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A sedentary lifestyle can be a major obstacle to getting a leaner figure, as you need to move more to burn more calories. This will seem like a daunting task to many, especially in office or sedentary work. But there are simple ways to increase your activity level naturally. In this article, we will look at simple ways and illustrate with specific examples that everything is possible – you just need to take it and do it.
How to increase your calorie expenditure?
The more calorie consumption, the more effective weight loss is – this is a fact. High calorie consumption allows you not to cut your diet too much, helps you become more active and makes weight loss comfortable. Our body constantly spends calories not only on movement, but also on maintaining temperature, breathing, heartbeat. Unfortunately, it is difficult to achieve a significant expense just by playing sports, unless you do it daily. Daily long-term workouts are the prerogative of athletes, and for ordinary people, three workouts per week are enough and the increase in energy expenditure due to non-workout activity.
The sedentary trap
The human body is designed to move. Finding their own food, our ancestors hunted animals for hours and worked in the fields. In the long periods of modern history, physical labor was the only way to feed ourselves. Automation of production and the appearance of household appliances made our work easier, and television and the Internet brightened up our leisure time, but made us sedentary. The average person spends 9,3 hours a day sitting. And this is without taking into account sleep, watching TV and chatting on the Internet. Our body is not designed for such a lifestyle. It suffers, gets sick, gets overgrown with fat.
A sedentary lifestyle reduces calorie expenditure to 1 calorie per minute and reduces the production of enzymes for burning fat by 90%. Daily prolonged immobility leads to increased cholesterol levels and decreased insulin resistance. A sedentary lifestyle leads to poor posture and muscle atrophy, and also provokes hemorrhoids.
According to statistics, overweight people spend 2,5 hours more sitting than slim people. And over the years of rapid development of information technology from the 1980s to the 2000s, the number of obese people has doubled.
There is a way out, even if you work in a sedentary job 8 hours a day.
Ways to Increase Activity Outside Home and Work
If you decide to lose weight, then you will have to become more active than you are now. The easiest way to increase your activity is to find an active activity that you enjoy. Cross stitching will not work. Look for something that will make you move.
Active hobby options:
- Roller skating or ice skating;
- Cycling;
- Nordic walking;
- Dance classes;
- Classes in the section of martial arts.
An active hobby can help you take your free time, but if you are working in a sedentary job, look for opportunities to break away from your chair.
Ways to be more active at work
Ways to be more active at work:
- Get off one stop earlier and walk (can be done both before and after work);
- During the break, do not sit in the office, but go for a walk;
- Do a light warm-up during your coffee break.
The worst thing to do with a sedentary lifestyle is to come home to sit down at the computer or in front of the TV again. However, you can combine business with pleasure – do a set of exercises or exercise on the simulator while watching your favorite show.
Ways to Increase Your Activity at Home
If you spend most of your time at home, use the following ways to burn more calories.
Ways to increase your activity at home:
- Household chores;
- Hand wash;
- Active games with children;
- Shopping trip;
- Active dog walking;
- Performing an easy set of exercises.
It is important to understand that the point of these actions boils down to simply increasing your calorie consumption, which will allow you to lose weight faster and more efficiently. And if you turn this process into an exciting game “Get rid of excess calories”, then by the end of the week the result will pleasantly surprise you. To get yourself to move more, place things as far away from where you use them as possible. For example, put the printer in a far corner to get up from your workplace more often, and at home, deliberately lose the TV remote control to change channels manually. Train your body to be active playfully!
How to spend more calories without being noticed
Let’s look at the example of a day of two women weighing 90 kg, but one leads a sedentary lifestyle, and the other is active.
In the first case, the daily routine of an ordinary person is sleep, light morning exercises, personal hygiene, cooking and eating, walking to and from bus stops, sitting in the office, watching TV for two hours, and taking a shower. A woman weighing 90 kg will spend a little more than two thousand calories on this activity.
Now look at this example. Here are the same activities, but this woman went out during her work break to buy groceries and walked a few extra hundred meters on the way home. She gave up the elevator, did light homework in the form of a hand wash, spent an hour of time actively playing with her child, and while watching her favorite TV series, she did simple exercises for balance and stretching. As a result, she managed to burn a thousand more calories!
No exhausting workouts and active hobbies, but a natural increase in activity, which allowed us to increase calorie expenditure by a thousand. Who do you think will lose weight faster? And add here workouts, an active hobby and uncounted regular getting up from a place and calorie consumption will increase even more.
You, too, can calculate your energy expenditure in the calorie consumption analyzer and think about how you can increase it. The main thing is that it should be easy and natural for you. So that you can maintain approximately the same level of activity every day.