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.

In other words, after 21 days of exercising, whatever the form is that it takes, you usually will become so used to it and the feelings it gives you that you actually miss it physically and mentally if you stop for a few days – much like a smoker would miss cigarettes!

I can say that I think this applies to me. Now, I don’t think that it has to be 21 days all in a row, at least not for me personally. I think for me, it proves to be true when I’m exercising for a month and I’m doing it with no more than a 1-2 day break between sessions.

It begins to establish that brain activity in me that I so crave. That is, it makes my synapses faster. I’m able to think on my feet way more, and my mood becomes lifted. I just feel like a totally different person all together when I’m getting adequate exercise.

It’s almost as if a fog lifts when I go through a period where I can’t work out. If I’m sick for a week or two, I just feel so apathetic toward everything. When I get the energy to start working out again, it’s as if a cloud has been lifted and I’m “me” again – cheerful and optimistic.

This is every reason why I exercise, and why I will until the day I die. I think even people who have never exercised consistently need to at least give it a try for a month and see what types of changes it incurs in the body and mind – and to get addicted to something that’s actually great for you!

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.

Yoga definitely has one benefit over traditional workouts though. Flexibility. Yoga makes you much more flexible, and it helps you to maintain that flexibility through your older age if you practice regularly. That in itself can be priceless, since flexibility means mobility to us as we get older and may have a harder time getting around.

New studies are also showing that yoga may help to lower the blood sugar levels. This may have a great benefit to those with type II diabetes. However, it is suggested that those with type II diabetes engage in regular aerobic activity as well as this may actually have greater benefit than light yoga.

Now, if you’re talking about asthanga yoga or bikram yoga, both of which are a more intense, dynamic flow of yoga, then you still get the aerobic benefit from that, as well as the flexibility aspect, so it’s like you’re killing two birds with one stone.

The researchers did note that the benefit from just doing light yoga was fairly unimpressive, but it still did show some improvement in the participant’s blood sugar. Their approach to this was a “something is better than nothing” but they still recommended regular aerobic activity as well.

If you’ve ever practiced yoga, then you know how much it can vary in intensity. I’ve been to yoga classes or done yoga DVD’s that were so intense I felt like my heart was going to pound out of my chest. On the other hand, I’ve done some where there was almost no cardio challenge.

If you want to get the cardio in there too, then do a more dynamic, moving yoga, and you’ll get the results you want in weight loss and blood sugar benefits more readily.

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. 

Sugar and fat, especially when paired together, say in a triple chocolate fudge mousse cake or something similar, are two of the biggest reasons behind weight gain, and they will make you fat faster than you can say the word “chocolate chip cookie”. 

One of the best ways that you can keep those inevitable cravings for sugar and especially for fats at bay is to exercise. Research has shown time and time again that those who have fitness schedules that they stick to actually crave healthier, lower fat and lower sugar foods more than those who are sedentary (lead inactive lifestyles).

The reason for this is thought to be the action of fatty and sugary foods on our brain, which is similar to the effects that many different types of exercise has on the brain. The brain releases a feel good chemical called serotonin, which is a rush of chemicals throughout the body which make us feel happy and content, when we eat sugary or fatty foods.

But the effects of the food on our brain is short lived.  So we end up going back to those foods over and over again when we don’t have a substitute for them (exercise) which has a very similar effect on producing and stimulating the release of these feel good chemicals.

When we exercise, we essentially replace much of the need for sugar and fat in our diets, because we are getting that much humanly craved “high” off of working out, and we are getting it on a much more sustainable wavelength, instead of the fleeting feel good chemicals that come with eating naughty foods.

So, if you wanna stay thin and you want to reduce your cravings for naughty, sugary foods, carbs and fats, then you must stick to a regular workout regimen that keeps those feel good chemicals up high as can be.  It’s also obviously excellent for depression and stabilizing moods for the same reasons outlined above.

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.

