If your goal is looking fit and feeling healthy all year, exercise should not feel like torture. The brutal “no pain, no gain” mentality does not apply to adults who are not professional athletes or bodybuilders.

The best way to get and maintain long-term fitness results is to perform simple muscle-sculpting exercises while eating healthy food.

Spotting Time-Wasting Workouts

Workouts that focus on pushing you to exhaustion often a waste your time and energy. For one, they don’t focus on sculpting your muscles efficiently.

They focus on burning calories instead of efficiently building muscle. So, the body will feel exhausted, but unnecessarily. In addition, the unnecessary pain might later be used as an excuse to eat unhealthy food.

Regaining the Weight

It’s common for people to jump on treadmills to feel good about eating cake, pizza, and other junk food. However, treadmills were invented as torture machines. So, your the will resist getting back on a treadmill through soreness and fatigue.

Chances are that these people get on a treadmill or spin bike once or twice a week, but will keep eating junk food to reward yourself. This results in weight gain.

Feeling Unhealthy

Two things that make the body feel bad in the long run:

1. Torturous exercise
2. Eating unhealthy food

If you’re used to eating junk food, you might not be able to tell how bad junk food makes you feel. People who make the transition to eating healthily report feeling more alert, fresh, and energetic than they were while eating junk food.

It’s common sense: Junk food makes the body feel like junk, high quality food makes the body feel high quality. Eat junk for 5 minutes a day. Feel like junk 23 hours 55 minutes a day.

Eating to Keep the Weight Off

Easier said than done. However, your taste buds will adjust. Studies show that not eating products with added sugar makes your taste buds more sensitive to sugar. For example, apples will begin tasting much sweeter.

Eat healthily. Then, you won’t need to burn off the junk you ate. You’ll simply focus on sculpting your muscles to look athletic.

Exercising to Keep the Weight Off

If you want to look and feel healthy without the torture, don’t do torturous exercise. Do exercise that tones your muscles. You don’t need to feel tortured to get results.

Smart people finds the easiest and most effective ways to solve problems. We don’t need to get exhausted to look and feel healthy.

20 minutes a day of non-exhausting exercise is all it takes.

Food guides that encourage you to eat lots of healthy food are the best. No tiny meals. No elimination of food groups, like carbs.