Everybody knows that in order to lose weight they must start exercising. Although you can lose a certain amount of weight through changing your diet, exercising will increase your results greatly. Apart from losing weight, exercise will give you countless other benefits including, all round health, increase self esteem and confidence, make you feel happier because you look better, increase your willpower and give you a great achievement factor when you start seeing results.

The best time to do any cardio exercise is first thing in the morning before you eat anything. What happens is that because you haven't eaten anything during the night, as you have been asleep, your body has to use calories which are stored in your body and burning calories is what you need if you want to lose weight.

Another benefit of exercising in the morning is that it not only wakes you up mentally but it wakes up your entire body. Your blood is a delivery system; it carries nutrients and oxygen to your muscles and organs. When your heart is pumping blood at a normal rate, the delivery of oxygen and nutrients takes time. When you force your heart to work faster and harder through cardio, your blood will deliver more oxygen and nutrients at a much faster rate, simply because it's moving a lot faster. All this will give you greater energy for the day and make you feel more alive instead of sluggish and tired.

Your metabolism will also speed up if you exercise first thing in the morning. Exercise burns calories, and your metabolism has to burn them. Shortly after exercise you will feel hungry and if you feed this hunger with a good healthy breakfast, your metabolism will put all the calories to good use and it will be boosted to burn more calories throughout the day as long as you don't skip meals.

Another great advantage of exercising early is that it is done. You do not want to spend the whole day dreading and thinking about how you have to exercise when you get home from work. The more you think about that the less you will want to do it. You will make up excuses like "I can't be bothered, I'm too tired, or I've got other things to do". You will virtually talk yourself into not doing it and on top of this a part of you will feel guilty about avoiding it.

Exercising first thing in the morning gets rid of these feelings. You have finished before the day starts. You will be happier because you will know that the rest of the day is free because you will have already done what you needed to. There will be no guilt and no dreading exercise because it will already be finished.

There are no distractions when you exercise in the morning. There is nothing to watch on television. You don't have to go out anywhere because everything is closed. There are no people to converse with because they are asleep, and you can't say that you have had a long day. This is your time, your time to make a great difference to your health. While everyone else is in bed you are getting a head start and bettering yourself. It may be a little hard at first but after a few weeks it will become a habit. Go to bed an hour earlier and wake up an hour earlier. You're talking about 30 minutes of cardio, and those 30 minutes will come be the most valuable investment that you may ever make.

Always make sure that you spend 5 or 10 minutes warming up slowly as this gives your body a gentle nudge to wake itself up. I promise you that after a short time of doing this you will begin to feel great everyday. Look at professional boxers, right from the early days of boxing up until the present day, boxers have woken up in the early hours to run. Boxers are some of the most physically fit specimens of human beings that you can come across. If they always do cardio in the mornings, surely that is enough to tell you that it is good if you can exercise early to lose weight.