www.abc.net.au Transcript: www.abc.net.au Exercise is important whether you need to lose weight or not. In fact, being fat but fit is considered healthier than being a skinny slob. Nonetheless plenty of us exercise with our waistlines in mind and we want to get bang for our buck. So what’s the best way to shed those kilos? Do we run, skip, cycle, walk or swim? Well, if you want a really efficient fat-burning program, rule number one is don’t waste too much time agonising over how to go about it. It’s true that running will see you burn roughly twice the kilojoules per hour as walking. But if you can only run for five minutes, whereas you could walk briskly for a full hour, then all other things being equal, your walking workout will see you shed more fat. Likewise, unless you really go hard, a 30 minute swim generally doesn’t pack as much punch as a brisk half-hour walk. But the upside of being held up by the water is that there’s less pressure on your ankles and knees. If that means you’ll work out more often, then swimming could well be the better way to go. So if you’re exercising for fat loss, the specific activity you choose is less important than whether you can sustain it. But what about the issue of intensity? One thing that generates confusion about this is a diagram you often see on equipment or on posters in gyms. It’s a graph that tells you what exercise ‘zone’ you’re in, based on your heart rate and your age. The so-called ‘fat burning zone’, is second from …