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Exercise is important for everyone. The fitter you are, the less your risk of having a heart attack or stroke or developing diabetes or some other crippling and deadly disease. For weight loss, you need to expend a minimum of about 200 to 300 calories a day on a minimum of three to five days a week. Exercising also offers true, tangible benefits that are a real plus to dieters. The following sections describe those benefits

Curbing your appetite

Many people eat out of boredom or habit. True hunger has little to do with why or how much people eat. Think of the mindless nibbling that you do while watching TV, for example. When you're busy and out of the house, on the other hand ' or at least diverted from the call of the kitchen 'you eat less.

Some people say that exercise increases their hunger. But that's one of the greatest exercise-avoidance excuses of all time. The reason? Exercise pulls stored calories ' or energy ' in the forms of glucose and fat out of tissues so that blood glucose levels stay even and you don't feel hungry.

When you first start becoming more active, after a long stretch without any exercise, you may feel hungry initially. It's only temporary. After a day or so into your exercise commitment, any sensations of hunger will be replaced with feelings of well-being. In fact, it's a well-known phenomenon that people who exercise regularly automatically eat better and more healthfully.

Increasing Calorie Burn

The math is simple: the more calories that you burn over the amount that you body needs to maintain its current weight, the greater your weight loss. That's why adding exercise to your reduced calorie plan speeds up your metabolic rate ' the pace at which your body uses calorie. And exercise helps you to lose fat but not muscle, which determines how fast or slow your body burns calories. Fat is relative inert, but muscle is active and needs energy to maintain itself. So the more muscle you have, the more calories your body needs

Protecting against muscle loss

Many studies demonstrate that when a person diets, the weight that's lost is 75 percent fat and 25 percent muscle. And that ratio isn't good. As muscle is lost, your body's ability to burn and use calories is decreased, too. To build muscle, you need to add resistance training, such as lifting weights, to your exercise program.

Improving self-esteem

Exercise pays off physically, but its psychological benefits are dramatic as well. And we're not just talking about a runner's high or an endorphin buzz. Each time you exercise, you're doing something positive for yourself. Some psychologists even prescribe daily exercise for depressed patients and see mood improvements equal to those of prescription antidepressant therapy.

So mush of the weight loss process involves giving up, limiting, and cutting out. But exercise is a positive addition, not a take-away negative, and that's a powerful incentive to tick with. When you feel good about yourself, staying with your weight-loss commitment is easy.

Losing weight more easily and keeping it off

The National Weight Control Registry maintained at the University of Colorado includes more than 3,000 individuals who have lost more than 30 pounds and have kept it off for more than a year. But amazingly, the average loss is 60 pounds, and the average maintenance is six years. So many people actually lose more weight as time went on and have kept it off for a long period of time.

Researchers looked carefully at these success stories and found that one common thread, besides reducing the number of calories they ate, is that these successful losers expended about 2,800 calories in physical activity per week. That translates into about 60 minutes of activity a day. Typically, they combines walking with medium-to-heavy exercise, such as cycling, running, stair climbing, aerobic exercising, and weight lifting. This activity level, researchers say, may be the most important factor in maintaining their success.