The Simple, Smarter Way To Achieve Your Fitness Goals
FITNESS GOALS
The holiday season plays a big role in our weight calculations, with many of us attending - often already overweight - binge eat in the last week of the year before we decide to lose excess weight in the new year. A better decision is to start your weight loss journey months before the holiday season – and two cheat days during the holidays.
The best part of this strategy?
You'll start the new year with your fitness goals already achieved, and this locked-in success will give you the confidence to focus on all your other goals and the confidence that comes from achieving success. In the rest of this article, we look at some simple steps you can take to lose weight over two months. This is a better approach than forcing yourself to spend a lot in a short period of time. And the festive season is a reward that will come in handy. Let's take a quick look - what are you doing less of? Before we begin, it's important to understand that while there are some basic principles that apply across the board, everyone is different in how well they do certain things. You need to assess where you stand on these criteria.
Sleep and recovery
Do you get enough quality sleep? If the day is less than six consecutive hours, you should push for at least seven hours. Losing sleep will override all your efforts (caloric restriction, exercise). It's good to invest in a sleep watch like the Fit-bit Charge 5 that helps you track your sleep more. The same goes for de-stressing - if your job is stressful, take a five-minute de-stress break into the day and forget about it. If you've been exercising hard, check how to control your breathing in the cool down after exercise to optimize recovery (you warm up before and cool down after you work out, right?).
Eating habits
The most important factor after recovery (sleep, stress, exercise) is how much to eat (and what you eat). Whether you want to follow Paleo, OMAD (one meal a day), intermittent fasting, keto, low carb, flexible macros, or something else, you need to master two things:
Consistency:
For the next two months, follow the protocol with 90% accuracy. For example, if you do intermittent fasting, I recommend spending the first week on the 16:8 protocol before switching to 18:6 in the second week.
Starting in the third week, I ask you to fast for 24 hours once a week to allow for occasional rewards and opportunities to influence your metabolism to strengthen discipline. In short, start simple, build discipline, and iterate on complexity.
Choice of food:
When it comes to satisfaction, the secret of fatigue is replacing choice with satisfaction. The surest way to lose weight is to remove the decision-making process from what you eat. Choose a few healthy foods from what you want to eat (every meal) and increase them every week. You don't have to decide between options you don't like - choose foods you can eat three/four times a week. A few repeat meals could be the difference between reaching your goals this year or losing the heat with analysis. Calorie deficit A key principle in all this will be maintaining a caloric deficit. For a gradual two-month program, I usually recommend starting with a small deficit—250 calories/day—to make it easier for your body to stick to it at first. Bigger setbacks are possible (and we will), but starting small will help you develop discipline. You can increase the deficit to 500 calories a day after the first few weeks (depending on whether you see results), but the key is to maintain consistency for two months. Calorie restriction is easier than you think.
For example:
· If you have two cappuccinos a day, switch to black coffee for a 200+ calorie deficit.
· If you enjoy two 16 oz cans of soda, switching to sugar-free soda will result in a 300-calorie deficit.
· Eating? Skipping your meals will often leave you in a 200-400 calorie deficit, depending on how severe your eating is. Cutting meals by 25% can create a 100-200 calorie deficit. As you progress, you will realize that a deficit of 250-500 calories can be very incorporated into your eating habits without distracting yourself.
After the first few weeks, you can learn to go from a 250 calorie deficit to a 500-calorie deficit, but play around with this number to see if it works for you. Training If you've been practicing, that's great—we can see ways to improve If you are sedentary, add 15 to 30 minutes of exercise each day will help you lose weight while adding to the calorie deficit described above.
Exercise with consistency and simplicity - something you enjoy and can do for at least 15 minutes (and 30/60/120 minutes a day) (every day). If you have time, there is no real upper limit. If you don't exercise, you don't need to run for two hours a day.
Here's a list of practical exercises that burn the most calories per minute - pick your favorites (and learn/master them), switch them up, or do them together every day. At this stage, do not fall into the trap of taking a "break" day from your workouts-you can do a variety of activities, but you will rarely need to take a "break". If all else fails, a 30-minute walk will work and 5-10 minutes of jumping rope - helping you stay consistent. What you'll notice from reading the calories burned by exercise above is that exercise only helps you burn an extra 150-300 calories in most cases, or 400-600 if you go out for an hour. In contrast, eating 300 or 600 calories does not need much time or effort.
Use exercise as a booster, not as a fattener. 
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