Getting in shape is usually a two pronged attack. Firstly, you need to make sure that the number of calories you’re consuming isn’t excessive, and secondly you need to be getting enough exercise to burn that same energy off.

Eating And Nutrition

First, we’ll briefly cover food – most people already know this, but there’s still some people that swear they don’t overeat yet pile on the pounds. Sorry guys, but that’s just not true. Overeating, by definition, is eating more than you should. You burn a certain amount of calories every day just from being alive (think breathing, heartbeat, wandering around the house and so on), but the rest gets used by the additional activity you take on – or to put it another way – exercise!

Quite simply, if the number of calories you take on exceeds what you burn off, you’ll gain weight. No exceptions! Yes, admittedly when you go to the toilet for a ‘longer stay’ you’ll lose a few calories, but the human body is incredibly efficient and it’s unusual to lose more than five to ten percent of your daily intake from the other end.

Getting Active

As a broad approximation, the body’s activity that keeps you alive burns approximately a calorie per minute. It does vary a lot though. Generally women are slightly lower, but it’s a good rule of thumb. Doing a bit of maths tells us that we therefore use up 60 calories per hour, and in turn 1440 per day. That means that if you’re consuming 2500 calories a day (to use the male guideline as an example), you’re going to need to get rid of an average 1,060 calories per day through activity to balance the energy books, so to speak.

It might not sound a lot until you put it in context. Walking a mile will burn approximately 100 calories for an average man, so you’ll need to walk over ten miles a day to make up the calories. The good news is if you’re overweight you’ll burn more per mile, as you’re heavier, so more work to carry yourself around, however it’s unlikely to increase by more than 20% per mile, so you’ll still need an eight to nine mile stroll. For most people, that’s going to sound like a mammoth effort.

That’s why we recommend visiting the gym or exercising at home. You can buy a relatively inexpensive cross trainer, which is great for raising your heart rate and maintaining activity for a decent workout over half an hour or so. It’s also great because it’s designed to make you work harder than walking, so you can almost certainly achieve more in less time.

We’re often asked what the best one to buy is, but the answer is almost always that you get what you pay for. If money is no object, we’d recommend buying something that gets consistently good reviews on the web like the JTX Tri-Fit, particularly in places like Amazon where a lot of purchases are made. As you can see from this JTX Tri-Fit cross trainer’s star ratings, there’s a lot of positives for this type of elliptical machine, so it is a great choice if you can afford it:

It’s not the only equipment that will help you get fit at home though, all the other bits of gym kit are fine too, whether it’s the exercise bikes, rowing machines, treadmills or even going for a run around the block. The point is you need to burn off those calories, so the more you eat, the more you need to work out to counteract it if you want to shed those pounds. In other words, you need to use more than you take on.

If you want to learn more, there’s a good amount of information in this home cross trainer review website.