercise raises your metabolism. When you start exercising regularly, your body will adapt by learning how to burn more calories. It does this to try and make the exercises easier to do. As your metabolism increases, the amount of calories that your body naturally burns throughout the day increases too. This will increase the amount of fat that is burned for energy. As long as you are burning more fat than what you are taking in from food, you will start to lose weight.

Exercise decreases fat-storing hormones

Thirdly, exercise helps to increase fat-burning hormones while decreasing fat-storing hormones. Did you know that there are hormones that are responsible for storing fat? One of these hormones is insulin.

Insulin contributes to weight gain

Insulin is released when you eat something that has sugar in it. Sugar is used for energy by the body, but it can damage cells if sugar levels get too high in the blood. In order to stop blood sugar from damaging the cells in the body, insulin is released.

Insulin takes the sugar from your blood and shuttles it away before it can do any damage. It moves sugar into the muscles and liver in the form of glycogen. It also takes sugar out of the blood and stores it away in the form of fat.

When you eat a lot of sugar, more insulin is released. If there is a lot of insulin in your body, it may take away too much sugar out of the blood to store it as fat. This will lead to sugar cravings and a sharp energy drop. When this happens, you eat sugar and more insulin is released. This repeats the cycle over and over again - making you gain more weight each time.

Insulin also directly affects appetite. The more insulin you have, the hungrier you will be. In fact, insulin release blocks the part of your brain that should tell you that you are full. That is why it is so easy to finish a whole lot of junk food even when we aren't hungry anymore.

Our bodies are designed to consume as much sugar as possible when it is available because sugar used to be hard to find many years ago.

That is how insulin leads to weight gain. Sugar consumption increases insulin levels. Exercise, on the other hand, decreases insulin levels. Here's how:

Exercises decreases insulin levels

Exercise requires energy. One of the ways that your body gets this energy is from sugar. When exercise decreases blood sugar because it gets used up for energy, less insulin is produced.

Lowered insulin levels lead to a decrease in appetite. This leads to less calories consumed and less food that is stored as fat.

Exercise also burns through glycogen (glycogen sugar stored in the muscles and the liver). When these stores are empty, more sugar can fill these stores instead of being converted to fat whenever you eat something that has sugar in it.

Exercise depletes the glycogen that is found in the liver and your body switches over from using sugar to burning through fat stores.

Insulin levels drop when fat stores are being burned for energy in place of sugar. When this happens, you crave less sugar because your energy is coming from your fat stores instead.

To sum it up, insulin is the hormone that makes you eat as much as you can when there is lots of sugar available. Insulin drops when the body has to use its own fat stores for energy instead. Exercise helps you to make this change inside your body.

The exercise program to lose weight

Now that you have learned how exercise will help you to lose weight, let's look at the exercise program that you can do to start losing weight right now.

This program is designed for beginners. If you want a weight loss exercise program that is suited for people that already exercise regularly, try the 30 day fitness challenge. You can find it here.

Chart of Exercises to Weight Loss. Right Click or Long Press on the image to save it or print it.

Weight loss exercises: Day 1

In the morning

• 20 squats
• Jumping jacks for 30 seconds

In the evening

• 10 push-ups
• Plank for 20 seconds 

Weight loss exercises: Day 2

In the morning

• Do 20 lunges (10 on each side)
• Do 10 crunches

In the evening

• Do 15 good mornings
• Do 20 Russian twists

Weight loss exercises: Day 3

• Rest (no exercises)

Do your exercises in a 3-day cycle. Every time you complete a cycle, add 10% to the number. This is what the second round would look like:

Weight loss exercises: Day 1 (round 2)

Morning

• 22 squats
• Jumping jacks for 33 seconds

Evening

• Do 11 push-ups
• Plank for 22 seconds 

Weight loss exercises: Day 2 (round 2)

Morning

• Do 22 lunges (11 each side)
• Do 11 crunches

Evening

• Do 17 good mornings
• Do 22 Russian twists

Weight loss exercises: Day 3 (round 2)

• Rest day

Keep adding 10% to the number of exercises every time that you do them. If you cannot add 10% to your workout number because it is not an even number, round it off. You can round it down. This is how you should slowly increase the numbers so that every time you exercise, you lose more weight.

Because of this; every round that you do; you will burn more calories, increase your metabolism even more, decrease insulin faster and use up more of your fat stores.

Questions for these weight loss exercises

Here are some of the most popular questions about this weight loss program:

How long will it take before I start to see weight loss with these exercises?

