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The message for today to everyone who wants to reduce his or her level of body fat is: change your lifestyle.

Seemingly tiny changes to your daily activity pattern can have as much effect on your body's use of body fat stores as hours of sweaty exercise. A more active day will make an enormous contribution to getting yourself lean and healthy.

If you have been getting fatter as the years roll by, and you don't have a physical medical problem, then its because you have adopted poor eating and exercise habits over your lifetime. You have opted for a lifestyle of "convenience".

Change this, and you will see that by just getting a bit more active during your normal day you will use easily use up twice the normal number of calories.

Go waltzing and you will be using up four to five times as much energy as sitting reading a book. If you are heavily into a convenience lifestyle, then you have to reduce your food intake in an attempt to avoid getting fatter.

This cycle of reducing energy expenditure and then reducing food intake ("dieting") is doomed to failure. Your body sees this reduced energy intake and output as a threat, and reduces your basal metabolic rate to conserve energy.

So you are eating less, but not getting any leaner! If this is you, you need to add into your daily life more activities that are easily performed anywhere with little preparation.

Stick with "convenience" exercise or "homework" activities away from the fitness gym which will assist in overall body fat loss by accumulating further kilo-calorie output.

This requires a lifetime commitment. Be positive about the importance of understanding your eating and activity habits, and in this way poor eating habits can be changed.

Set nutritional and activity goals, and reward your successes, but not with food. Learn to use other types of rewards, such as new running shoes, a movie, or a new CD.

You do not have to be daunted by the thought of making huge changes to your lifestyle in order to get lean, fit, and healthy. Forget all your preconceptions about slogging it out for hours on end as punishment for being fatter than the anorexic models in magazines and on TV.

On the contrary, all you have to do is get out there and enjoy yourself. See how good gardening is for increasing your energy expenditure; or playing a musical instrument; or going for a walk. And you don't even have to do this on your own.

See if there is something there to enrich your daily life, and contribute to an increased lifestyle energy expenditure. Then realize that you can get leaner, you can get fitter, and you can get healthier.

You may not end up looking like a fashion model, but these guys and gals devote their whole lives to looking like they do, and you have only got an hour or so a day.

But who cares, the aim is to get you to realize your own potential by looking better and feeling better. If you aren't happy with your current activity level, then start today, right this minute. Get out there and do something active - anything!

Then don't stop being active for the next 60 years.