One of the best ways to lose weight, and keep it off, is to exercise regularly and vigorously. Regular exercise gets the muscles working harder. The individual cells burn extra calories during exercise. And the cells continue to burn calories for hours, even after you’ve stopped exercising. That means you continue to lose weight even when you’re not exercising.
Muscle cells use more energy at rest than fat cells do. So exercising, dieting away excess fat and building up weak muscles makes it easier for you to control your weight.
Exercise also helps control your appetite. Contrary to popular belief, vigorous exercise doesn’t make you hungry. So regular exercise should be a part of any weight-control program—a lifelong program.
For the reasons I’ve just discussed, and more, exercise adds health and zest to your years, and years to your life. This has been confirmed by a long-term study of 17,000 Harvard graduates. Those men who did enough exercise to burn at least 2,000 calories a week lived longer than those who exercised less or not at all. It takes the equivalent of about five hours of brisk walking, or four hours of jogging, to burn 2,000 calories.
Even the exercisers who had high blood pressure, a family history of early death or who smoked, benefitted.
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