Exercise: It's a Given

OK, before I continue talking about my eating plan, I want to come clean and admit that I exercise pretty much every day and have done that for several years. While you will certainly lose weight eating the way I did, you will lose MORE weight and be less hungry if you exercise, too. Now I have been exercising regularly since I was 22 (I'm 45), and while it did help my fitness level, it never made much of a difference in my weight. Believe me, I tried it all: kickboxing, step classes, walking programs, TaeBo--you name it. Did they work? Yes and no. Yes, they made me stronger and healthier. No, they didn't really help me lose weight--until I combined the exercise with my eating plan. Then, the pounds started to come off. Today, I exercise about an hour a day, cross-training to get a balance of cardio (spinning, running, walking, aerobics tapes), strength training (Cardio Muscle classes and tapes) and flexibility exercises (yoga and Pilates). I strongly believe that you need to be diligent about both diet and exercise in order to be successful at healthy weight loss; one doesn't work nearly as well without the other. And for me, I could have run to the moon and back and still not lost weight until I got my eating habits in gear.

If you don't exercise, starting out with a simple walking program, climbing stairs in your house or doing a beginner's exercise tape is a good way to ease into it--after getting your doctor's approval, of course. If you're a long-time exerciser, good for you--keep it up! Pretty soon, you'll be able to challenge yourself even more. I found that as I lost the weight I was looking for more athletic challenges, like getting my heart rate up even higher during spinning classes (I bought a heart-rate monitor watch with a calorie-counting feature to help me), and I ran my first two races this year (both 5Ks and now I'm looking for a 10K). Getting the positive reinforcement of seeing the numbers on the scale go down and feeling my fitness level rise made me feel confident enough to do more. It will have the same effect on you.

Next post: The scale!