Why all the fuss over this “light-hearted” form of dance exercise? It’s simple: Low impact aerobic classes supply people with a means of obtaining and maintaining a high level of fitness, while avoiding undue stress and strain on the body’s vulnerable points such as the knees, shins, ankles, and feet.

Low-impact classes involve movements that mimic those of their high-impact cousins, but the pace is slowed down considerably. Rhythmic motions are performed in a controlled manner, and one foot remains on the floor at all times.

Hopping and jumping, for example, are excluded and replaced with, say, marching or fast walking. The underlying rationale is to “keep it all moving,” while minimizing harsh jarring.

Low impact aerobics programs are designed to incorporate many muscle groups simultaneously, demanding the heart to work harder. Exercise becomes extremely efficient when the smaller muscles of the upper extremities are engaged along with the larger muscles found in the lower extremities.

Low impact aerobic routines consist of simple dance-like combinations, walking variations, sweeping full-body movements, and upper-body strengthening exercises. Since the legs do not play as active a role as they do in high-impact aerobics, the arms are used more extensively to elevate the heart rate to a desired level.

Take chocolate, for example, I can’t tell you it’s good for you. But eating a small quantity infrequently won’t harm you. If you deprive yourself, that’s unrealistic. Also unrealistic is the idea that gimmicks and fad diets are successful ways to lose weight.

It’s easy to lose weight. What’s tricky is keeping it off. That requires a permanent change in eating and exercise habits that most people are unwilling to make.

Also be wary of extreme weight loss measures such as Oprah’s liquid protein diet. That diet is very risky and expensive. It should only be undertaken by extremely obese people who’ve failed to lose weight every other way.

Starving oneself isn’t safe and often isn’t effective for causing weight loss anyway. There’s a misconception that you will lose weight by only consuming 400 or 500 calories a day. But your body will suppress your metabolism to compensate so you might even gain weight. You’d have to keep eating less and less. It would be very devastating to your health.

Instead, people should eat a reasonable amount and exercise to keep their metabolism up. The word, exercise, turns people off. By exercise, I didn’t mean jogging in the snow or getting sweaty and yucky in the gym – just keeping active will do.

For diet, be sure to include plenty of fibre and starchy carbohydrates, minimize the amount of fat and pay attention to the amount of salt and sugar. Drink plenty of water as well – it’s a very forgotten nutrient.

Moderation is recommended for children’s diets as well. Restricting diet at an early age is too extreme and can cause growth retardation. Children need more fat and cholesterol than adults. Children should drink whole milk until they are at least two years old and never drink skim milk until they’re teenagers.

Overweight children should never be put on a weight loss diet. Instead, their current weight should be maintained until they grow into it.

Children needn’t be deprived of sugar either. Believe it or not, sugar has a clean bill of health. It doesn’t cause hyperactivity. It has been linked to dental caries, but the concern is more for dental hygiene than eating sugar.

On the other hand, sugar has no nutrients so no one needs to eat it. But it’s not realistic to deprive children of foods they’ll encounter elsewhere. However, they should know the difference between healthy foods and treats. Treats are okay in moderation, but not as substitutes for healthy foods.

Adults needn’t be overly concerned about sugar in their diets either. It’s more important to limit the amount of fat. We eat so much more fat than needed. We’re probably better off with jam on our toast or syrup on our pancakes instead of butter.

So there you have it. You can really eat anything you want and still lose weight if you follow the nutritionists’ advice about moderation.

When it comes to the battle of the bulge, most Americans are losing. For some, the reason is too much inactivity. For others, it’s a combination of inactivity and poor nutrition. Obesity is on the rise, not only among adults, but for children as well. On average, Americans put on 1 to 2 pounds annually between the ages of 20 and 50, typically because of their high-fat diet and too little exercise.

Research has constantly pointed out that exercise can help reverse this damaging health trend, but renewed emphasis is being placed on the role of nutrition in promoting weight loss and a heart-healthy lifestyle.

