22 Exercise: It ' s Non-Negotiable
22 Exercise: It ' s Non-Negotiable
Calling all couch potatoes: If you ' re not getting regular exercise, you aren ' t following the Atkins Nutritional Approach. It ' s that simple. You must make a commitment to physical activity as well as change the way you eat-and take nutritional supplements. Doing one without the other is like riding a bike with flat tires. It ' s a lot more difficult.
Why Exercise?
In case you need convincing, I ' m going to build the case for how important exercise is and how integral it is to your new lifestyle. First, you should know that being active is critical to your good health. A report from the Global Burden of Disease project-a massive research effort that studied disease and death around the globe-included physical inactivity among the most important risk factors threatening global health. The second thing you should know is that regular physical activity has been proven to contribute significantly to each of the Atkins principles: weight loss, weight maintenance, good health and disease prevention. And, now, I submit my evidence. We ' ll look at the first two together.
Weight Loss and Weight Maintenance It ' s one of the basic laws of the universe: If you use more calories than you consume, you lose weight.( You sharp-eyed readers might say, " Whoa, I thought we didn ' t have to worry about calories." That ' s true, but it ' s a great way, here, to illustrate an important point.)
For example: Without changing the way you eat, say you burned an extra 250 calories per day, which a 150-pound person could accomplish by walking for about forty-five minutes at a pace of three miles per hour. If you did this for two weeks, you would create a deficit of 3,500 calories and thereby lose 1 pound of body weight. In addition to enabling weight loss, exercise keeps the pounds off. Research shows that most people who maintain weight loss exercise regularly, while most people who gain weight back do not.
Exercise is like a buy-two, get-one-free proposition. Not only does it elevate your metabolic rate while you ' re exercising, but it keeps your calorie-burning meter cranked up for significant periods after you ' re through. This means that you continue burning calories at a good clip even though you ' ve stopped moving. Similarly, when you increase your muscle mass, you increase the amount of energy your body naturally expends just to keep functioning-even at rest.
Good Health By building endurance, flexibility and muscle strength, regular exercise contributes to the health of your muscles, bones and joints, in addition to improving your cardiovascular health. All of
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