Six Reasons To Move More

Movement and exercise is a vital component for wellbeing, with the benefits it brings to our emotional, mental and physical health being huge.

It has been used as one of the most common ways people attempt to ‘lose weight’ or ‘burn fat’. Exercise and movement is a necessity for healthy and successful weight loss, but no one component will solve weight issues. Exercise needs to be included for many reasons, and all of these are only because they create a healthy body. It is only once you have created a healthy body, your body can then release unnecessary body fat. While your body isn’t living in optimum health, any weight loss that takes place won’t be a long term successful reduction – extra body fat is only a message telling you something is not functioning to your body’s preference.

It is important for exercise to be an important part of everybody's lifestyle, regardless of weight loss goals, and it is even more important to realise there are so many different ways you can exercise that don't include pounding treadmills or going to gyms. Exercise really is just a name given to moving in a way that brings health benefits. As a culture we are doing more set exercise (such as gym sessions) now than we ever have, but we aren't moving incidentally nearly anywhere near we should. This is leading us to de-evolve in our health and wellbeing, rather than evolve.

Daily movement and being active is so important, and it doesn't need to be intense and prolonged - it's just about moving your body! In fact, light to moderate exercise brings about many more health benefits than intense and prolonged exercise does.

Here are six reasons why exercise will make you feel healthier and/or help with weight loss goals...

• Puffing, sweating and breathing eliminates toxins from our body’s. If we don’t do enough, these toxins build up and the liver starts to store these in our fat stores leading us to feeling sluggish and unenergetic. Movement and exercise helps the liver speed up its ability to filter the toxins from the foods we eat and the toxins from the environment out of our bloodstream through our body’s methods of detoxification – sweating, puffing and heavy breathing.
  
  
  
• The more we move, the better we digest food. Moving activates our abdominal muscles, which in turn aids significantly in the movement of food through our digestive tract. Exercise is one of the best remedies for constipation for this very reason.
  
  
  
• Exercise produces several important ‘feel-good’ mood regulating hormones – endorphins, dopamine and serotonin, to name a few. These all create a feeling of achievement, feelings of self-worth, an increase in energy, and a general sense of wellness and happiness. All these feelings are vital to ensure our pleasure quota gets filled regularly, and to help to motivate us to continue being healthy. Exercise is often classed as the ‘gateway to health’ because it instigates many other healthy habits through the release of these ‘feel-good’ hormones.
  
  
  
• Exercise and improving strength speeds up our metabolic rate which improves the speed that we convert food to energy – meaning simply that we burn through the food we eat much faster and more efficiently.
  
  
  
• When we exercise we utilise carbohydrate energy first, and through exercising, these stores become depleted much quicker which in turn allows insulin levels to decrease and we begin to burn fat. Without lots of movement in our day we rarely will burn off the available energy we have, let alone touch the fat in our fat stores.
  
  
  
• Ascetically, exercise improves many areas of our appearance, such as our physical composition, muscle tone, glowing complexion, strong posture, confidence in the way we walk, and an overall fresher, healthier and happier persona. All these things are superficial to who you are as a person, they do not make you any ‘better’, but they do go a long way to you feeling good about yourself and your appearance, and feeling like you take care of yourself well.