If people would only follow guidelines regarding proper nutrition, there would be a considerable decrease in deaths due to heart disease. Cancer deaths would drop another 30 to 40 percent as well. These are big numbers and represent millions of lives.

Proper nutrition for weight loss and health starts at your local supermarket and favorite restaurants. The problem is that people do what they want to do when it comes to food, instead of doing what they know they should.

Proper nutrition should be everyone’s concern. If people have interest to spend the time exercising during the week to maintain or improve their health, then they should carry it full circle by paying attention to good nutrition as well. And this means drastically reducing their dietary fat intake.

The dietary fats that you can see (butter, cream cheese, heavy cream, etc.) and the hidden fats you can’t see (fat in ice cream, meat products, etc.) are the real enemies in your diet. Exercise alone will not rid your body of the fat laid on by these culprits.

Combined with good nutrition, however, you can certainly bring about tremendous reversals. Reducing fat from the diet take some willpower and commitment.

Increase the amounts of fruits, vegetables and grains that you eat, while cutting back on red meats, fried foods and rich desserts.

As difficult as weight loss can be, weight maintenance is a daunting challenge. Studies of individuals on commercial weight loss programs indicate a high percentage of initial success, followed by a high percentage of weight regain. Within three years, the vast majority of dieters have returned to their pre-diet weight. While each case varies, many of the people who manage to keep the weight off permanently do so with the help of a regular exercise program.

Diets alone can actually slow your metabolism as your body grows accustomed to smaller quantities of food. Regular exercise, on the other hand, boosts your metabolism and burns extra calories to boot. And, exercise doesn’t have to be grueling. Over the past years, research has shown that moderate aerobic exercise performed three times a week for 20 minutes of longer is very effective at improving fitness.

Add weight resistance training to your weekly schedule and you can even increase your resting metabolic rate (the number of calories you burn to maintain normal bodily functions such as circulation and respiration) by increasing your muscle mass.

The key to adherence is selecting exercise activities that appeal to you. If you enjoy dancing, the following exercise will raise your heart rate to a training level.

• Start by standing with your feet together. Touch your left foot on the floor to your left side as you hop on your right foot.

• Extend your left arm toward your left side, following the motion of your leg.

• Next, hop on both feet, bringing them back together in the middle, as you extend both arms downward.

• Reverse the movements to the right side, and continue by alternating sides for 15 sets.

Combine these movements with other dance exercise steps for a 20-minute workout. And remember, before beginning any exercise program, it is advisable to check with your physician.

When carbohydrates are eliminated or drastically reduced, a person’s appetite is diminished. That is because the body switches over to using protein and fat, and there is a chemical change in the body, called ketosis.

The hardest part of dieting for many people is controlling their appetites. But if you can consume just the same number of calories, regardless of the diet composition, you will lose the same amount of weight.

All low calorie diets are potentially dangerous. Semi-starvation is not the right approach to weight loss. Yes, the very low carbohydrate diets can lead to fatty deposits in the liver. The emphasis on proteins, particularly fat meats and other foods high in saturated fats, and even eggs, may significantly increase the total cholesterol levels.

The proper diet for weight loss is not a low calorie diet, but rather a balanced diet that includes all of the four basic food groups. It should provide 1,200 calories a day for adults. Anything less can lead to problems and needs to be managed by a physician. The low calorie diets being promoted today usually produce only temporary results. All you need to do is look at Oprah Winfrey’s story of rapid weight loss and not too long afterward, a rapid weight gain, back to where she started. That is the usual story. If you want to lose weight, you need to be on a program you can follow for life.

Don’t forget the value of exercise. A proper limited-calorie diet (rather than a very low calorie diet) along with a good exercise program is essential. And it really doesn’t matter if you have three or six meals a day. Calories do count and the total calorie intake is the important factor.

Losing weight (and trying to keep it off) is a major preoccupation for many adults in this country. Doctors tell us that being overweight is unhealthy. The media tell us that being overweight is unattractive. And the diet industry tells us (in no uncertain terms) that weight control can be a highly profitable business – for everybody but the person trying to figure out how to lose weight, for whom it can be a very expensive business.

