100+ Fitness Facts + Fun Facts about Working Out to improve your Exercise
We all know that exercise and fitness is pivotal for anyone aiming to enhance their physical and mental well-being. Amidst an ocean of data, pinpointing actionable and accurate fitness facts can feel as challenging as embarking on a new workout regime. There are however plenty of invaluable insights on fitness, including effective workout routines, fitness challenge ideas, and strategies for optimizing physical health, which of course require a time investment which we rarely can afford. All these come in the form of flashcard-like idea cards curated by our dedicated community members and curators who've already spent the time to distill key ideas from books, articles, videos, podcasts and courses into the cards you find on Deepstash.
Over 4100 Facts and Ideas on Exercise and Fitness for Your Discovery!
Ideas on maintaining consistency in your workouts, strategies to overcome fitness plateaus, and intriguing facts about the science of exercise serve as a compelling call to swap idle scrolling through tiktoks and reels for content that ties into your fitness journey. Deepstash is brimming with fitness goals ideas, tips for enhancing workout effectiveness, and wellness insights, all contributed by genuine users who share their personal experiences and knowledge gained from books, articles, videos, and podcasts on exercise and fitness.
Flick through our ever-increasing number of fun facts about working out
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Your eating has to be in check. About 80% of what you look like is based on diet.
It’s a calorie game, people often overestimate the amount of food they burn in an hour-long session. Do the math, and figure out your weight-loss goals.
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Your muscles are already toned or you wouldn’t be able to move around. They’re just not visible because of the layer of fat covering them.
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Both sexes have the same body structure but different hormonal make-ups which may mean a difference in muscle strength but does not mean they should work out any differently.
“Men tend to focus on abs, chest and arms, and women tend to focus on gluts and legs,” Maik Wiedenbach notes. “They’re each forgetting one half of their bodies.”
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... and do higher repetitions than men.
Because women’s testosterone is lower, they likely won’t be able to lift as much weight as men, but the typical three-pound lady dumbbells won’t work because the resistance is too low to create change in the muscle.
Everyone should do six to eight repetitions with a weight that challenges them.
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The conventional wisdom is that stretching elongates the muscle and helps prevent injury. Conversely, stretching before a workout will weaken the muscle by 30%, and the reduced tension may increase the risk of injury.
Do warm up by walking before cardio or doing light weights before intense training, and do stretch after a workout.
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No matter how many crunches you do, someone with 20% body fat will never have abs like someone with 8% body fat.
To lose weight quickly, you’ll need to burn as much fuel as you can with intense exercises like squats, dips, pull downs, dead lifts and shoulder presses while following a strict diet.
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The only time when you burn fats exclusively is when you are asleep.
Interval training, a mix of low and high intensity, will produce the best results.
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Technically the body is deprived of nutrients in the morning, so will tap fat stores-- but it is the wrong approach.
Working out on an empty stomach burns more muscle, which defeats the purpose of any fat-loss diet. Working out in a fasting state is sub-optimal, since the lack of nutrients will not allow for peak performance.
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It’s not that they’re inherently bad for you, but that they won’t keep you full.
Whole foods have more fiber and take up more stomach volume, which keeps you feeling satisfied. They also require more digestive work, so use more energy and keep the metabolism up.
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Some studies show that yolks helped to reduce LDL, or the bad cholesterol.
The yolk contains most of the vitamins and minerals in the egg, plus half the protein. Since an egg white-only breakfast is nearly fat free, it will cause a significant insulin spike and promote hunger cravings as well as energy swings later in the day.
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Exercise vs. Diet
Fitness coaches all over the world are unanimous in their opinions that success in building a beautiful body is 30% dependent on exercise and 70% on nutrition.
However, even the most rigorous workout can only cover the caloric value of one chocolate bar, at most.
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Your muscles experience microtraumas during workouts and then grow and get stronger on rest days, which is why it is so important to set the right activity pace.
The number of workouts depends on your fitness level. If you are a beginner, try exercising every other day or at least twice a week.
If you have been exercising for a long time, let yourself rest at least once a week.
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This myth is usually followed with “X makes you fat, not calories”. That X is usually a macronutrient such as carbs or fat. Sometimes it’s a chemical found in the foods.
CICO principle is still alive and people who respect this principle lose weight and keep it off successfully. It’s mostly the people who look for a shortcut that fail to lose weight and to keep it off.
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The rationale behind this myth is the fact that when you eat, your energy expenditure goes up during digestion.
The problem with this myth is that the amount of extra calories you burn during digestion is directly correlated with the calories you consume. That means eating ten 200 Calorie meals increase the metabolism at the same rate as eating two 1,000 Calorie meals.
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Although there are many potential health effects of diet sodas and artificial sweeteners, weight gain is not one of them. Your body can’t store fat out of nothing.
