Health

Losing Weight Isn’t as Complicated as It Often Sounds

Every time a new fad diet or weight loss supplement comes out, the good folks at Salt Lake City’s Mcycle indoor cycling studio cringe. They hear all of the supposedly scientific explanations justifying the product in question, realizing that losing weight isn’t as complicated as diet creators and supplement makers want you to believe. Complicating matters only makes it more difficult for people to lose weight and keep it off.

There is no denying that the human body is a complex organism. However, it is also true that the process of losing and keeping off weight is scientifically straightforward. It’s as simple as modifying your diet and getting regular exercise. The simplicity of it all boils down to a single word most of us are intimately familiar with – calories.

More About Calories

Our modern culture has been conditioned to believe that a calorie is a tangible thing. It is really not. A calorie is a measurement of energy. In chemistry, it is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1°C. When we are talking diet and exercise, calories are essentially the amount of energy a particular food offers.

That energy is stored in the food itself, much like the energy that drives your car is stored in the gasoline that powers it. And just like some types of fuel are better for your car than others, some types of food are better for your body. That’s why you hear experts talk about the differences between good calories and empty calories.

Empty calories come from food that has little to no nutritional value. They are calories generally stored in sugar and fat. Good calories come from nutritionally rich foods like fruits, vegetables, and fish. Calories relate to weight loss in the sense that you have to burn more than you consume in order to lose weight.

Diet and Exercise Together

With a better understanding of calories, you can probably see how diet and exercise work together to help a person lose weight and keep it off. From the diet standpoint, the goal is to consume only as many calories as your body needs to function properly throughout the day. That is going to be different for every person. So you calculate, using a tool designed for that purpose, and then make adjustments from there.

The exercise portion of the equation is designed to burn calories your body does not need to maintain the daily routine. In other words, you want to use up all of those excess calories so that they aren’t stored in your body as fat. This is the very reason that Mcycle promotes spin classes for weight loss.

High Intensity Burns Calories

Indoor cycling, often referred to as spinning, is a high-intensity form of exercise that gets the heart pumping. The movement alone burns calories. In addition, the body burns more calories as its internal temperature goes up. Those calories are burned trying to keep the body cool. Therefore, a high-intensity cardio exercise that forces you to break a sweat represents an excellent way to burn excess calories.

If you burn more than you consume, your body has to turn to fat stores for energy. So, it boils down to a simple algebraic equation. Modify your diet so that your caloric intake is just enough to get you through the day safely. Then add some exercise. Because your body needs extra calories to exercise, it will take those calories from the fat already stored in your body. That is how you lose weight and keep it off.

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