I like to approach it this way, because I know that the cardio is going to help me burn off those excess calories, and I know that weight lifting and doing things like pilates isn’t offering me as much bang for my buck when I’m not yet at my target weight and I’m essentially building lean muscle over the fat I want to get rid of first.

The second rule is to make sure you are getting your heart rate up high enough so that your body goes into maximum overdrive when it comes to torching those excess calories off the body, and reducing fat.  Your heart rate is really what makes your body work harder, and that is what makes your calorie burning ability go into hyper time.

Also, make sure you are not eating ANY carbs for a while after your workout. This is when your body is still in high burning mode, and it’s basically attacking and burning all that stored fat and stored energy instead of taking in what you just crammed in your mouth as carbohydrate fuel.

If you do this, then you will notice a big difference in your weight loss efforts. This means also stay away from those sugary energy drinks or replenishment drinks unless they are sugar free, during and immediately after your workout .It is strictly H20 and nothing else, so that you get the most bang for your buck.

By the way, by using this practice of no carbs after working out, you are also pushing your natural HGH production into overdrive. HGH is a natural hormone that the body emits a whole lot when you are younger. It is responsible for more muscle tone, less body fat, and a higher metabolism, so producing more of this does your body good.

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.

Not sweating can be very bad for your health, as this is the way that your body not only gets rid of water (besides urinating), but it is also the body’s way of getting rid of some of those toxins that can build up in your body as a result of your diet or lifestyle, and environmental toxins that can enter our body.

I notice a huge difference in my body when I’m working out reguarly – the kind of workout where I sweat a lot – aka, where I do lots of tough cardio work.  I notice that my body seems more sleek and streamlined, and I can fit into my clothes better, even if I have not changed my diet at all.

Anyone who has lost five pounds (which is almost all water weight usually, since the first five usually are, especially when lost quickly), can tell you what a huge difference this small weightloss can make in the way your clothes fit. It can make a large difference in your tummy area, your butt and thighs, all of which are the buzzwords for most women.

Guys will notice it a lot in their bellies, which always tends to be one  of the problem areas for men.  Men tend to get jiggly here, and they tend to retain water there and in their love handle region, on the sides of the belly, when they retain lots of water from consuming too much salt or not working out enough and sweating.

Working out and moving, and doing intense cardio, not only helps you keep water weight at bay, but it also keeps your circulation going, which can help with everything from cellulite to water retention.  The cellulite reduction part is obviously very appealing to women. 90% of women (at least) admit to having cellulite.

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.

Video games had yet to hit really hard like they did in the nineties, and television was just a pastime, not a lifestyle, as it has become for so many people today.  The only good thing about video games today is that we now have games that make us move like the Kinect and the Wii, which offer fitness plans for weight loss and other fun games that make you move and burn calories.

Sure, my parents had to pry my sister and I away from the boob tube here and there because it does have somewhat hypnotic powers when you’re a child, but we always went outside to play. We played games where we’d run around til dusk, and come in nice and hungry for dinner after burning off the calories we had eaten during the day and then some.

It’s no wonder that the obesity rate has doubled since the eighties in this world. Inactivity has been promoted and tolerated for a long time now, and it’s really starting to show not only in our waistlines, but also in the number of diseases and potentially fatal health issues as well.

Partially hydrogenated oils, or trans fats, have ruled the world for the past two decades as a cheap and tasty way to make food taste better, all at the expense of making us fat and crave fats even more because of their addictive nature.

Same thing goes for high fructose corn syrup – that stuff makes your blood sugar surge to high levels, only to bring them crashing down and you more hungry than ever, setting off a vicious cycle of binging on high carb, fattening food all over again.

Everything has been made easier, so we don’t have to move around to do anything any more. There are drive thru areas for fast food joints, prescription refills, and even convenience stores – God forbid we have to exit our cars and move!

Everything has become a little too convenient in our technology driven world, and it has steered us more toward a machine and immobility mentality where we rely on technology to do everything for us. Technology is a good thing – but is it good for our mobility!?