Exercise comes in many forms. I'm not going to tell you what type of exercise is best because there is no best in my mind, as long as you're doing something then you're winning. Whatever form of exercise you choose to do, the only thing that I stress is that if you want to start seeing results, you need to push yourself a little harder/farther each time to play, practice or participate in your form(s) of exercise. For me, I like to run, go for walks with my family and do Insanity; Insanity is a high intensity workout routine developed by professional trainer Shaun T.
Before you can think about getting results from exercise you need to make sure that you're eating right. Before I go any farther with the diet piece, you need to know that I'm NOT a certified dietician or a professional in any way with relation to dieting. I just have a few gems that have worked well for me that I want to pass along.
- Don't eat within a few hours of going to bed, your body won't have time to digest and process the food.
- Eat anything you want, IN MODERATION.
- Don't take the second, or third, helping
- Eat a big breakfast, medium size lunch and a small dinner
- Make fruits and veggies your snacks
- Don't eat until you're full, eat until you've had enough. If you always eat until you're full then you're training your stomach to get a little bigger each time you're full.
- Eat out for dinner, but don't make it a habit, once a week is plenty. There's a reason restaurant food tastes so good, it can be full of butter, salt and other things that aren't great for you in large portions. If your profession/travel demands you eat out a lot, make smart choices, otherwise make your meals at home.
- Make your own lunch as much as possible too, and if you can't, again, make smart choices.
Get into a routine and have discipline to stick with it. Especially in the beginning, regular exercise can be hard; your muscles will hurt, your routine will change and you won't see instant results. KEEP GOING! Be strong a keep pushing yourself, it takes 20-30 days to create a new habit. A lot of people don't know where to begin when it comes to an exercise routine, there are many great trained professionals out there who can help you, find one of these people. That being said, if you're going to make exercise a routine then it has to be something you enjoy doing. It's a mindset, if you view exercise as work and a pain then you're not going to be as motivated to work out as if you viewed the exercise as fun and purposeful.
Out with the bad, in with the exercise. Look at your spare time, this is when we should be exercising. What are you doing in your spare time? Watching TV? Going to the bar? Playing video games? I'm not telling to stop those things, but they're not going to help you get into better shape and overall health. Find a way to add 30-60 minutes of exercise into your every day. My personal choice was to cut out TV watching and use that time for me; now I read, play guitar, exercise, write and a number of other things that are better for my personal health. The average Canadian watches 3-4 hours of TV a day, think of what you could accomplish if you reclaimed that 3-4 hours!
You may be asking, what makes this guy qualified to talk about exercising, health and weight loss? Lots of people get educations and become professionals in this stuff, but I think there's a lot to be said for experiencing the value and importance of exercise first hand. When I graduated from high school I was one of the biggest guys in my graduating class, easily 60-70 pounds overweight. I took a job shortly after grad that helped me lose the 60-70 pounds, the job involved a lot of running around and heavy lifting 6 days a week. As good as the weight loss was, at the time I didn't make make exercise a routine so I slowly added some pounds back on (at least it wasn't the 60-70 pounds). The next time I lost weight was when I moved in with my now wife; we lived close to a gym so I started a routine, which allowed me to lose the weight I had regained in the previous years. Through all this I was playing Ultimate, running semi-regularly and living a fairly active lifestyle. I didn't realize it at the time but my eating habits were the root of me not keeping the weight off, mostly revolving around portion control, which I have since fixed. Then work, life and family (we had our first daughter) started to pick up and the weight started coming back, again. Now, about to have our second daughter, I've realized that my health is not going to get better through osmosis and that I needed to make the choice to make exercise part of my everyday. About 8 months ago I developed a routine for myself that involves running and Insanity, it's something that I've worked into my everyday exercise. I'm now in the best shape I've been in my entire life, and it's getting better. The best part... Now that I've been doing it for a few months - eating healthy and exercising - it doesn't feel like a burden, in fact, I look forward to the exercise.
We need to make exercise happen today, don't put it off. If you've got a long way to go with your health and fitness level then you need to keep remembering that it will take some time before you see significant results. Persist and stick with it because you will LOVE the results.
You can do it!
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