How many times have you prayed for a magic pill or diet that would instantly solve your weight problem? How many times have you succumbed to the outrageous claims made for various diets, in the hope that this could be the one? How many pills or shots have you taken to try to lose those extra pounds quickly? How many times have you heard that the only thing that will really help you lose weight is to change your eating habits and increase your exercise? How many times have you rejected that advice as boring and impossible?

That many, huh?

Well, you’re going to hear it again, but this time with suggestions to make it easier.

While it is true that the only way to lose weight is to take in fewer calories than you burn, it is not as difficult as you might think to cut down on the number of calories you eat. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to give up everything you like to eat. It may just mean that you have to make room for food with fewer calories and more nutrients. Here’s how it works.

Your body is using up calories all the time, whether you are moving around or not. The rate at which you burn calories while at total rest is called your resting, or basal metabolic, rate. For women this is about 11 calories per pound of body weight and for men it is about 12. This means that if you are a woman who weighs 150 pounds, your body needs to take in about 1,650 calories a day just to exist. If you are engaged in light exercising, you multiply the BMR by 1 6, giving you approximately 2,400 calories to play with, moderate exercise activity requires somewhere around 3,450 calories (23 x BMR).

Let’s assume that this 150-pound woman is eating 2,500 calories a day and is doing light activity. If she cuts down her calories to 1,500 per day and does not change her exercisee pattern, in about 1 1/2 days she will lose a pound. If she begins to do moderate exercise and only eats 1,500 calories per day, it will take less time to lose the same pound.

You probably already know how to increase your activity level, but where can you cut those calories to make your weight loss plan as painless as possible?

• Instead of eating 1 croissant, substitute 1 plain bagel to save 72 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 whole egg, substitute 1 egg white to save 47 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 oz of Cheddar cheese, substitute 1 oz of part-skim mozzarella to save 42 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 tablespoon of cream cheese, substitute 1 tablespoon of 1 percent cottage cheese to save 35 calories.

• Instead of eating 35 oz of untrimmed beef, substitute 35 oz of trimmed beef to save 75 calories.

• Instead of eating 35 oz of lamb chop (broiled), substitute 35 oz of lean leg of lamb (broiled) to save 220 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 oz of regular bacon, substitute 1 oz of Canadian bacon to save 110 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 beef hot dog, substitute 1 chicken hot dog to save 67 calories.

• Instead of eating fast food French fries, substitute 1 baked potato (plain) to save 126 calories.

• Instead of eating 1 cup of ice cream (premium), substitute 1 cup of sorbet to save 350 calories.

The substitutions on this list also save many grams of fat and cholesterol, as well as calories. If you read labels, pay attention to what you are eating and eliminate the true junk food from your diet, you can come up with a 3,500 calorie savings in no time.

If you also start moving around and exercising a little more, you will lose weight even faster.

Now make no mistake, losing weight is hard work, requiring a lot of consistency and it will not work very quickly. But it is the most sensible way to lose weight, does not put money in anybody else’s pocket and will help you change your eating habits.

Why diets don’t work

For decades, experts believed that weight problems were caused simply because people ate too much. That is, they consumed more calories than their bodies needed and the extra calories were stored as fat. New research, however, suggests that the real reason some people are heavier than others may have more to do with physiological differences between people than with how much they eat.

The most appropriate approach to preventing obesity may be to increase physical activity, rather than decrease caloric intake. There’s another reason why cutting calories alone doesn’t work.

Surprising as it may sound, crash dieting may actually cause you to gain weight in the long run. How? Drastically cutting back on calories can slow down your metabolism (the rate at which you burn calories). Each of our bodies has an internal control mechanism, or setpoint, that drives the body to maintain a certain amount of body fat. When we diet to lose weight, our bodies automatically try to compensate by conserving body fat – in effect slowing down our metabolism.

