Exercise

Introduction to exercise

After all that talk about the importance of diet, why exercise? Because, while it isn't as important as diet, it is still pretty hugely important to your overall health and fitness.

• Exercise determines HOW you gain or lose weight, and your body composition generally. You can diet down to, say, 120 pounds. But do you want to be 120 pounds of sleek, sexy muscle, or 120 pounds of gross, flabby loser? Exercise largely dictates the outcome.
• Exercise burns calories, which makes it easier to lose weight in conjunction with diet.
• Exercise promotes strength, endurance, and resistance to injury and illness, all of which are pretty great in and of themselves.

So exercise makes it easier to lose weight, and plays a big role in the composition of your body. There are two main kinds of exercise, cardiovascular (aka cardio, aerobic, etc.) and weight lifting (aka weights, lifting, resistance training, etc.)

Cardio: Any type of exercise that sustains an elevated heart rate consistently for a long period of time, such as running, cycling, or elliptical machine

Weight lifting: Pretty self explanatory, you push around heavy weights.

Cardio vs. weights

For most people, meeting their fitness goals requires that they do some of both, not one or the other.

I'm going to start with the case for weight lifting, because it seems to have the most misconceptions associated with it.

Are you trying to lose weight? Lift weights. Lifting burns tons of calories, and lifting weights while dieting will cause you to retain more muscle and lose more fat than just diet and/or cardio. Because the name of the game when it comes to not looking awful is FAT LOSS, not weight loss. Do you want to be that guy who loses lots of weight and still looks flabby and useless? Of course not.

Are you just trying to "tone up"? Lift weights. "Toning" is kind of a nonsense term, because you don't actually "tone" anything. You can only lose fat and gain muscle, and lifting weights helps you do both, by burning calories and promoting muscle growth. Like I said before, you get huge by eating huge, not lifting weights; lifting just determines how much of your weight is muscle vs. fat.

Are you a woman? Lift weights, because I already explained why lifting won't turn you into a man, and all the other benefits still apply to you. And if you are a 1 in 1,000,000 woman who can pack on muscle mass like a man, just stop working out as hard and it will go away.

Lifting weights makes you stronger and healthier, improves your posture, makes you less injury prone, and strengthens your bones(making it especially important for the elderly and for women). Additionally, it speeds up your metabolism even while you rest - more than cardio by itself.

But what about cardio? Cardio is good for everyone because it improves your overall endurance and ability to exert yourself over an extended period. It promotes cardiovascular health and contributes to increased bone density. Additionally, it pretty much makes everything else function better: cardio helps stabilize hormone levels (increasing testosterone and increasing insulin sensitivity), improves endurance and recovery, helps the body fuel calories away from the fat cells and into the muscle, helps with weight maintenance/preventing the "yo-yo effect", generally keeps you healthy, and finally burns calories.

My suggestion is to alternate weights and cardio, for instance doing 3 days of weights, 2 days of cardio, and taking the other 2 days off. Doing both on the same day tends to cause one or the other to suffer from reduced effort, and generally burns people out.

Starvation is bad, OK?

Weight loss is largely a matter of reducing calories and increasing activity. So if 500 fewer calories a day than you need to maintain is good, 2000 less is better, right? Not really. Because below a certain threshold, your body thinks you are one of those starving refugees on TV, and does a bunch of things that hurt your long-term weight loss.

Read that again: starving is a bad way to lose weight.

Why this is so:

• Your metabolism slows down. Your body will burn fewer calories to maintain itself, and you will feel awful. This is bad for weight loss because as soon as you quit starving yourself, you'll gain weight fast because your metabolism has bottomed out.
• You will tend to lose muscle more than fat. Your body will naturally try to conserve fat and cannibalize muscle if it thinks it is outright starving. This is bad because your real goal is FAT loss, not weight loss. This is how you have people who lose 100 pounds and reach their "ideal" weight, but still look amazingly flabby. Also, losing muscle slows your metabolism down even further, amplifying the giant horrible rebound effect once you quit starving yourself.
• Your life will be a living hell. You'll eventually feel horrible, the diet will fail, and you'll binge eat and regain everything you lost, plus interest.

You want to run a clear-cut, but tolerable calorie deficit to sustain weight loss over the long term. Very obese people may be put on very low calorie diets by their doctor, but these are medically supervised and designed for people who need to lose weight now or suffer severe health problems. Be safe and stick to 500 fewer calories a day than you burn, which is the equivalent of one pound lost per week.

Healthier cooking methods

The methods below are generally healthy ways of cooking because they add little or no unhealthy fats.

• If it is a vegetable, eating it raw
• Steaming (especially) or boiling
• Baking, broiling, roasting without added fat
• Smoking and grilling
• Stir frying with vegetable oil

The best advice I can give is to learn how to cook so you can control your diet better. It is actually very easy to do, and is guaranteed to impress potential mates. Any number of beginner-oriented cook books can get you started. It is hard to not improve your diet just by cooking your own food; restaurant food is generally not much better than fast food, and they give you way too much of it.

