I can't even go a day without someone talking to me about weight loss, exercise or nutrition. Whether it is someone that says, “I really need to lose weight”, or “I probably should not eat that donut otherwise I will never lose weight.”
One thing I always try to tell people is that if you truly want to not only lose weight but keep the weight off you need to add some weight training to your exercise program. Training with weights has shown in countless numbers of studies to increase your body's ability to burn that excess fat you may be storing.
It is no secret that muscle burns fat. So it goes without saying that the stronger, healthier and larger your muscles are the more fat they will need to burn. This in turn makes your body a fat burning furnace that runs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days per year.
What you may not know is that your body has a finite number of muscle cells. Regardless of what you hear or think you can not add more muscle cells. Therefore the only thing you can do is enlarge them by increasing their volume size. Obviously larger muscle cells will burn more of your body's fat.
Implement a weight training exercise program that works your chest, triceps, back, biceps, legs, shoulders and abdominal muscles. You should work out every other day. You will need that day in between for your muscles to rest and repair. I recommend one to three sets for an exercise and one exercise per each muscle group. Your workouts should be no shorter than thirty minutes and no longer than forty-five minutes. Remember you aren't training for the Olympics here.
Now that you have your exercise routine in place, just remember to switch it up every six weeks or so. Changing the exercises that you do is a great way of doing this. You make this switch so your body doesn't plateau, or in other words stop showing results from your workout routine.
Now that you have the basic knowledge of what you need to know, go ahead and get started. There is no better time than the present to turn your body into a fat burning furnace.
Although cardio is important, it is not the only way, or possibly even the best way, to lose weight.
A comment on changing up your exercises. People often plateau from doing the same workout program week after week. They then want a whole new program.
I've been doing the same program for years, and continue to see gains. It's as simple as changing up weight and reps. Every few weeks, I increase weight, drop reps. At the end of the cycle, I start over.