What’s a dieter to do?

Researchers are now pretty much convinced that increasing your activity is the easiest – and safest – way to lose weight. By increasing your physical activity instead of cutting back on calories, you won’t have to go around feeling hungry and miserable all day long. That means you’re more likely to stick with a sensible diet plan and make the weight loss stick, too.

Regular exercise helps you burn fat. Exercise slows down the rate of protein breakdown in your skeletal muscle, which means that an even greater portion of the calories will be burned as fat. You can see the results in groups of people who exercise regularly throughout their lives. Obesity is virtually nonexistent among nomadic people in Africa – even when fat comprises up to 70 per cent of the diet. Those people keep up a lifelong modest level of exercise. Their low body fat seems to be related to that continuous activity.

Dieting alone, on the other hand, usually causes you to lose water during the first several weeks, which you gain right back after you go off your diet. If you can manage to stick to a low-calorie diet for more than a few weeks, you’ll shed some fat, but the accompanying muscle loss can zap your strength. And although you won’t rapidly lose weight by exercising, you’ll probably notice improvements in your appearance fairly soon.

Since you’re building lean muscle mass, which weighs more than the fat you’re losing, your clothing size may drop before your weight follows suit.

But won’t exercise stimulate your appetite and make you want to eat more? That’s a myth. While it’s true that athletes in training do require more calories than most of us, studies have shown that regular, moderate exercise doesn’t appear to have much effect on the caloric intake of the average person.

If exercise is such a great way to lose weight, wouldn’t exercise and dieting work even better? Yes! In fact, scientific research is full of examples of the role of exercise in weight loss.

The beauty of combing exercise and diet, of course, is that you don’t have to cut calories so drastically, since the calories you burn during exercise add to the calorie deficit you need to lose weight. And since exercise helps stoke up your body’s calorie-burning abilities, it counteracts the detrimental effects that dieting alone has on metabolism.

If you decide to combine the two, just remember to diet sensibly. To start, make sure you take in at least 1,200 calories a day. If you eat any less than that, you’ll be short changing yourself nutritionally. One of the best ways to cut back on calories is to cut fat from your diet. That’s because fat has more calories (9 per gram) than protein or carbohydrates (4 calories per gram). And some studies suggested that it’s possible to gain weight on a low-calorie diet that’s high in fat.

In view of the millions of dollars Americans spend on weight loss programs and fitness, it is incredible that they swallow so much dietary nonsense. We pay large sums of money to support legitimate scientific research on health, and then perversely choose to follow the latest unschooled huckster who promises to show us how to lose 20 pounds in a week.

To be acceptable, any diet plan should incorporate these 10 features:

• Safety: The diet must provide through various foods sufficient nutrients and vitamins to meet the body’s needs.

• Effectiveness: Proper, well-balanced diets take time. Diets that are too fast, too ambitious or make ridiculous claims will usually fail.

• Maintenance: Look for a plan that puts you on a temporary calorie-restricted diet. People do not like permanent diets, with the result that most quit. Look for a diet plan that tells you not only how to lose weight, but how to maintain weight loss as well.

• Scientific: A successful and permanent reduction of weight is based on science. It is always nice to dream about effortless and struggle-free weight loss programs, but science tells us otherwise.

• Healthful: A successful weight loss plan not only reduces the risk of chronic disease, but also improves your quality of life. A proper diet and exercise program means better health in general, and this aids the body in fighting many physical disorders.

• Fitness: A person attempting to lose weight must participate in some form of daily exercise. Scientific evidence shows that weight maintenance is much easier for active people than for sedentary people. Regular exercise promotes physical fitness and frequently brings on other health benefits which cannot be achieved through weight loss alone.

• Exercise: As your level of activity increases, it becomes possible to eat more and still maintain a desirable weight.

• True loss: A gradual weight loss plan will promote the loss of body fat rather than merely water. This plan helps keep the weight off permanently.

