Keep Moving to Manage Your Weight

You can lose weight by dieting, exercising, or a combination of both. Including exercise into your daily routine offers other benefits besides weight control: It boosts your stamina, increases your muscle strength, improves your balance and your mood, and reduces your risk for some cancers.

If you don't exercise, or slack off on your exercise routine, you lose lean muscle and may end up adding on fat, says James M. Rippe, M.D., a healthy lifestyle specialist in Boston. By keeping active, you keep your metabolism ramped up to burn calories.

Be sure to check with your health care provider before starting an exercise program.

Watch your calories

Even with exercise, you still need to watch how many calories you eat. One way to reduce your daily calories is to keep your fat intake to no more than 30 percent of your daily calories. Fats contain 9 calories per gram, and carbohydrates contain only 4 calories per gram. So, by cutting down on fat, you can cut down on total calories. Just be careful not to replace all those calories from fat that you are avoiding with an equal number of calories from carbohydrates.

Exert yourself

Without physical activity, your metabolism slows with age, leaving you less healthy— and looking like it. If you don't exercise, you can't effectively manage your weight, Dr. Rippe says.

A lot of people blame their spreading middle on a metabolism genetically locked in slow gear. "What's really happened is that we have the middle-age spread because we've slowed down; we've become less active," he says.

Combine weights and aerobics

To raise your metabolism, Amy Jo Sutterluety, Ph.D., a sport medicine specialist in Columbus, Ohio, recommended lifting small dumbbells, combined with aerobic training.

Start with dumbbells weighing between 2 and 5 pounds each. Try two sets of 10 to 15 repetitions for each exercise for the first three weeks to a month. After this, you can add more weight and more sets of each exercise. Include aerobic exercise such as walking, running, bicycling, or swimming. Ideally, this should be done for 60 minutes most days of the week.