When I finally got fed up with being rotund, the first thing I did was clean up my diet. However, this wasn’t enough to help me lose weight consistently. With the amount of fat I needed to lose, nutrition alone just wasn’t going to cut it; so I started an exercise program to keep those fat burning results coming. Here’s how to use exercise to send unwanted body fat packing.

Do Plenty of Cardio

In order to lose one pound of fat you have to burn 3500 calories. It’s almost impossible to achieve this without doing cardiovascular exercises. Aim to get cardio (with an emphasis on high intensity interval training) five days a week. If you’re super busy (like most of us) and find it hard to squeeze cardio into your day, break your workouts up into chunks.

Here’s an example of how you can break your cardio workouts into manageable pieces:

• Run on a treadmill for 15 minutes when you wake up.
• Take a brisk 15 minute walk around the parking lot during your lunch break.
• Pop in a workout video and exercise for 15 to 30 minutes before dinner.

Don’t feel like your only options for good cardio workouts are treadmills and exercise bikes. There’s nothing wrong with these machines, they work great. But if you do them all the time, they can get sort of humdrum. There are plenty of other ways to get your heart jumping. Some examples include kick boxing, mowing the lawn, gardening, jumping rope and swimming.

Pump a Little Iron

Many women avoid weights like the plague. They fear pumping iron will make them look bulky and masculine. This is absolutely not true. Unless you use some sort of performance-enhancing drug when you lift weights, the possibility of looking like the Hulk is slim.

When you build lean muscle tissue by lifting weights, it kicks your metabolism into high gear and helps you slim down. Keep in mind, the more lean muscle mass you have, the more calories your body will burn—even when you’re stretched out on the couch doing nothing (nice!).

Also, lean muscle mass is compact so it takes up less space than fat. Any lean muscle tissue you build lifting weights will tone your body and give you a streamlined physique. Ladies, if you really want to get in shape, put your fears of huskiness to rest and pump weights three times a week.

Sample Workout Plan to Get You Started

In one of my past newsletters, I talked about building a foundation by focusing on mastering the basics—lunges, squats, pushing, twisting and pulling. Do the below exercise back to back. After you do the entire circuit, repeat all five exercises two more times.

• Bodyweight squats – 10 to 20 repetitions
• Bodyweight lunges – 8 on each leg
• Modified pushups on your knees 10 to 15 repetitions
• Assisted pull ups – 10 repetitions
• Medicine ball or dumbbell woodchop – 10 repetitions per side

As your fitness level increases, you can build on these exercises to make them more challenging by increasing resistance and making them more complex.

There’s nothing like waking up every morning looking and feeling your best. Anything less is unacceptable. Let The Diet Solution Program show you these tried and true methods that I’ve used to help me lose weight.