Never lose sight of the fact that both eating right and exercise are needed for the best results in losing weight.

Do you think that you can manage ten minutes of exercise on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of each week?  Follow these exercises and if you finish before the allotted ten minutes, do a few more. What you are trying to do is to raise your pulse rate by 50% for a very short period of time.

1. Stretch your neck muscles by allowing your chin to drop to your chest and turning your head in circles, three times clockwise and three times counter clockwise and repeat three times.

2. Let your arms hang by your side, palms against your body. Stand upright. Bend sideways from the trunk and try to push your right fingers to the outside of your right knee. Three pushes on the right side and then repeat to your left side. Repeat the entire process three times. Easy so far? Good.

3. Stand upright with your palms on the front of your legs. Bend forward as far as you can and bend back as far as you can nine times. After a few weeks of this I found that I was able to rest the palms of my hands on the floor with no bending at the knee with my feet together. If you stick to your fitness program this will eventually happen for you.

4. Stand upright and stretch your arms from the shoulders parallel to the ground and swing from the waist, left, then right a total of nine times, twisting the waist but keeping the hips still. This is too easy, right?

5. This isn’t so easy and you may not achieve it at first, but don’t panic, it will happen in time. Stand upright and bend at the knees going down until your bottom almost touches the floor (squat position)and then stand up again. At first you may need a chair beside you to help with balance. When you are on your feet, stretch up onto your toes, then return to a flat footed stance. Do this nine times. If you can only manage one or two that’s fine; as your muscles tone during the coming weeks you will manage more.

6. Nine push-ups from the floor. If the full body push up is too difficult, try it from the kneeling position. Don’t panic if you can’t manage nine. I once asked a very wealthy man how he made a million dollars and he replied, “Easy! I just went out and made one dollar and then repeated the same thing a million times.” So you just do one push-up and as your muscles tone you will be able to repeat the process. Soon you will find nine not a big enough challenge and will want to do more.

7. Finally you can either go for a short walk, jog or do some running on the spot. The idea is to run until your pulse rate reaches 1.5 times normal. I never check my pulse. I just run on the spot until I start gasping for breath and that is enough. Then I end by doing a few gentle stretching exercises to cool down.

8. In this fitness program you are not what you weigh, but what you measure. So use a tape measure and check waist, hips and thighs before you start the program and monthly while you’re on the weight loss program to watch the progress.

As I’m basically lazy and a lover of fine food, I use this program to ensure that I never have to worry too much about diets and it works fine for me.The great thing about it is that it doesn’t take up much time, it focuses you on your lifestyle and as you get more fit you will need to increase the amount of exercise to reach that ‘slightly breathless’ stage that says: “Enough!”