How to Burn Calories with Activity

Everything we eat, no matter how healthy or unhealthy, contains calories. Calories in food provide the necessary energy for us to do our daily activities. In a week, we use up an average amount of calories per day. This is called Basal Metabolic Rate. To manage your weight, it’s important to know your BMR. Your BMR refers to the amount of calories you consume in order to perform your regular activities and maintain your weight.

Read Body Mass Index Defined for more information about BMR and BMI

However, most don’t really want to maintain weight, but rather shed weight or gain weight (former more common than latter). Losing weight requires a deficit in calorie intake. We have to consume calories in a day that is lower than our BMR. To do that, we have to minimize high-calorie foods, control portios AND burn calories through exercise and activities.

There are three types of activities we can do to burn calories:

• Sports

If you already play sports, keep it up. For example, you can burn calories at a rate of 200 calories per hour playing golf? But increase the number of hours or days that you play as an hour’s worth of golf barely burns a regular latte. If you play tennis, you’d be glad to know it burn calories at the rate of 560 per hour. That’s a significant amount! Another sport that burn calories great is boxing. This can burn calories at approximately 420 per hour.

• Exercise

You can go to the gym or work out at home. By running on the treadmill for half an hour, you burn calories at a rate of 150 to 250 per hour. Try to increase the intensity by setting it at a faster pace. That will surely burn more calories. Lifting weights is also an important part of a workout regimen. You can burn 170 to 250 calories for an hour of light to moderate weight lifting. If you’re looking for something that’s not as strenuous, you can try Tai Chi, a Chinese martial art, one hour of which can burn calories at 280 per hour.

• Everyday activities

You’d be happy to know that simple everyday activities can expend those calories. Walking your dog for half an hour can burn calories at  100 to 150 per hour. So don’t break your promise of an afternoon walk with Fido; it will benefit you both. Do some sweeping inside the house or out in the driveway; a half hour will burn 120 to 170 calories for you. Carrying your baby while doing some mall shopping can burn calories at around 200 to 300 per hour. Now, there really isn’t any excuse for you now, is there?

The idea of having to burn calories with activity shouldn’t elicit a groan. When you exercise more, you grow muscles which burn calories more and raises your BMR. You should actually be happy because there are just so many things you can do on a daily basis that will help you burn calories and lose weight.

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What is a Diet?

To many people, dieting connotes restrictions and limitations in the foods that they take. But diet, overall, simply refers to the types of foods you select on a day-to-day basis. Some would jokingly say that they are on a chocolate diet or a diet of all things deep-fried.

Your diet corresponds to the outcome you see in your body. It is unavoidably directly related to your weight. But first, you need to know how much you should weigh; not everybody needs to be 100 pounds. We all have different ideal weights. The weight range that we need to be in tells us that falling below that range makes you underweight and being beyond it makes you overweight. Either case is not good.

There are ideal weight charts that only factor in one’s height. But the more helpful ones are those, which factor in one’s body type as well. There is a different weight range for a person who has a small frame, one who has a medium frame and one with a large frame even if they are all the same height. It’s good to consider your body frame in order to be realistic when it comes to setting weight goals.  To calculate your BMI and see if you are in the healthy range, click here.

Dieting greatly affects weight but it should not mean starving oneself to achieve the ideal weight. That simply does not work or it could but it’s detrimental to your health. To achieve one’s desired weight, provided it’s realistic, there should be a good balance between what foods to eat and the right amount of these foods in one’s diet. Everything we consume contains a number of calories, which give us the energy to do our activities.

• Diet goes hand in hand with the activities we choose to do because to maintain our weight, we need to be eating only the number of calories we can burn.
• To lose weight, one should be eating fewer calories than he can burn. Consequently, if one needs to gain weight, he should be eating more than what he can burn. Losing weight properly and at a healthy pace happens when the person is aware of how many calories he gets from what he eats.
• Counting calories may sound tedious but instead of treating them as numbers, every person who aims for good health should look at calories in food as a way to respond to what the body needs in terms of nourishment.

Nourishment should come from a nutritionally balanced diet. If you target to eat only a certain number of calories per day, you should eat the right foods in right amounts that will add up to that desired number rather than eating only one or two food groups in very large quantities in order to achieve that desired number of calories in food. Remember that your body responds to what you put into it and what you don’t. Review the 7 Rules to Healthy Eating.

Weight is, indeed, a very important thing. It’s not just about aesthetics and it’s definitely not about believing than thin is beautiful. Weight is one of the measurements of our health. Being overweight can lead to a number of chronic diseases; being underweight shows that the body is lacking in essential nutrients and amount of food.

