Your Body Can Burn Fat on Its Own

Wouldn’t you just love it if your body decided to burn fat and calories on its own?

It can:
1. Exercise in short, intense bursts (interval training) for effective fat burning after exercise.
2. Increase the amount of resistance/strength/weight training you do, to build more lean muscle. Muscle is ‘metabolically active’ and burns more calories than other body tissue even when you’re not moving.
And of course, for best results:
3. Chill on the amount of food you are eating.

Technically:
1. Our bodies are built to survive, so when you exercise for long periods of time (often and consistently) your body thinks it needs to hold on to fat for energy. Doing short (12-15 minute), intense exercise sessions builds strength and burns calories, but not fat, so it “feels safe” using fat stores for energy after exercise.
2. Resistance training (using extra weight) helps build lean muscle mass (and strong bones), and muscle burns more calories than fat.
3. If you are obsessing over things like fat grams and not eating a nutritious diet, your body will reserve energy (store fat) to survive.

Realistically:
1. Varying your exercise is the most effective and efficient way to stay lean and healthy. You must do some longer exercise to build cardiovascular endurance, burn lots of calories, and yes, even burn fat during exercise - your body will not click in to “save” mode unless you exercise for long periods of time, regularly and often.
2. You must do resistance training in order to build muscle and strong bones.
3. Nobody wants to exercise more - and we don’t want to train our bodies to need more exercise to stay fit. So exercise efficiently – two short, very intense (relative to your level of fitness) training sessions weekly, like a 15-minute fast run/walk or fast cycling sprint intervals, and two moderately long, moderately intense sessions (30-45 minutes) of strong walking, cycling, or yoga, with one long day (60-90 minutes) of a moderately paced walk/hike. That’s a great five-day/week training schedule.
4. Instead of adding more days to your workout schedule, add a weighted vest to your training. I have said this before, but this is the most efficient way that I know of to build muscle while burning calories. For more information, go to http://www.walkvest.com/.
5. Eat moderately - stop counting fat grams and calories and look at how much food is on your plate! And eat more nutritiously by eating foods that are natural and unprocessed.