I heard an interesting factoid on the radio the other morning. It had to do with exercise and how long it takes the brain to become accustomed to it, and actually crave it to the point of a sort of addiction.

It certainly explains why people who have been couch potatoes for the majority of their lives can be transformed into exercise addicts if they stick with it for a while and are consistent. Basically, the theory is that it takes the body and mind about 21 days to become so used to exercising that it actually begins to form an addiction to it.

Yoga has many health benefits. However, regular cardio and weight exercise also has tremendous health benefits. The difference between yoga and more traditional exercise is that yoga can be modified to be much more gentle to people who may not be able to handle a lot of risk or strain on their body. Yoga also has other benefits such as stress reduction and depression lifting, however, these benefits are also shared between all types of exercise.

As if you needed yet another reason to work that body out as often as you possibly can, there is another huge incentive to get your exercising on a daily basis, or at least exercising as much as your lifestyle will let you fit in. 

Exercising, it has been found, on a regular basis, actually lowers our cravings for the two types of foods that are most responsible for obesity and weight gain in this country. Sugar and fat. 

When you’re trying to lose weight, it is really imperative that you follow some simple rules with your workout regimen to develop the most effective fitness plan for weight loss. The first one is very simple, and hopefully very common sense for most people. That is, make sure you get in a ton of cardio, and go easy on the weight training until you start to lose the weight.

One huge benefit that I personally notice from working out, is that I seem to keep a lot of the mushy, smushy pesky water weight off my problem areas like my thighs and my belly (althought that used to not be a problem area, as I get older, it’s getting harder to maintain). 

Why would working out regularly help you to lose water weight? Well first off, you lose a lot of that water weight through sweating. When you lead a sedentary lifestyle, you probably don’t sweat a whole lot, which means you aren’t getting rid of excess water weight on a daily basis.

This is quite a staggering number to read, I must say.  It’s clear that obesity is a national epidemic. It certainly has been an epidemic for some years now here in the US, but it now is becoming more of a global epidemic as more and more cultures take to quick, easy foods that are low in nutrition and filling qualities and high in salt, fat and sugar.

It’s not only food that contributes to the obesity rate, as you well know -it’s also inactivity, which has become another huge problem. Even thinking back to my childhood in the eighties, we had toys that required moving around to play with them.

It seems that more and more evidence is mounting that the best way to burn fat and keep muscle on the body while getting rid of body fat is to do a regimen at least a few times a week where you are getting short bursts of extremely physical, hard activity, followed by short recovery periods.  I had first talked about this a few months ago when my husband and I began doing circuit training which used this principle, and we both lost a lot of weight for working out for only about 25 minutes to a half hour.