Monday 11 May 2015

Weight Loss For Dummies

Mindset/Goal Setting

 

Before starting on any form of exercise, one of the first things you should do is consider your mindset. You need motivation to get you to exercise, a goal. It might be simply trying to lose a certain
amount of weight or trying to get into a particular item of clothing you think you’ll look good in.
And once you set your initial goal, you’ll need to keep setting them to keep yourself motivated, so you don’t stagnate. In order to grow and better yourself, you need to keep setting goals as you grow.
When you create a goal, it’s not always necessary to keep it realistic, as long as it motivates you. If you are going to be realistic, you’re automatically putting a barrier up and saying that you won’t be
able to do something. But, if you don’t hit your targets, you’ll be motivated to keep working towards them.

Break Yourself in Gently

When you start out with your exercise, you should break yourself in gently to make it manageable. If you throw yourself into exercising a lot, very quickly, not only do you risk doing yourself an injury, you might overwhelm yourself and become disillusioned.
By breaking yourself in gently, you are making your fitness goals more achievable by building up to them over periods of time.
To use an example, if you wanted to run a marathon, you wouldn’t leave the house one day and run 26 miles. You’d start running smaller distances, such as 2 or 5 miles, and then build up to the point
where you could run 15 to 20 and then push on to run 26 miles.

Get Someone to Join You

 

Working out on your own can become a lot easier and fun when you have someone, a friend or family member, who is with you. Not only do you then become accountable to someone who will motivate you to push yourself when you feel like giving up, but also you can make it a competition between the 2 of you and this will push you to keep up the exercise plan.

Calories

 

When you start on an exercise plan, you need to make sure that the amount of calories that you are consuming is fewer than the ones you are burning off. It is not going to help you if you do all the
exercise but then binge on junk foods and put the weight back on.

Get Enough Sleep

 

This is an often-overlooked part of beginning exercise. 8 hours is the recommended sleeping time. Sleeping is your rest, your time off. The times when you are resting your body are just as important as when you are training your body because you are giving the body time to recover and be able to do the exercise you have planned.

Water


You’ve heard it a thousand times, but you need to be drinking enough water. Enough water means about 2 litres a day. It’ll help you lose weight by flushing out the toxins in your body and help your
digestive system while keeping you hydrated enough to do the exercise that you need to be doing.

Running

 

If you don’t do any exercise at the moment, a good start would be to go walking. Going for a daily walk is better than being sat around at home doing nothing, but you should quickly pick it up if you are serious about losing weight, by breaking into running. Obviously, if you feel fit enough to go straight into the running, you’ll be all the netter for it.
Running is an ideal exercise as it is a natural movement for the body and thereare very few side effects. Try running distances and timing yourself so that you get a sense of progress and make a note
of this progress. You will find it extremely motivating to keep trying to beat your time, as you get fitter, or increase the distance of your run.
Start by running or walking once a week, to get into the routine of it. Progress as you feel able to so that you’re not risking burning yourself out but you are challenging yourself.
I always go running with my iPod, and listen to loud, heavy music, that motivates me. If your shoulders start to ache, it’ll be because your hunching them up as your run, if you loosen them
up and roll them backwards, you’ll feel better. If you get a bottle with a handle, if you want to take water with you, I find them more comfortable to hold than the ones with the handles.
I often find it fun to run during rush hour as well and on a route with lots of traffic lights. I find it motivating to be chasing the cars that have to stop so often because of the traffic lights and the
volume of traffic on the roads. Don’t let rain put you off running, it can be very refreshing to run along with the rain coming down on you, it cools you off as you heat up from the running.

Swimming 

 

Swimming can actually be better for you than running. The main reason being that, as you are in water, there is no impact on the joints that there is with running, you are just pushing yourself through the water and not impacting any surfaces.
Again, start small and build up. Aim for doing a certain number of lengths and, as you get fitter, either aim to do the lengths quicker or do more of them and always have a target in mind for when you reach the target you previously set.
It might be worth getting earplugs, if you are going to start swimming seriously, toreduce the risk of getting an ear infection.
Try going once a week to get your body used to the exercise and then build up as you get fitter, if you throw yourself into it, you may end up injuring or tiring yourself out really quickly and then you
will be put off from doing it again.
You’ll have to time your swimming sessions to the timetable of the pool that you use, I don’t know about elsewhere, but in the UK, schools and swimming lessons are carried out in the pool at certain times of the day. So, if you turned up to swim at that time, you would be unable to.
If you have never done any swimming before, whatsoever, it may be worth your while signing up to some beginner swimming lessons. This will take away the risk of not swimming properly when
you go and you’ll get some useful tips that you can use in the future. Also, it will give you confidence when you go swimming, that you’re not going to be embarrassed by getting into the pool and
not knowing what you are doing, or getting in other peoples’ way.