• Inexpensive: A successful weight loss diet will stress inexpensive, healthful foods as well as exercise that can be designed to suit your lifestyle. Walking, cycling, swimming and jogging are basically sound, inexpensive exercises and burn off many calories. No pills, expensive “diet aids” or health spas are needed.

• Enjoyable: Progressive weight loss and enjoyable exercises can make dieting bearable. If the weight loss process is pleasant it will naturally tend to be successful.

Getting in shape

Get off to a slow start – The worst mistake most of us make is trying to do too much too soon. If you don’t exercise regularly, being too ambitious at the beginning will do two things, both of them bad: First, you’ll wind up aching all over, and second, you’ll never stay with it.

As you become more physically fit, you can increase your pace but, don’t try to do it all in one day. Remember, exercise should make you feel good – it isn’t a new way to beat yourself up.

Give your muscles a little TLC – Make sure your muscles are warmed up before you start exercising. First use stretching exercises to loosen up tight muscles, then warm up with ten minutes of exercise that works the muscles in the same ways as your activity. A brief rally for tennis players, jogging in place for runners, or some practice swings and slow running around the bases.

Train like the pros – Professional athletes train every day, and they vary hard exercise days with easy ones. Over-exercising won’t get you in shape faster, but it will damage muscles and tendons. A vigorous 30-minute workout every day will make you look and feel better than a grueling three hour session once a week.

Change your routine – Exercise doesnt always mean calisthenics. If you vary your exercise, you won’t get bored and you’ll exercise all your muscles. A week of activity might include bike riding, aerobics, swimming, jogging, tennis, skiing, or hiking.

It’s all in the timing – If you exercise outdoors, pay attention to the weather. During the summer, don’t exercise between 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. when the sun is at its peak. Prolonged exposure without a sunscreen is dangerous. To avoid sunstroke, heat stroke, dehydration and sunburn, plan activities for mornings or evenings when the temperature drops. A hat provides a lot of protection.

Use the right equipment – Sometimes injuries happen because the wrong equipment is used. For example, tennis elbow can be caused by using a racket that’s too heavy, having too much tension on the strings, or using heavy balls which increase the force against the racket.

Runners should invest in the best shoes they can afford, otherwise performance will suffer and the possibility of injury will increase. For bicyclists and baseball players, using the right equipment will not only prevent injuries, it can save your life.

Forget “no pain, no gain” – Unless you’re in training for an Iron Man Triathlon, don’t force yourself beyond your limits. Exercise shouldn’t just improve you physically, it should lift you up emotionally and reduce stress. Make exercising fun – bicycle or run with friends, take the kids hiking. And don’t make your tennis or softball game too competitive. Play to win, but most important, play because you love the game.

If that isn’t enough, dieting also results in muscle tissue loss, slowing down the metabolism even more. Sure, you’ve still got to monitor your calorie intake and burn off more than you take in to lose extra fat stores.

But dieting without exercise is a path to failure and losing weight without exercise is a futile undertaking. To lose extra weight and keep it off, be gentle with your metabolism and change your body consumption with regular strength training. By adding this exercise to your weight loss program, you can save yourself some calorie-burning muscle and turn your body into a calorie-burning machine. If you’re into a step class or the treadmill, those activities do little to change body composition.

Aerobic activity is the obvious choice of people who want to lose weight. Sure it burns calories and contributes to body leanness, but it doesn’t add muscle. Extensive aerobic activity combined with a low-calorie diet can burn into protein stores as well, lowering the metabolic rate even more. So 30 to 60 minutes three to five times a week is all you need.

To really make a difference in your body’s calorie-burning ability, you’ve got to add muscle. Regular strength training, done two to three times a week, not only burns calories, but slows the rate of muscle loss during the diet. By putting on muscle, you’ll increase your metabolic rate – some researchers say by as much as 50 calories per pound of muscle. So if you put on two pounds of muscle, your body will burn an additional 100 calories a day.

So, instead of running away with the idea of losing weight without exercise, you are better of following the aforementioned tips and lose weight the right way.