Losing Weight in the Sun

It may sound a little strange to many people, but if you have a weight problem then you can actually do your self a power of good by getting out of the house more and into the daylight. Why would this make any difference to your weight? Well, there are several reasons why it really does make a difference and here are three of the best of those reasons:

Exercise

Getting out of doors more often means you will naturally be more active, even if its just walking around more. This extra activity may not seem like much to you, but it actually helps to improve your body's metabolism, or that process whereby it digests the food you eat and takes out the goodness while eliminating the waste products. When you are mostly inactive, this process gets very sluggish and you end up storing a lot of what you eat as fat. On the flip side, when you are more active, more of what you eat gets used as energy. That means less of it gets stored as fat. Common sense must tell you that more activity will equal less fat and reduce your chances of gaining weight. The more activity you give your body, the more chance you give yourself to actually start losing weight.

Vitamin D

While it is quite normal for people to supplement their daily vitamin needs, Vitamin D is one vitamin that the body can actually manufacture all by itself. To do that, it just needs some daily exposure to sunlight. About 20 minutes or so a day is actually enough for your body to manufacture all of the necessary amount of this vitamin to satisfy its needs. Recent tests have shown a link between weight loss and having the correct levels of this vitamin and conversely weight gain for those who lack it. This is a very good reason to get out doors into the sunshine to make your own Vitamin D (which, incidentally is far superior in quality to anything that you can supplement) and help yourself lose weight that way. Read more about the studies here: http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2009/UR_CONTENT_165066.html

Stress

Stress is well known to be a major contributory factor in obesity. When a person is under a lot of stress, their digestive system becomes less effective and their metabolism slows down appreciatively. This leads to greater storage of fat which goes hand in hand with weight gain. So it makes good sense to deal with stress and reduce it from your daily life. One way to do that is to get plenty of natural daylight. That's because natural daylight triggers the body's production of serotonin, which is an anti-stress hormone that the body makes naturally. When we spend too much time indoors under artificial light, the body does not make this hormone, so we suffer the ill effects of stress much more. But getting a good supply of nature's own relaxation drug just by getting plenty of natural daylight enables us to cope much better with stressful situations. This means our metabolism and digestive systems will work much more effectively to reduce the storage of fat and to burn more of what it has stored when combined with a healthy, low calorie diet.

So there are three very good reasons to get outdoors more often and enjoy what nature has provided for us. It gives us more energy, boosts our vitamin D levels and helps us deal with stress to improve our health and help reduce our body weight, which can only be a good thing.