What are the best types of exercise to lose weight?

The best types of exercise to lose weight are ones that burn calories, help speed your metabolism, and equally important, ones that you enjoy. There are many activities that burn calories. Anything that elevates your heart rate (from shoveling snow to playing soccer) can be considered cardiovascular in nature. Weight loss is all about burning calories, and the longer and more intensely you exercise, the more calories you'll burn.

Exercise also has the ability to speed up your metabolism, in particular, resistance training. Strength training helps build lean muscle, and lean muscle has a higher metabolic rate than body fat. Adding even a little new muscle means that your body will burn more calories everyday than it did without it. The form of resistance you choose is up to you. Free weights, exercise bands, machines, and even your own body weight are excellent choices. Combining resistance training with cardiovascular exercise may be the quickest way of reaching your weight loss goals.

It's also important to find activities that you enjoy. Weight loss does not happen overnight, and to be able to stick to a workout program, it's nice to actually look forward to exercising.

All activity counts when it comes to losing weight. Any time you move your body, you are burning calories. Do what you enjoy.

Now, if you've been doing aerobic work for several months and have built some tolerance for it, and if your doctor has no issues with you working out vigorously, then you might try a HIIT protocol for your cardio work. HIIT is High Intensity Interval Training and boy, it's a humdinger when done correctly. It burns great calories.

Resistance training is also a great. Muscles are your friend. Go pump some iron with the big boys.

It seems that the right combo of physical activity may have the power to make you eat less. The magic formula involves both cardio and strength training. Doing just one or the other doesn't really curb your calorie intake as much, if at all.

When men in one small study combined aerobic exercise with weight training for 16 weeks, they ate significantly fewer calories compared with the men who did either aerobics or weight training alone or who did no exercise at all. The researchers suspect that the combo of cardio and strength exercises had the most favorable effect on blood levels of fats, glucose, amino acids and satiety hormones -- producing a powerful combination of hunger-controlling physiological changes.