For some people, consuming certain beverages may trigger a craving for another food. If you know when you drink diet soda, you are going to crave some other food, avoid it.
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Breakfast means breaking your fast. It doesn’t mean early morning meal. Some people are just not hungry when they wake up. Forcing them to eat breakfast leads to unnecessary calorie consumption.
Be aware of your own behavior and decide whether eating breakfast is a good idea or not.222
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Studies show protein consumption doesn’t cause kidney disease.
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There is no convincing evidence regarding the effect of dietary cholesterol on cardiovascular disease. There are several studies showing egg consumption increases the good cholesterol, HDL. In fact, Mayo Clinic Suggests that healthy people can safely eat up to 7 eggs per day.
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The main drivers of hypertrophy are volume and intensity. As long as you increase your hard sets on each muscle group, your muscles will grow. It doesn’t matter how many reps you perform.
Strength, on the other hand, relies on heavyweights. So if your goal is the strength, heavy weights with low reps will work best.
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After you break down your muscle with your workout, you need to start the muscle protein synthesis by eating protein rich in leucine. However, this window of opportunity is much longer than 30 minutes. You have about 48 hours to stimulate muscle protein synthesis and the closer you get to your workout the better.
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The more fat you have to lose, the easier it is to lose it. On the other hand, the less muscle mass you have, the easier it is to build muscle.
So if you are a beginner in both aspects, meaning you have a lot of fat to lose and a lot of muscle to gain, losing fat and building muscle at the same time is possible and easier for you.
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This myth is for the ladies. There is no such thing as toning up muscles. Muscles don’t tone up. You either build muscle or you don’t.
The female bodybuilders use hormones and workout for hours every day for years to look like that.
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Muscle cells and fat cells are completely different and one doesn’t turn into other. It’s like saying “your liver will turn into lungs”.
The reason you see big bodybuilders get fat off-season is their eating habits. If you stop working out and eat the same amount of food, you will get fat and you will lose your muscle size and definition.
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Soreness you feel the day after your workout is not an indicator of how hard you worked out and has nothing to do with lactic acid.
Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) usually occurs when you start a new program after a long break or change up your program. If you are making progress with your weights, you don’t need to get sore.
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Mental fitness simply means to cultivate positive values and keep your mind active towards something that will make you happy.
Mental fitness is the only way to prevent mental aging.
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Habit conjures up images of engaging in a mindless, automatic behavior, which fitness is not.
Start thinking about making exercise a routine or a ritual more than a habit.
According to psychologists, the difference is that routines and rituals are deliberate, purposeful, goal-oriented and mindful acts, rather than mindless ones.
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Find fitness buddies.
Notice all of the benefits you get from working out. It will keep you coming back for more.
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Exercise is like a wonder drug for many health outcomes: reducing blood pressure, reduces the risk of diabetes of heart diseases and slows developing cognitive impairment from Alzheimer's and dementia.
But as for losing weight, it helps more in weight maintenance than in losing the actual weight.
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Exercise accounts for a small portion of daily calorie burn.
Even when you work out, those extra calories burned only account for a tiny part of your total energy expenditure, only around 10 to 30 percent, depending on the person. It's not nearly equal to food intake.
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They won't really help you lose weight. Research suggests regularly sleeping in colder temperatures may be optimal for weight loss as they stimulate the production of brown fat, the "good" fat. Brown fat keeps us warm by burning through "bad" fat stores.
Turn down the heat at night. You'll trim your belly and your heating bills.
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Skeletal muscle has a very low metabolic rate when at rest, at just 6 calories per pound. That's three times as much as fat, so building muscle definitely helps your daily fat-burn. But you might be better off building your brainpower: a pound of brain actually burns 109 calories a day.
Exercise, and don't sweat the big muscles if you don't want to. Any exercise will do.
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Exercise is a movement of the body to enhance physical fitness.
Most people know that exercise is important for the physical development of the self, yet a majority of them are skipping exercise often.
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The way to change this sedentary epidemic:
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Regular exercise can treat mild to moderate depression, as good as the antidepressants.
Exercise provides us with feel-good chemicals made naturally inside our body, as the brain releases endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin.
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Exercise also has a psychological benefit of making us feel great.
Using exercise as a social activity, we improve our self-esteem and get to meet new people, forming healthy and positive connections
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Eating food increases your metabolism for a while because extra calories are required to process your meal. This is called the thermic effect of food (TEF).
Protein increases your metabolic rate by 15-30%, carbs by 5-10% and 0-3% for fats. Eating protein makes you feel full and prevent overeating.
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High-intensity interval training (HIIT) involves short, intense bursts of activity and help you burn more fat by increasing your metabolic rate.
