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| Most Important Weight Loss Tips For Women |
Getting fit and lean requires more than having a great training program. After all, substantial weight loss and great abs are made in the kitchen. But even if you train hard and eat healthy, if you don’t have the right mindset, your progress will be at risk. Building a healthy and strong body isn’t a short-term project that you can complete and then return to your old ways – it’s more of a dedication to living, eating and thinking healthy in the long term.
When it comes to fad diets and suspicious-sounding supplements, the majority of the victims to their incredible claims are women. Actually, it seems that every third woman doesn’t have the much needed patience and knowledge to sculpt her dream body and her efforts go to waste as the boomerang effect of inadequate dieting kicks in. So let’s just tell the truth: significant weight loss and firm muscles are the result of hard work in the gym, hard work in the kitchen, and plenty of willpower and self-discipline. The bad news is that there’s no way to get around those things, but the good news is that when equipped with the right science-backed methods, you can accomplish a lot more with the same amount of effort.
Let’s get started.
STOP FOCUSING ON FAT LOSS
Here’s the thing: many behavioral studies have shown that when you focus solely on burning fat and design your whole program around that goal, you’re more likely to fail. Illogical as it may sound, it’s actually the truth. When all you care about is the calories, you end up consuming more of them. How does this happen?First of all, focusing only on restrictions is just too stressful. Second, it involves a ‘push’ motivation, meaning that you’re actively pushing yourself away from a source of discomfort or anxiety (the image of you being overweight forever), which can be a very powerful motivation, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as its counterpart, the ‘pull’ motivation, which involves tapping your desire to achieve something really worthwhile, lasting and meaningful.
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So when you gear your workout towards fat loss, you’re not giving yourself the opportunity to enjoy that activity and give it some real depth and importance, and this often results with rewarding yourself for your hard efforts with food. Exercise becomes just this annoying thing you have to endlessly perform in order to prevent putting on fat, which means that your motivation will inevitably diminish. But if you try to focus on working out for the goal of building strength and muscle, you can transform your gym hours into a more enjoyable experience and greatly increase your overall motivation, which in turn will certainly yield better results.
DON’T STARVE YOURSELF
Do your friends tell you that you have to basically starve yourself in order to lose weight? Sure, creating a calorie deficit is an important part of weight loss, and there are many ways to lose weight fast. But this approach has never resulted with any long-lasting changes and it will only make you hungry and unhappy, until you can’t take it anymore and end up overeating. We can assure you that eating as less as you can won’t give you the results you desire.On the contrary, it will only slow down your metabolic rate and cause your body to burn fewer calories as an attempt to preserve its precious fuel sources. So, the real trick is in reducing your appetite and creating a slight caloric deficit and improving your metabolism at the same time. How? It’s very simple actually – all you need to do is to make a few dietary adjustments by including more filling, nutrient-dense unprocessed foods in your diet and drink more water.
Build your diet around high quality sources of protein such as lean meats, fish and eggs, eat more fresh veggies and fruits that provide plenty of belly-filling fiber with every meal and consume an adequate amount of healthy fats on a daily basis. There are plenty of weight loss-friendly foods that you can choose to keep you satisfied without adding any inches around your waist.
Also, keep in mind that the exact number of calories you need to consume depends heavily on your body composition, the type and amount of physical activity. However, by obsessively counting calories you will only create additional anxiety and elevate the production of stress hormones in your body, resulting with greater fat storage instead of losing more weight.
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Stress hormones are directly linked to the process of storing fat, particularly around the waist, and are also partially responsible for junk food cravings. So instead of emphasizing the number of calories, aim to eat a healthier, low-carb, high-protein diet that will keep hunger away and allow your body to burn fat more efficiently. Multiple studies have shown that increasing protein intake will increase your metabolism and maintain your muscle mass. Additionally, your body naturally burns more calories in the process of breaking down protein than when breaking down either fats or carbs.
Another thing you can do is to include periods of fasting in your eating pattern. In general, it takes about 6-8 hours for the body to metabolize all glycogen stores and then shift to burning fat. This means that if you are replenishing your glycogen stores by eating throughout the day, your body is less likely to use your fat stores as fuel. So instead of eating anytime you feel like it, eat all of your food for the day within a 10-12 period of time and fast for the rest of the day