Are you hoping to reveal all (well, nearly all…) on the beach this year?
Yes?
Well take a good look at your body right now and decide what changes you want to make. If you just want to improve your fitness and tone up those muscles, now is the time to start. The main requirements are time, effort and consistency. There isn’t an overnight solution, so prepare yourself for a little effort.
Let’s start with nutrition; in very simple terms your body uses fuel (food) for energy. However, if you eat more food than your body requires to fuel your daily activities, your body stores this excess as fat and you will gain weight. So, conversely, if you use up your fuel with your daily activities your body dips into your fat reserves in order to keep going – in this case, you will lose weight.
Regardless of what you may have heard, crash dieting or excessive exercise is not the best way to lose unwanted weight while staying healthy. Sure, crash diets will make you lose weight very quickly, but whilst you are doing this, you are starving the body of the nutrients it requires to keep you at optimum health. Your body, which is a remarkably intelligent pile of meat and bones, will also go into ‘starvation mode’ when you begin to eat again. As a self-preservation method your body is programmed to conserve extra fat, just in case of food becomes scarce again. Excessive exercising of an unfit body causes its own problems. So intelligent, healthy and gradual changes are the key to any successful weight loss or exercise regime.
If you need to reduce that ‘spare tire’ the healthiest way to go about it would be to just pay attention to everything that you eat. Visit mensjournal to learn more about healthy options. If you reduce your daily calories by just 500 per day then, providing you weren’t gaining weight in the first place, you are almost guaranteed to shed those extra pounds even if you don’t increase your exercise.
Did you know that if you cut out just one packet of crisps (chips) per week, you could lose around 12lbs per year? How cool is that!
Now, what about exercise? It really is not necessary to take out an expensive gym membership, you could increase your exercise using free methods. Start with going for a brisk walk every day, if you already walk daily, then walk further and a bit faster. You could then progress to 100 metres jog then 100 meters walk. Do this for your entire time ‘on the road’. Once you can do that easily, progress to running.