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Muscle is more metabolically active than fat, and building muscle can increase your metabolism, making you burn more calories.
Lifting weights will help you retain muscle and prevent the drop in metabolism that occurs during weight loss.
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Long periods of sitting burn fewer calories and can lead to weight gain.
If you have a desk job, try standing up for short periods. You can also invest in a standing desk.
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Some studies found green tea and oolong tea can increase metabolism by 4-5%. The teas help convert some of the fat stored in your body into free fatty acids, which may increase fat burning by 10-17%.
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Capsaicin, found in peppers, can boost your metabolism. At acceptable doses, pepper can burn ten additional calories per meal.
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Caffeine in coffee can boost metabolism by 3-11%. It also promotes fat burning. However, coffee affects lean women more, with fat burning by 29% compared to only 10% for obese women.
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Each muscle is made up of thousands of tiny muscle fibers. When you do body weight exercises, your muscles develop tiny tears in the fibers. When you rest, your body begins repairing your damaged muscle cells by fusing torn muscle fibers back together and laying down new proteins within each muscle cell.
Your nervous system, circulatory system and endocrine system all contribute to muscle repair and growth. The continued repair process creates bigger and stronger muscles.
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Muscle-building starts the moment you challenge your muscles to do something. Real beginners will see improvement within six weeks and advanced lifters within six to eight weeks of switching up their regular strength training workout.
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Most people won't build much muscle from traditional cardio such as walking or jogging.
But cardio that involves high-intensity exercises like plyometrics or high-volume weight training can help you build muscle to an extend. Beginners can build some muscle with hiking, skiing, and other outdoor cardio.
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For much of history, human beings had an active lifestyle, but it did not include any kind of formal exercise.
Movement just for movement's sake is a relatively new phenomenon in human history.
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Our ancestors walked about 5 miles a day - or about 10,000 steps. Many people are moving less than they did before the pandemic. If 10,000 steps feel too out of reach, it's OK. It doesn't really matter what you do, as long as you're focused on movement.
In villages in remote parts of the world where people don't have chairs or a hunter-gatherer camp, people sit on average 10 hours a day. So it is not unnatural to sit a lot, but it is problematic if that's all you do.
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Getting up every 10 minutes or so just to go to the bathroom or make yourself a cup of tea is turning on your muscles. It uses up fats and sugars in your bloodstream, and it produces molecules that turn down inflammation.
Interrupted sitting and not sitting in a chair that's nestling your body keeps your muscles going and is much healthier for you.
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Until recently, only the wealthy people had a chair with a seatback. Human beings used to either sat on the ground or on stools or benches.
A seatback makes sitting more passive than just sitting on a bench or stool because you use fewer muscles to stabilize your upper body. If you don't use your muscles in your body, they atrophy. And weak muscles make us more prone to pain.
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There is this idea that running wears away your cartilage and causes arthritis in the knees. But it is not valid. Studies show that people who run more are less likely to get arthritis in their knees and more likely to benefit from physical activity.
Knee injury is indeed most common among runners. But these injuries can be prevented by learning to run properly.
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To be active
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Whenever you move to do stuff, that's physical activity. Exercise, however, is a voluntary physical activity that one undertakes for the sake of fitness.
Exercise is a modern behavior. Humans, for many ages, were only physically active when it was necessary or when it's rewarding. Gathering food among other survival activities are considered necessary while playing, dancing, and developing skills, are rewarding.
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Being physically active has an indirect advantage that goes beyond burning calories: spending less energy on other aspects of our body like inflammation levels, reactivity to stress and other unwanted areas.
Exercise then becomes a way to redirect and refocus energy expenditure and an auto-adjustment of metabolism.
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Exercise helps one regulate their body, keeps it in shape and is essential for us no matter how much we eat.
If we live with the hunter-gatherer societies and see how they live, work and eat, the diet fads like vegan, paleo etc. will seem ridiculous and even dangerous.
One has to eat plenty of plants, roots, pulses, honey and burn it by having an active lifestyle 24 hours a day, not just an hour at the gym.
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For the biggest benefits of exercise, try to include at least 2½ hours of moderate-intensity physical activity (e.g. brisk walking) each week, 1¼ hours of a vigorous-intensity activity (such as jogging or swimming laps), or a combination of the two.
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Walking is an easy and accessible form of exercise that can combat brain ageing and memory loss.
Whether it was the easiest form of movement or a way to get some headspace, the past year has shown the benefits of walking in our day-to-day lives. Just because lockdown is easing, it doesn’t mean that the love affair with walking will end either. 60% of people say they will continue to use walking as one of their main ways of keeping fit in 2021, according to research.
