Wednesday, July 24, 2013
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| from http://thewellnessscientist.com |
Part One: Diet
- Form a diet that minimizes starches, and sugars. Bad starches and sugars to stay away from include: potato chips, fries, white breads, pastries, soft drinks, candies, and cakes. These will all keep you from realizing your weight loss goal.
- Form a diet that is rich in vegetables, fiber, and lean protein. All these foods are less prone to being converted into fat, and come packed with healthy vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.
- Drink water instead of sugary drinks. Water will help your immune system stay healthy, keep your skin looking great, and give you more lasting energy to do the things you need to do during the day. Sodas, juices, and other sugary drinks aren't the way to go if you want to shed pounds off of your frame. Unsweetened green tea is another good substitute for sugary drinks. Green tea contains a good amount of antioxidants, meaning that it helps your body fight against free radicals, which enhance signs of aging in humans.
- Use dieting tips to form good habits. We all cheat now and then, and that's fine. But we can make it harder on ourselves to cheat in the first place, giving us an incentive to follow our diet more strictly and diligently.
- Keep a food journal. If you keep track of your diet and one week goes particularly well, you can try replicating your diet to achieve the same results.
- Never skipping meals, never eating late at night, and don't forget breakfast. A good breakfast will help you jumpstart your metabolism, keep it going throughout the day, and gently wind down as night comes. Eating right before sleeping is a bad idea because your body often doesn't metabolize all the calories, instead converting them into fat.
Part Two: Exercise
- Stretch before you exercise. Be prepared to stretch for 5 to 10 minutes — slowly and effectively — before you exercise. Stretching will keep you from getting injured.
- During your warm-up routine, try to break a sweat. Think of it this way: breaking a sweat means you're exerting yourself more, which means you're burning more calories. The more calories you burn, the more weight you'll lose. That's a good thing.
- Keep sweating throughout your entire workout. Now that you've set the tone during your warm-up, keep the intensity ramped up. Losing weight is going to require one hour of moderate exercise per day.
- Do one hour of cardio a day, working at a moderate pace at least.
- Complement your cardio with strength training. Strength training can be anything from yoga and Pilates to resistance or weight training.
- Do interval training. Interval training is short bursts of high intensity workout followed by longer intervals of mellow exercise, repeating throughout.
- Pace yourself. The good news is that if you pace yourself while exercising, you're less likely to feel burned-out and more motivated to finish your regimen at your maximum intensity. That's a good omen for calorie-burning.
Part Three: General Tips
- Burn more calories than you take in as food. This is actually the most effective way to think about weight loss.
- Starving yourself will make you gain weight, not lose it. Why? When a person starves him/herself, the body realizes it is getting less food, causing its metabolism to slow down in order to save energy. When this happens, your body starts eating its muscle supply, basically, consuming lean tissue instead of fat reserves.
- Any quick weight-loss regimen should also be accompanied by exercise. The truth is that if you want to lose quickly, you're not going to do it merely by eating right. You will lose weight, but it will take time.
- Stress can cause weight-gain. When your body is under stress, it released adrenaline — the fight or flight hormone. But your body also releases cortisol, another hormone. When the adrenaline wears off, which happens quickly, all that's left is the cortisol. The cortisol causes us to want to eat, because we've spent precious energy using our adrenaline to potentially save our life.
- Results will take time. If your goal is to lose 2 pounds in 7 days, that's probably double. If your goal is to lose 7 pounds in 7 days, it's not going to happen. On top of that, it's not healthy. Be reasonable about what your goals are so you don't get down on yourself when you fail to meet them.
- Too many people expect immediate results and then get discouraged when they aren't able to see them. Well, life isn't fair, and it's never easy, is it?
