Why should I actually exercise?

The truth is that exercise, or being active, is simply vital for long-term health, and especially important for fat loss and maintaining an ideal body weight and body composition.

Aside from using up excess calories during the actual time you are exercising, regular exercise literally trains or teaches the body to better use its own fat stores for energy, as well as helping the body to effectively respond to sugars and fats in the diet.

In other words exercise helps you to better use the food you eat for energy, as opposed to storing it – as fat.

Those people who find spaces in their lives for regular activity are more likely to successfully lose weight and maintain that lost weight than those who don’t.

Exercise also raises the metabolic rate at rest, meaning more calories are burned when not exercising.

An effective exercise programme should include both aerobic (or cardiovascular) exercise and strength (or resistance) work.

It must also be regular and consistent. Anyone can exercise and eat well for a day, it is consistency that is the key.

The weight loss achieved by regular exercise tends to be more fat loss as opposed to lean tissue loss, which is often what happens with dieting alone.

Maintaining the body’s lean muscle tissue through exercise means the metabolic rate is not disturbed.

In fact, working the muscles regularly actually lifts the metabolism.

Losing lean muscle, which can happen over time with normal ageing, results in a lowered metabolic rate - the opposite of what a person is trying to achieve when wanting to lose excess fat.

It is a major frustration of mine that whenever diets or nutrition plans are mentioned in the media or on TV is that they are never mentioned in line with a significant raise of your daily activity levels to result in a successful and sustained amount of fat loss.

It isn’t just about going to the gym or doing a session once or twice per week with a personal trainer but a total change in your daily activity levels.

I was that person, making excuses that I haven’t got the time to prepare anything to eat, living in hotels, travelling the UK in my surveying job, endless business meetings and entertaining usually with high calorie meals fuelled with alcohol.

I went from a young, very fit, athletically-built guy in his late teens and early 20s, playing rugby union at a very high professional and semi-professional level at 90kgs or just over 14stones in weight to an overweight, sluggish guy with a waist eight inches bigger and five stone in weight heavier at 124kgs or 19-and-a-half stone. I was FAT!

In our modern day sedentary lives, we spend less time moving around and more time sitting down both at work and in our leisure time in front of the television.

The traditional family meal has been replaced to some extent by TV dinners; how often do you come home, very hungry after a long stressful day at work and sit down to a large meal and then sit down in front of the television to unwind with a large glass of wine or a cold beer in hand?

I would say this is a typical picture of most peoples' lives these days.

We consume a large calorie meal (often the right foods but the wrong balance of foods) together with alcohol and our food digests with our bodies being more and more inactive. Have you ever thought of the calorific content?

So it's even more important to be more active than ever, go out and engage all the family and have some fun.

Don’t take the lazy option but actually make the effort, especially at this time of year when the weather is better and the evenings are still quite light; you may well be surprised as to how good it makes you feel. You will probably sleep better too.

Exercise does not only have an aesthetic benefit but it can also:

• Reduce the risk of heart disease, encourage an increase in the amount of red blood cells in your body and also promote more oxygenated blood in your system to rid it of the impurities so your heart can function at its optimum.

• Improve your resting heart rate by lowering it, so it doesn’t have to work so hard to pump blood around your body, thus enabling your muscles to perform at their very best.

• Improve your respiratory functionality; being able to improve your lung capacity means that cleaner oxygenated blood can flow around your body, keeping your body running at its optimum.

• Stimulates muscle growth and, in the case of resistance training, it helps stimulate calcium production for bone growth, no matter what age you are. This will also in turn help improve your posture, functionality and performance.

• Great way to manage stress, by releasing the feel good ‘endorphins’ into your body through your nervous system.

• Educate, provide motivation and support by helping you to learn about your own physique and feel more in tune with your own body.

• Transform or change the way you think about exercise, particularly if you had a bad experience at school.

• Enable the setting of goals and targets for any personal health and fitness reason.

• Help bring fun and enjoyment to your life, its meant to be fun, so don’t take it too seriously!

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