Physical activity and exercise are crucial to the success of your weight loss effort. Engaging in regular exercise is important for a number of reasons, one of the most important being that it can improve your health by helping you lose weight. It is imperative that you begin an exercise routine prior to weight loss surgery as you will be required to lose a percentage of your baseline body weight before being cleared for surgery.

Exercising now will make your recovery from surgery faster, you will already have experience with an exercise regimen, and it will help you maintain as much muscle tissue as possible during your weight loss process. Maintaining a lifestyle that includes exercise, will keep you healthy and at your target weight.

Weight loss is a function of calories in (eating) versus calories out (metabolic processes of life plus physical activity and exercise). We gain weight when we eat more calories than we burn off through moving our bodies. We lose weight when we burn more calories than we take in, and we maintain our weight when we eat just as much as we expend. To successfully lose weight and keep it off you must target both calories taken in and calories expended. There are two main ways to expend more calories:

Increase daily physical activity: This means moving your body more during daily routines.

• Take the stairs instead of the elevator
• Take short breaks from your work to walk
• Park further away from the store
• Wash your car by hand instead of using a carwash
• Change the TV by hand instead of using the remote

Exercise regularly: Exercise is moving your body specifically for the purpose of increasing health and fitness or losing weight and is more structured than Physical Activity. Cardiovascular exercise, in particular, will burn significantly more calories than other forms of activity. It is also the type of activity that is most beneficial for your heart and lungs.

• Walking
• Bike riding
• Swimming laps
• Dance/Step aerobics