Healthy Weight Loss

One of the inescapable facts of life is that to maintain optimum health, we need to not only eat a sensible and varied diet. We also need to get enough exercise. For those of you who immediately balk at the thought of sweaty bodies and heavy weights, never fear. It is not necessary to become a gym junkie to be healthy. There are many ways to get exercise that are good for you and are enjoyable as well.

The most obvious way is walking. If you think your lifestyle is too busy to fit in a regular walk, then perhaps you need to make a few adjustments. How about walking to work? If this is not an option because you live an hour’s drive or a two hour train ride from your place of work, then why not just leave a little earlier and park the car a few blocks from your place of employment, or get off the train one stop earlier and walk the rest of the way. A good brisk walk in the morning will get your blood flowing and you will not drag yourself into work feeling like you just got out of bed.

If you can’t abide the notion of getting up earlier to enable this strategy then perhaps you could spend part of your lunch break walking around the block, or better still, the nearest park. You could take your lunch with you, have an enjoyable brisk walk, and sit down on a park bench and eat lunch having really worked up an appetite.

Another pleasant and relaxing form of exercise is bicycle riding. You don’t need to feel that you are in training for the Tour de France. If you can access a bike track or if the roads near your home are not too dangerous, this can be a very meditative form of exercise. If you live in the countryside, then all the better. It is a joy to ride along a quiet country road on a nice day, with a cooling breeze in your face.

One of the very best low impact forms of exercise is swimming. Your body does not have to endure the pounding which it experiences when jogging. Professional swimmers do have their injuries, but I suspect that they are considerably less than in most comparable sports, so if you have access to a swimming pool or live near the beach, a regular swim would be a wonderful way to enhance your fitness and overall health.

You can combine your hobbies or pastimes with exercise. Why not take up dancing? This is certainly an activity which has become very popular in the last few years with the advent of reality TV dancing shows. It is the ideal activity for a couple to take up together. It is always more enjoyable to share an activity and dancing lends itself to this.

If you feel that you need more incentive than the prospect of improved health and wellbeing to keep going with whatever regime you undertake, it may an idea to keep regular notes on your progress. If you are walking one and a half miles a day, for example, keep a diary and add up the mileage at regular intervals. You will feel a sense of pride knowing that you have walked half a marathon in two weeks. That would be nearly 550 miles in a year. That would have a lot of health benefits and it is achieved in achievable portions. Do the same if you are swimming laps, and you will soon find them adding up to impressive figures.

Keep your goals in mind, and don’t make exercise too much of a chore. If you are doing enough to be enjoyable but not so much that it is something that you dread doing, then you are on the right path.