5 Tips to Kickstart Your New Year’s Weight Loss Resolution
Use these weight loss tips to make a permanent change!
Every year, millions of people make New Year’s Resolutions about losing weight, getting healthier, exercising more, lifting weights, or any of the countless other “healthy” resolutions. Unfortunately, only a very small portion of those people actually accomplish what they set out to do. Why is this? It’s not because people don’t sincerely want to be healthier. Everyone would love to lose that spare tire or get back to their ideal weight. However, many people set goals without a good strategy or figure out the right strategy but don’t determine their goals. This article will present 5 tips that will help you set attainable goals and find a strategy to reach those goals.
1. Set achievable and realistic goals, then write them down and stick them wherever you go.
You can’t reach a goal if you don’t set it. It’s great to say “I’m going to be healthier this year” or “2015 is the year I lose weight,” but these are vague goals that you could strive for forever with no specific end date. If you want to lose weight, set your goal to lose 20 pounds by a certain date. Don’t leave it open. On top of that, set smaller, intermittent goals to keep you on track. If your goal is to lose 20 pounds in 2 months, set smaller weekly and monthly goals to stay on track.
Second, set realistic goals. You’re not going to go from couch potato to Arnold in a month. If you want to lose 50 pounds of body fat, don’t expect that to happen in 30 days. Set goals you can reach, so that each time you reach that goal, you increase your motivation, instead of being overwhelmed by this seemingly unattainable moonshot-type goal. This relates to creating a step-by-step timeline for your goals.
2. Keep a food log
Most people have no idea how much or how little (eating too little is just as bad for weight loss as eating too much) they actually eat. If you’ve never taken the time to count your macronutrients (notice I didn’t say count your calories), then you probably don’t know how much you actually eat in a day. Whether your goal is to lose weight or build muscle, your diet is critical to the process. You have to know exactly how much you are consuming and the breakdown of your total calories. I recommend making this part of your permanent routine. It’s really not that hard to track your food nowadays with all the apps available. MyFitnessPal is a great app that allows you to simply scan the barcode on your food and it will generate the nutrient content for you. It also tracks the breakdown of carbs, fat, protein, fiber, and more, rather than just calories.
At the very least, try to log your food for a couple of weeks to get an idea of how much you’re supposed to eat. If you never set a benchmark for yourself, you’ll never know if you’re eating too much or not enough.
3. Plan your exercise program for each day of the week
You can lose weight through your diet, but if you want to tone, firm, sculpt, build definition, increase lean muscle mass, get bigger, or any other popular phrase for building muscle and definition, you need to incorporate resistance. training. Cardio is great, but it takes the right mix of resistance training and cardio to build a great-looking, healthy physique.
To build your new physique, you need to establish a plan of attack and stick to it. It’s too easy to skip a day if you’re just trying to exercise when you can. Even if it’s just 20 minutes a day, you should set aside a time every day to exercise.
In addition to that, you need to plan your actual exercise. What muscles are you going to work every day? Will you do cardio and resistance training or just one? How long will your rest periods be? sets? beef? Have a plan. If you really want to spend a lot of time in the gym and not get any results, go without any plan. Don’t waste time going around thinking about what you are going to do, or forgetting what muscles you worked yesterday, or what exercises you did two days ago. Take ten minutes to sit down and plan the attack you are about to launch on your body. You’ll save time and see more progress.
4. Recruit a friend or family member
Reaching your goals will be much easier if you get someone to do it with you. One very important thing to remember is to recruit someone who already works out consistently or who really wants to make a change. Don’t pick the laziest person you know to be your training partner. There will be many days when you need a little extra motivation, so it helps to have someone around to push you to improve, don’t agree that you need to take the day off for pizza and ice cream. . Plus, when you start to see progress, you’ll have someone to share that joy with, and you can continue to help each other improve.
5. Learn something new every day
Take 10 minutes every day to read something new about nutrition or fitness. It’s really hard to stick to something if you don’t care, and it’s much easier to care about something if you know. If you feel like you don’t know how to eat right, lift weights, do effective cardio, set big goals, or anything else, then educate yourself! You can find practically anything on the Internet. Take charge of learning about what you are trying to do. Learn about effective methods for lifting weights. Learn about the most effective forms of cardio. If getting fit was easy, everyone would be fit. It’s not magic, but it does require some knowledge. This is an important part of your strategy. If you don’t know how to create an impressive strategy, you will seriously hinder your goals.
If you don’t want to take the time to learn (or don’t have the time), hire a professional, such as a certified personal trainer. Its sole purpose is to provide you with a roadmap to success. All you have to do is follow it.