Everybody is different. Some people will start to see results sooner than others. In most cases, you should start to see that you weigh less on the scale during the second week. From then, you should start to lose a pound of weight every week or so.

As the numbers of the exercises that you do increase, the rate at which your body can burn fat for energy will also increase.  You will notice after the first week that your energy levels feel better. This is because exercise teaches your body to start using its own energy reserves.

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I don't know how to do some of these exercises

Here are some useful guides that will teach you everything that you need to know about doing these exercises. If you prefer, you can watch the videos instead.

This is how to do a squat.
Watch a video to learn how.

This is how to do a jumping jack.
Learn via this video.

This is how to do a push-up.
See how it's done in the video.

This is how to do a plank.
Watch the video on how to plank.

This is how to a lunge.
Check out this video on how to do a lunge properly.

This is how to do a crunch.
This video will show you how.

This is how to do a good morning. (You can do it without any weights or bars).
This is a video about how to do good mornings.

This is how to do a Russian twist.
See how to do a Russian twist here.

I was losing weight, but I gained a pound. What's going on?

We expect our bodies to change in a linear motion. In other words, we think that our body will gain weight or lose weight is a straight line without going in the opposite direction. This is almost never the case.

There will be days when you drop a lot of weight. There will also be days when you gain a little weight. This will happen as your body tries to adapt to the weight loss exercises.

Give your body time to get used to losing weight regularly. Remember that it does not know that you are trying to lose weight. All it knows is that its fat storage are getting empty. This can be a shocking experience for your body.

As you lose weight consistently, your body will grow accustomed to its new weight and it won't fight back as much as before.

Don't measure your success on a day-to-day basis. It is okay to gain a pound here and there while you are losing lots of pounds in the long run. This is why it is better to monitor you weight loss goals on a weekly basis instead of a daily basis. You will stress less and you will see that you are still losing weight consistently.

If you gained a pound today, but lost 3 pounds in the last 7 days, you are still in the fat burning zone.

What else can I do to help me lose weight even faster?

Eat fewer calories

You can speed up the weight-losing benefits of these exercises by restricting the amount of calories that you eat. You can use an app like this one to track how much food you are eating and set it to help you eat enough to lose weight.

Try not to shock your body too much with too many big changes at once. If you make too many big changes, you risk pushing yourself too far. This can cause you to drop your weight loss plans because they are getting too hard for you to stick to. Rather start small and give your body (and yourself) time to adapt.

You can restrict your calories to lose more weight, but don't restrict them too much.

Avoid junk food

Avoid foods that are highly processed. Chemicals are added to these foods to increase their shelf life. These chemicals mess with our hormones and stop the body from working properly. They slowly kill us in the same way that they kill bacteria.

Eat nutritious foods instead.

Opt for foods that are high in micro nutrients like vitamins, minerals and electrolytes, antioxidants and other good nutrients. Foods that are not cooked or processed are much healthier for you.

Add in some wholesome foods like fruit and vegetables. Grapes are good for you. Learn how spinach and lettuce can help you to lose weight.

You can also exchange your coffee for lemon juice or green tea for even more weight loss benefits.

If you need some great ways to turn unhealthy foods into nutritious ones, see how to turn junk food into healthy food with these great-tasting alternatives.

Drink plenty of water

The best way to drink more water is to make sure that you always have your water bottle with you. When your water bottle is in your hand, you will continuously sip from it automatically. Keep a jug of water on your desk to remind you to drink more water while you are working.

I skipped a day of my exercise. What do I do now?

It is okay to skip a day every once a week or so. Do not try to do two days in one to make up for it. Rather do the same exercises on the following day. If you were supposed to do day 1's exercises on Monday, but forgot, do them on Tuesday instead.

Do not skip day 1 and go straight to day 2. This will help you to maintain balance with all of the exercises.

Additional tip: Take weight loss progress photos

I highly recommend that you take before pictures before you start with these exercises to lose weight. Also measure how much you weigh and the circumference of your waistline. Write these measurements down. Take new photos and write down the new measurements every month.

This will show you how far you've come. It will motivate you to do even more and keep losing weight. After 6 months of this weight loss program, you will be surprised at how much weight you've lost - all without spending a single penny!

If you have lost weight with these exercises, please share this link with your friends and family to help them out too. I recommend bookmarking this page so that you can refer to it or read through everything when you need some motivation to keep losing weight.

I am looking forward to reading your questions in the comments below. If you have lost weight through this exercise program, let me know in the comment as well. This will inspire other people to lose weight for themselves. Stay Strong!

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