If you enjoyed this article, please take the time and take our fitness survey so we may continue to research articles of interest. Click Here to take survey

Recommended next steps:

Determine Your Diet / Eating Personality and the Fun Fitness Questionnaire

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Review: Wii Yoga

Wii Fit (Amazon affiliate link) is considered to be a good substitute for the health freak people who is fed up going to the gym daily, or self-conscious in yoga or aerobics class. Wii Fit (Amazon affiliate link) is not an easy or smooth workout.

• Wii Fit (Amazon affiliate link) will definitely help one to sweat out.  It includes whole new theories of games which are in the form of exercise. Including balance board peripheral which informs one of how good or what exactly is the level of your performance.

  

  Tree Standing Yoga Poses On Wii Board

• The Standing Yoga Poses on the Balance Board demonstrate Wii Fit’s great benefits.  It measures your center of gravity and provides the practitioner an opportunity for improvement.

The fun side of Wii Fit (Amazon affiliate link) includes aerobic as well as balance activities. In aerobic games there are 18 numbers of games from which one can choose from. The aerobics games consists of step dancing, jogging, hula hoops, Wii Sports just like boxing and much more. While the balance activities is considered to be the most casual. It includes ski slalom, ski jump, snowboarding (in this the balance board is turned sideways), table tilt game in which the weight of the person is shifting in Mercury Meltdown.

• Wii Yoga exercises are helpful in providing positive impact on the health of the person. Wii Yoga focuses more on improving the muscle tone and balances the cardio as well as weight loss.
• The advantage of using it: it provides your weight, body mass index i.e BMI. Another advantage of it is that it shows how much time spent exercising both with the game and from other external activities performed.

After registering with this game and after one has put date of birth as well as height, the person will be told to step on the balance board for weight. Thus from weight and height information the BMI of the person is calculated. Depending on BMI the user is informed of the weight i.e. whether the user is underweight, is ideal or is overweight.
Wii Fit (Amazon affiliate link) Yoga when compared structure wise is just similar to a variety of brain training games. These exercises basically are divided into four groups

1. Aerobic

2. Balance

3. Yoga

4. Muscle.

The first two have already been discussed earlier. While yoga and muscle types give the feel to the person as if doing traditional exercise.

• There are 15 yoga poses and 15 muscle toning moves which are included in the workout. The muscle toning is a combination of parallel stretch as well as push ups. One should always choose a good trainer to guide you through and correct you as and when required. Wii Yoga helps in Weight Loss and is therefore called Weight Loss Yoga.
• Make sure you have the proper Wii Fit Yoga Mat. It is designed basically for Wii Yoga. It is placed in between the Wii board and the flooring. It gives the person comfort. It consists of three layers of material for that added durability. This mat is the best for moving stretches and general workouts.

In Wii Fit (Amazon affiliate link) Yoga balance board is used. This balance board is a bit wider and has an appearance like a bathroom scale but without numbers. Wii Yoga balance board informs and tells how good the performer is what he is doing by measuring his centre of balance. This is the information of Yoga Weight Loss. Click Here to take survey

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Body Mass Index Defined

Health-conscious individuals need to understand weight-related terms. No other word is as closely associated to weight as the word metabolism. People often refer to themselves as having a slow or fast metabolism.
What exactly is Metabolism?   Metabolism refers to all the chemical processes that are taking place within the body by which the food you eat is converted into the energy your body needs to function.
And there are a lot of influencing factors that can influence the metabolic rhythm such as gender, genetic facts, environmental temperature, stress, and also the quality and quantity of exercise. The measurement that evaluates the relationship between body weight and height and is the recommended method by medical professionals to diagnose overweight and obesity is the Body Mass Index (BMI).
There is no such thing as an ideal body weight but there is what you call a healthy weight range.  The Body Mass Index is the height-weight system that will determine this healthy weight range.

The BMI formula (in pounds/inches) is:
Your Weight (in pounds) x 704.5 divided by Your Height (in inches) x Your Height (in inches)

A handy tool used to calculate BMI index is the Body Mass Index Calculator. This is one of the most accurate ways to determine if extra pounds pose health risks. In general, when people use the word metabolism they used this interchangeably with Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR).

How Body Mass Index Classifies Weight

Under 20 (19 for women) = Underweight
Between 20 and 24.99 = Normal Weight
Between 25 and 29.99 = Overweight
Between 30 and 34.99 = Obese Class 1
Between 35 and 39.99 = Obese Class 2
40 and above = Morbid Obesity

This is the sum-total of all the energy consuming process going on in the body while it is resting and the release of this energy is only sufficient for the vital functioning of the heart, lungs, nervous system and kidneys. If the Basal Metabolic Rate is the number of calories your body needs when you are resting and multiplied by your activity level, BMR then lets you estimate how many calories you need to lose weight or maintain your current weight.

If you calculations fall outside of the normal range and you are not an athlete, then consult with a licensed medical practitioner to achieve your goals.