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While it isn’t as high intensity as other forms of cardio such as running, it is effective in its own right, and no matter how fit you are, it is extremely beneficial. Walking is particularly good for people who suffer from “knee, ankle or back problems as it can reduce pain and improve your circulation and posture.
There are a whole load of benefits you can get from walking. It can help you improve your breathing, lower your heart rate, feel happier, become more connected to your environment, and experience less pain if you struggle with pain-related health issues.
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Exercise is good for you. Virtually all medical professionals would sign off on that proposition, and so would most of the rest of us, even at a time when some portion of the population rejects plenty of other health-related expertise, like calls for vaccinations.
Being physically active has been shown to decrease the risks of developing cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some cancers. It is known to combat anxiety and depression; strengthen bones and muscles; sharpen cognition; improve sleep and extend longevity.
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Just as the rich get richer, the fit tend to get fitter and too often, the poor get sicker. And then there’s the problematic fact that exercising has, for several decades, been linked to virtue, creating stigmas against people who can’t or don’t want to or even don’t look like they work out.
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A new term, “exercise guilt,” has cropped up in the past few years to capture the disappointment we feel when our fitness goals go unmet. When we fall short, we get dispirited and are less likely to exercise at all, putting us at risk for a host of destructive physical and psychic effects, which compromise high performance.
Like any unmet goal we set for ourselves, it’s helpful to ask, is this guilt the result of falling short or shooting too long?
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Many people have failed to distinguish the difference between “movement” and that dreaded word “exercise.”
“Movement,” is an all-encompassing term that includes both fitness and the general physical activity we participate in day-to-day whereas “exercise” is is planned and structured training.
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The American Heart Association now advocates for 10 minutes — yes, only 10 minutes — of movement a day. When we break the term down in this way, it becomes clear that most of us may be closer to our goals than we think.
The transition into the post-pandemic world is a perfect time for young professionals — and anyone, really — to rethink their health habits and shed the “exercise guilt” they may be feeling. It’s time to recalibrate our routines to a moderate pace and place.
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Sedentary: This inactive lifestyle is categorized by too little movement due to excessive physical lethargy. Sedentary comes with health risks like obesity, type II diabetes, and heart disease.
Sensible: The science says that this space is the best place, and it’s not that hard to get here. We don’t have to exercise obsessively to be healthy. Sometimes “sensible” is the best you should do.
Superfluous: As opposed to excessive lethargy, this is excessive activity. Too much exercise can lead to depression, injury, and compromised immunity.
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Most adults in high-income countries, such as the UK and US, don’t get the minimum of 150 minutes per week of physical activity recommended by most health professionals. Everyone knows exercise is healthy, but prescribing and selling it rarely works.
We all believe we should exercise more. So why is it so hard to keep it up?
We list the most common and unhelpful workout myths.
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Exercise is a voluntary physical activity undertaken for the sake of fitness. You may think exercise is normal, but it’s a very modern behaviour. Instead, for millions of years, humans were physically active for only two reasons: when it was necessary or rewarding. Necessary physical activities included getting food and doing other things to survive. Rewarding activities included playing, dancing or training to have fun or to develop skills.
But no one in the stone age ever went for a five-mile jog to stave off decrepitude, or lifted weights whose sole purpose was to be lifted.
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When food is limited, every calorie spent on physical activity is a calorie not spent on other critical functions, such as maintaining our bodies, storing energy and reproducing.
Because natural selection ultimately cares only about how many offspring we have, our hunter-gatherer ancestors evolved to avoid needless exertion – exercise – unless it was rewarding. So don’t feel bad about the natural instincts that are still with us. Instead, accept that they are normal and hard to overcome.
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Let’s not demonise a behaviour as normal as sitting. People in every culture sit a lot. Even hunter-gatherers who lack furniture sit about 10 hours a day, as much as most westerners. But there are more and less healthy ways to sit. Studies show that people who sit actively by getting up every 10 or 15 minutes wake up their metabolisms and enjoy better long-term health than those who sit inertly for hours on end.
If you work all day in a chair, get up regularly, fidget and try not to spend the rest of the day in a chair, too.
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A common myth is that people uncontaminated by civilisation are incredible natural-born athletes who are super-strong, super-fast and able to run marathons easily. Not true. Most hunter-gatherers are reasonably fit, but they are only moderately strong and not especially fast. Their lives aren’t easy, but on average they spend only about two to three hours a day doing moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. It is neither normal nor necessary to be ultra-fit and ultra-strong.
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Until recently just about every weight-loss programme involved exercise.
The truth is that you can lose more weight much faster through diet rather than exercise, especially moderate exercise such as 150 minutes a week of brisk walking. However, longer durations and higher intensities of exercise have been shown to promote gradual weight loss. Regular exercise also helps prevent weight gain or regain after diet. Every diet benefits from including exercise.
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