Your caloric intake of foods is what goes into your body, and exercise is the means to work it out. To achieve a negative or neutral balance, you also need to work on burning calories, in addition to your eating habits.



Exercise will increase your burning of calories in three ways.

First, you spend energy during the activity.

Second, your body spends energy after the activity during about 48 hours to recover from it (to repair muscle and restock energy stores).

Third, in the long run and as you slowly build muscle; it increases your base energy expenditure (also called resting metabolic rate). For information on what your resting metabolic rate is, visit http://ezinearticles.com/?Knowing-and-Using-Your-Resting-Metabolic-Rate&id=387743.

Also, noticed how the title is "lose fat" and not "lose weight"? This is because part of the weight lost in negative energy balance is muscle. As we've just seen, muscle help increase your burning of calories by raising your base energy expenditure, so you want to keep your muscle mass intact as much as possible. Exercise, especially weight lifting, will do just that. In short, by exercising during a period of negative energy balance, you ensure that you're actually losing fat, and not muscle.

ACTION STEP 13 REVISITED

No "regular" action step for this one. Once you're started and comfortable with the cardiovascular and abdominal training programs, if you want to speed progress up, do additional weight lifting.

A basic weight lifting program must include the Bench Press, the Squat, the Deadlift and Pull-ups. These lifts are described at http://www.exrx.net/. For a comprehensive guide on weight training, I recommend Body Building Revealed. It is, to my knowledge, the web's best source of information on the topic.