Get Plenty of Fresh Air
Welcome to another of my library of Top 100 weight loss tips. This post means we're into single figures, being article number 9 in the informative series that gives it to you straight the best natural ways that you can lose weight.
This post looks at the idea of getting outside more often and breathing in plenty of fresh air as an aid to losing weight. You might be wondering how this could possibly be of any use, but read on and you may be pleasantly surprised at what you find out...
Lose Weight by Breathing Plenty of Fresh Air!
As astounding as this may sound, there is plenty of evidence to show that when you spend more time out of doors in the fresh air, you give yourself more chances to boost your weight loss effort in ways you may not have thought of before. Here's the background to how it works:
If you've been reading through this series of tips for losing weight, you will probably know by now that a large proportion of any weight loss strategy depends for its success on your body being able to metabolize food more efficiently.
It must now be blatantly obvious to you that by spending the majority (if not all) of your waking hours indoors, either slumped in front of the TV or working at a desk or something similar, known as a sedentary lifestyle, you are depressing your metabolism by your body's own inactivity. In other words, by not moving around much and that style of life being the norm, your body's own functions slow down habitually to match that way of life.
Storing Fat
This means that more of the food you eat as part of your regular diet gets stored as fat simply because your body doesn't have any way to convert what you eat into energy for your muscles to use, because they're not using any. So it all gets converted to fat which is stored and you gain weight as well as grow in size.
Another by product of this way of life is that because you are not moving around very much and you are spending so much time inside, the air you breathe becomes more contaminated with additional carbon dioxide while becoming oxygen depleted.
That oxygen depleted air you are breathing also works to further inhibit your metabolism so an even greater proportion of what you consume gets stored as fat, while your muscles actually waste away due to lack of use, lack of nutrients and lack of oxygen.
Why Not Go to the Gym?
To reverse this situation, exercising is essential, as you are probably also very aware. But exercising in a gym means you are still indoors, breathing in stale air. Or worse, recycled air that has been passed through an air conditioning unit to cool it so it seems fresh.
However, it is still oxygen depleted, especially if the gym you are using is exceptionally busy. That's a lot of people all breathing in the same air, taking oxygen from it and enriching it with carbon dioxide!
So to really give your exercises a boost, you can't beat getting outdoors into the fresh air and breathing in natural, oxygen rich air. That oxygen rich air is more abundant in places where there are lots of plants and trees, such as a public park.
The additional oxygen boosts your sluggish body to increase metabolism causing the nutrients you have consumed to get broken down and converted to energy more efficiently. At the same time the oxygen enriched blood flows to the muscles helping them to convert the sugars into energy faster to produce a more efficient calorie burning engine within your body.
Exercis Outdoors
It sounds almost incredible, but it works!
Not only that, but by exercising in a park, you are also boosting the natural daylight that has two additional benefits. It boosts your body's production of vitamin D, which has been shown in recent research to help with the weight loss process.
The extra sunlight also helps to improve your mood by causing your body to produce more serotonin (the feelgood hormone), further adding to your motivation to exercise more, harder and for longer than you would do indoors!
So if you really want to turbo charge your body and burn those excess calories, get outside in the fresh air and burn even more!
100 Weight Loss Tips number 8 follows in the next post!
[BACK TO TOP]
Posted on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 in Top 100 Weight Loss Tips | 4 Comments
4 thoughts on "Get Plenty of Fresh Air"
Slim Healthy and Fit says:
As a martial arts instructor, I teach students from the very beginning the importance of proper breathing. Before we ever throw a punch or do a pushup, we practice our breathing.
This is one of the simplest things people can do to see the greatest positive effects concerning their health.
Adam says:
Some really good tips for losing weight here, thanks. You can also find some good ideas in other places online but so far I haven't found anything with so much information as your site here!
Roger says:
When I was losing weight I would crave a variety of different foods. My best solution to that was to either fix it myself or have my wife fix the particular food that I was craving. That way, I could smell it, even go up to the pan to get a close look and intake of breath but I would not eat it. Do you know the smell itself was enough to satisfy my cravings?
I know it sounds pretty crazy but for me it worked. Maybe its because doing it gave me a sense of power by smelling the food but not eating it. Incidentally, my wife also lost weight, just not in as drastic a fashion as myself! Thanks for the post.
Furnas says:
Awesome post! I have been looking for a new fitness routine in google and I found your blog. I just started a program and I am pretty clueless.