Specific kinds of foods you should eat

Note that the list below does not account for condiments and toppings; it just lists good food items. For instance, turkey breast is very good for you. Turkey breast covered in heavy cream sauce or deep fried in lard is not. Use your brain here.

Your dietary staples should include:

• Lean animal protein sources (fattier meats are acceptable if trying to gain muscle mass), including but not limited to:
  • Most turkey and chicken in general, especially if it is skinless. Turkey and chicken breasts especially.
  • Ground turkey, chicken, beef or pork.
  • Virtually all forms of fish, even the fattier fishes are very good for you. Tuna, while also good, should be eaten sparingly if you're concerned about mercury consumption.
  • More exotic-type meats, if you can find them: buffalo, ostrich, lamb, elk, venison, alligator, etc.
  • Whole eggs
• Whole grains, including but not limited to:
  • Whole wheat bread, bagels, rolls, etc.
  • Whole wheat pasta
  • Brown rice
  • Oatmeal
  • Whole grain breakfast cereals and muesli
• Virtually all fruits and vegetables, including beans and dry-roasted nuts. Vegetables are satiating, protect against a variety of diseases, are rich in almost every essential micronutrient and help with digestion.
• Healthy fats like olive oil (for sauces, dressings & low-temperature cooking) and canola oil (for high-temperature cooking), and Omega-3 rich fish oil.
• Dairy products like plain yogurt, cheese, cottage cheese, and milk.

Personally I preffer the good old salad with egg combo but anything that sticks to this list is viable in the long-run.

Introduction to diet

Diet is probably the most important single factor in your health, body composition and overall appearance.

Food determines how big you are. If you consume more calories than you expend, you will get bigger. If you consume fewer calories than you expend, you will get smaller. If you meet your maintenance needs, you will stay the same. Regardless of your metabolism, body composition, genetics, or whatever, your body must obey the laws of physics and biological imperatives. Now, your calorie needs can change over time. But in the end, it really is calories in and calories out. Everything else is just fiddling around the edges of this basic fact.

You can't get big if you don't eat big. That goes for muscle, fat, whatever. You can lift huge weights 10,000 times a day, and if you don't eat more calories than you expend, you won't gain a milligram of mass. Conversely, if you burn 10,000 calories a day and eat 11,000 calories a day, you will gain weight. Exercise and food selection plays a big role in what that extra weight becomes (fat or muscle), but the weight comes from food.

Video for the right mindset

Mindset

The most important aspect is not the specifics of a program or the details of a diet (though those are obviously important), but how you look at the situation. I don't mean in the sense that your mind is more powerful than what you do in the gym, although you'll need to have some self-discipline and commitment for obvious reasons. The main problem is that most people look at fitness in a warped, incorrect way. That's why they flunk, not because it has to be so hard in and of itself. What I mean is that you can't look at diet or exercise as a short-term ordeal that ends at some point when you aren't out of shape anymore. They must be seen as long-term lifestyle changes. That sounds kind of scary, but is actually not a big deal when you think about it, and once you start seeing results you will be motivated to continue.

Consider this: when people start dieting and exercise, they are often extremists about it. They try to work out 2 times a day, 7 days a week, or go on some crazy diet where they eat 500 calories composed entirely of herbal tea and tree bark. They hurt themselves or get sick or just hate life generally, and they fail. Then they get discouraged and get fat and out of shape again.

Was that a failure of willpower? Sort of, but the main problem is that the whole approach is wrong. You don't get in shape by killing yourself. You get in shape, and more importantly stay in shape, by accumulating significant, but livable, improvements to your lifestyle over time, and building on that. Not by going through some horrible ordeal requiring Olympian willpower.

Eating healthy just has to become how you eat most of the time. Exercise has to become a habitual thing you do every day or two, like mowing the lawn or taking out the trash. If you do just a little better all the time, but really stick to it, you can accumulate big gains very fast, and improve upon them over the long term. Once you start seeing improvements without having to kill yourself, it becomes very easy to keep on improving. You don’t have to stick to the following 100% of the time; but every little bit you slip up detracts from your overall results. The amount of time and effort you put into developing and maintaining your physical fitness is directly proportional to what you will get out of it and the magnitude of the results you will see. If you follow this advice only some of the time, you will only get some of the results. In the end, the wrong thing done consistently often times nets more results than the right thing done sparingly.

You can lose about 1-2 lbs of fat or build around .5 lbs of muscle a week as a male (females will build less muscle for a given amount of time due to hormonal differences). That's 50-100 lbs of fat and 25 lbs of muscle a year. In a year you’ll look way better than you do now and in three you’ll look pretty exceptional, assuming you are consistent and motivated. We know how the body works, we know what can be done, and we know how long it takes. Do not look for the easy-out, the miracle, or the fitness secret someone wants to sell you. You want results, not false promises - stick to a routine and diet and see it through. In otherwords, be persistent and be patient.