To truly lose weight in a controlled and effective way it is important to complement healthy eating with a fat burning exercise regime. This combination of fat burning foods and exercise will allow you to target your body fat stores as a source of fuel.

The aim is to lose weight by burning fat rather than losing muscle. It takes more calories to maintain muscle so the more muscle you have the more calories you will burn to keep it there, so you store less calories as body fat.

So where does fat burning exercise come in? It’s about doing the right combination of exercises that focus on building muscle to increase your metabolic rate at the same time as burning the body’s fat stores. This means you need to mix aerobic cardio exercises with strength training:

Aerobic exercises raise your heart rate which increases blood and oxygen flow through your cardio-vascular system. The number of calories you burn will depend on the intensity at which you work out so activities like running, cycling or rowing will be more effective than walking.

However, it is likely that beginners to cardio regimes may find it difficult to maintain high intensity activities at first. So they key is to build up slowly and gradually increase the intensity of your workouts by setting yourself goals to challenge yourself as your fitness levels improve. Remember, quality is better than quantity.

Strength training focusses on building up lean muscle mass (this is also known as resistance training). Building muscle boosts your metabolic rate so you burn more calories when you exercise as well as at rest.

There are many ways to build strength – you can use weights, resistance bands or even your own body weight. Good technique is very important for effective strength training. Exercising larger muscle groups of the body such as the thighs, bottom, chest or back offers greater calorie expenditure.

Three of four, high intensity workouts each week tend to give better results than training every day at a lower effort. This also allows your body time to recover between sessions.

Again, if you want to read more about exercising, burning fat and creating muscle you should take a look at this book – Burn the Fat – Feed the muscle.

This is an excellent book to take you to the next level and provides extensive information on achieving the results you want through both food and exercise.