How To Get Fit And Lose Weight This Year

Make a New Year Resolution today to get fit and lose weight!

Make this year the year that you turn your life around and get that beach body back that you used to have!

How do you do it though? Simple, follow this basic level fitness and weight loss plan step by step to get you started on your weight loss journey!

1. Take control of your diet. Learn how to prepare healthy meals. Learn how many calories you need each day and learn what to eat and what not to eat!
2. Get more active in all parts of your life, not just with structured exercise. For example, walk more, carry shopping home, play with your children, walk around the shops more!
3. But, also do some structured exercise, ideally at least 3 times per week for 45 minutes. The more the better (within reason). Weight training is an excellent way to tone up and cardio burns fat, so do both.

There are not really going to be any new ways to get fit in 2011 so your New Year Resolution will be the same as every previous year. But this year make one simple change – stick to the plan, don’t give up.

Fitness and Weight Loss Review of 2011

This year there was a wide selection of research coming out on health and fitness. Possibly the most interesting was the research that concluded that it really does not matter what type of exercise you do if you wish to lose weight.

Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2003 (yes, 8 years ago) found that variations in exercise duration and intensity and little overall effect on how much weight was lost by women. What really mattered was just focussing on getting the exercise. Although this is old research now it only came to light recently in a discussion with other fitness professoinals and few people seem to be aware of it.

Many people are still advocating specific exercise plans for weight loss, with suggestions that jogging or slow swimming is not effective for weight loss. However, the truth is that any form of exercise can be very effective for weight loss so long as you stick to the plan.

Of course, it is still just as important that your diet is healthy, well balanced and reduced in calories. No amount of exercise will burn off all the fat of an excessive diet. Well, not strictly true as some professional athletes consume towards 10,000 Calories a day – but their warm-up are more intensive than the average gym goers entire workout!

Some other research, this time carried out by the Human Performance Laboratory at the Appalachian State University, showed that if you do 45 minutes of intensive exercise the afterburn effect lasts for 14 hours. This is interesting as the after-burn is a way to maximise weight loss.

If you change your fitness schedule so that you exercise twice a day you can ensure that your body is always burning calories at an elevated level. By exercising at 6am and again at 8pm you will ensure that you are always burning more calories – 24 hour after burn!

So if you take these two pieces of research you can learn that by working out twice a day for 30 minutes each time you will lose weight more rapidly than if you workout just once. One simple method to implement this is to go for a morning walk and then a do a fitness class in the evening.