Lose Weight with your Home Vegetable Garden

I love the commercial where they show a heavy set man getting ready to get on the treadmill to do his daily exercise routine. He starts stretching, bending and moving as if he is getting his body ready for the rigorous and sweat filled activity that is to come form the treadmill. So he steps up on the treadmill, pushes some of the blinking red buttons, and the treadmill begins to move. Faster and faster the treadmill goes as does the man who then begins to start running due to the speed of the treadmill. After less than a minute he hits the big shiny stop button and walks over to the scale to weigh himself. When the scale shows that he didn’t lose any weight, the man becomes discouraged. The moral of the story was, don’t look for quick results without putting in the effort.

That theme holds true with losing weight which is why that particular company used weight loss as its lead in to prove a point. You need to put the time and effort in if you want to lose those extra pounds. However, what you may not know is that you do not need to spend countless hours in a gym to do it.

The key to losing weight is eating right, eating healthy well balanced meals through the day. Studies have shown that eating smaller meals more often keeps your metabolism rate high and that in turn burns more fat.

As an avid home vegetable gardener myself I can tell you that growing a vegetable garden at home can serve you two purposes in this area. The first being you can grow the food you need to consume that will help you lose the weight.

Each meal you consume throughout the day should have a portion of vegetables included with it. Vegetables provide your body’s requirements for minerals, vitamins and nutrients. When you grow your own vegetables you are guaranteeing their quality. You know what you are using to make them grow, such as water amounts, fertilizers, composts and so on and this allows you to control the amount of harmful pesticides and chemicals.

You also save money when you grow your own vegetables. The USDA reported in a recent study that fifty dollars in vegetable seeds can produce as much as two thousand dollars worth of produce.

Beyond all that, home vegetable gardening is great physical exercise. The larger the garden, the more work it will require to make it successful. The cultivating of the soil, picking of weeds, watering, digging holes for compost are all physically demanding and work your muscles. I have a garden that is about twenty feet by fourteen feet and I can tell you that I put a lot of work into it that helps me break a nice sweat. Of course standing out in the hot and humid New Jersey weather adds to that as well.

I won’t say that you can lose 100 pounds in 30 days, but you can get the extra physical activity you will need to keep your body in motion, and the best part is all of the work you put into it will yield fruits and vegetables that you can add to your daily diet and nutrition program.

About the Author
Mike is the author of the book Vegetable Gardening for the Average Person, as well as the president and CEO of Mike the Gardener Enterprises, LLC. You can, follow him on Twitter as well as join his Facebook fan page.