Joining The Gym

 

This is a great decision to make if you are going to lose weight. Once you get over the nerves of going for the first time, and you get into the swing of it, you’ll get the bug to keep going. I love
going to the gym, it’s the buzz of leaving, knowing you’ve bettered yourself as well as the knowing that you can transfer the confidence you gain by going to other areas of your life.
For example, you may not know right now, that you can do x amount of sit-ups in one go but, once you work towards and achieve that goal, you’ll then gain confidence and wonder what else you
are capable of that you have been putting off.
Joining the gym, you will obviously pay a monthly fee, so it doesn’t have that on the other activities you can do for exercise, but it’s very worth it. You have all the equipment you need in one place,
you can get instruction on how to do certain exercises and you can get general advice on how to keep going with your diet and exercise plan to lose weight.
At the gym, you can speak to a personal trainer and set out a schedule for your workouts and what you will do in them, you can get advice on your diet and you can set yourself targets to hit and then
keep yourself motivated to achieve those targets. If you have a schedule that includes going to the gym, you will be more likely to stick to it, because it is part of your routine, than to just go when
you feel like it.
If you go to the gym first thing in the morning, it’ll leave you feeling good and ready to take on whatever the rest of the day has in store. And you can become more productive with your day, as you
get fitter; you will become less reliant on sleep and be able to do more when other people will be tiring. You’ll still need sleep, just not as much!
At the gym, you’ll be able to do exercises like running, cycling and rowing without having to go far. Having these simulated will mean you are not put off by rain or cold weather and you can keep track of statistics while you run such as how far you have run, how long you have actually been running for and how many calories you have burnt off.
Make sure that, when you go to the gym, your workouts are broken down into parts; a warm-up, stretching, the main workout and then the warm down.
Doing a warm up, you will be preparing the body for more intense exercise. This is very important because the body will need time to adapt and prepare itself for strenuous exercise to prevent injury. The same goes for stretching, the muscles need to be loosened up so that they are prepared for exercise, instead of being cold and tight.
You need to warm up before stretching so that you get a better stretch out of the muscles than stretching them cold. You should stretch the entire body, even if you are just working on one particular part of the body. This is because you will get the entire body ready for
workout and you may end up using muscles for particular exercises and then using muscles you didn’t realise were being used.
For example, every exercise ends up working the core of your body so, if you strengthen that part of your body, you will find you get stronger overall. If you don’t believe me, try exercising an
individual muscle in the body and you will feel the tension in your core as well as the individual muscle.
And, of course, if your gym has a spa area with a sauna, steam room and Jacuzzi, this is an added bonus for the end of your workout. Not only because it is relaxing, but also because the sauna
and the steam room are good for your skin when used regularly.

Dieting

 

Before you begin to diet, you need to consider your weight loss goals. Weight and measuring your waist, hips, thighs and arms and then setting a goal for how what you want to lose from those
measurements is a good start. You might want to lose inches of your waist and then weight over your whole body, in general.
Once you’ve worked out what you want to achieve in terms of your weight loss, you should have a look at what sort of foods you have in the kitchen at home. You need to make sure that you have a
balance of foods from all the food groups: grains, fruit and vegetables, dairy, meat and protein and fats, oils and sweets.
Talk to your doctor before you go on any diet plan, get professional advice, they’ll be able to help you and give you more ideas and information about how you can lose weight the healthy way.
This is particularly vital if you have any health issues like asthma, for example, the doctor will be able to advise you with ways to lose weight that won’t be scuppered by any health issues you
already have and won’t trigger any of them either.
Health experts used to say that the average person needs 5 portions of fruit and vegetables every day, but it’s probably more like 8 or 9. This may seem like a lot, but if you have a glass of juice with your breakfast and a piece of fruit, 2 or 3 portions of vegetables with your main meal of the day and then 1 or 2 odd pieces of fruit as snacks over the course of the day, then you will have had 7 portions already. It’s really not that difficult, when you break it down in that way.
Take responsibility and stop making excuses. The sooner you take responsibility for your diet and exercise habits, the sooner you’ll be able to actually do something about them. If you are going to “start tomorrow”, you can be sure that something else will stop you from going ahead tomorrow. You must break this pattern by taking responsibility for how you have become unfit or unhealthy. Losers make excuses, winners make it happen
Whilst this short report can’t give you specific tips on dieting because I don’t know what you want to achieve by going on a diet, these tips will help to build a basis from which to start from.
Stop procrastinating. Whenever I find myself procrastinating over something, I try to do 5 minutes of whatever it is. This helps because, once you get involved in whatever you’re doing, you realise how little an amount of time 5 minutes is and you get into what you’re doing. For example, going for a quick run is better than not going for a run but then when you’re out, you might feel better about running and then want to do more anyway.
I’m not saying you should get geared up for a 5 minute run, by doing a small amount of anything, relatively speaking, will encourage you to do more.




1 comment:

  1. Obesity has always been a problem all over the world. Being overweight, people have lost the confidence in going out and meeting their friends. The best ways to lose weight is to have green tea and exercise regularly.
    best ways to lose weight

    ReplyDelete