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Burning it Up - Aerobic and Cardiovascular Exercise

What is aerobic exercise?

In a nutshell, aerobic exercise is the type of sustained activity where you engage the large muscles of your body (legs and gluts) for a prolonged period of time. Aerobic exercise increases the need to oxygen that allows these muscles to perform, helps to flush toxins out of the bloodstream, increases your metabolism, and strengthens the heart and lungs. Aerobic activity also requires sustained energy in the form of calories that are used to fuel your workout. Calories stoke the aerobic flame as wood or coal stokes a furnace.

Calories expended = pounds lost. My favorite kind of math!

Math actually isn't my favorite, but here are a couple of simple formulas for you.

Now that you know that math, there are a couple of ways you could go about this (and no, saying that's too much and giving up is not one of them).

1) Burn 500 calories per day with exercise. You burn about 100 calories every ten minutes of sustained aerobic activity when exercising at a challenging level, so a 50 minute aerobic workout each day would burn the 500 calories. If that sound likes too much for some of you, here's another option.

2) Burn 250 calories per day with exercise and eat 250 calories less each day.

The bottom line is, if you burn or expend more calories than you take in, you lose weight. If you take in more calories than you burn, you gain.

Knowing these numbers can also help clear up some issues about being discouraged with only a one or two pound weight loss each week. Two pounds is 7000 calories!! That's a tremendous amount of calories to eliminate through less food or more activity.

The recommended daily intake of calories for the average woman ranges anywhere from 1500 to 2200 calories per day. So, don't minimize your accomplishments, remember you've either burned or given up a lot of calories to lost a pound of fat!

When it comes to the appropriate type of aerobic activity for you, it's a completely personal decision. One mom may love to walk, another may love to run, another may love to dance, hike, use the elliptical machine, swim, bike, or hit the courts for an hour of tennis. It doesn't matter what you do as long as you a) choose something you enjoy and b) DO IT!

If you find your aerobic exercise torturous, you'll hardly look forward to it. But if you find it invigorating, rejuvenating, and inspiring - mark my words, you'll miss it when you can't do it!