Keeping The Pounds Off
To often people come into my gym and they’re depressed, frustrated and at their wits end. Either they couldn’t take weight off or they did and within weeks it returned….and often brought friends. There’s a logical reason that dieting doesn’t work and it’s all about those pounds finding their way back home after the diet ends. When you diet, it always ends. That’s when you go back to your normal eating habits that put on weight in the first place. Of course, you’ll gain that weight back again. Keeping the pounds off requires more than just lowering your caloric intake for a few weeks or months, it means changing your eating habits for a lifetime. When you add a program of exercise, you keep your metabolism burning hot!
What’s the difference between eating healthy and dieting.
When you diet, you often feel deprived or hungry. You have are limited to the food listed on your diet. Some diets, like fad diets, limit that selection severely by focusing on a “magic soup” or “weight loss elixir to drink three times a day.” Eating healthy just means making smarter choices when it comes to food. For instance, just switching from white rice to brown rice can save a few calories, while also boosting the nutritional content of the meal.
You might have a diet to follow initially, but that’s only until you learn the best changes to make.
It takes time to change old habits. Those eating habits may have come from your childhood, so many are rooted in the comfort food area. These are go-to foods when anything significant affects your life. Changing that doesn’t happen overnight. Learning what’s healthy and lower in calories isn’t always easy. In fact, food manufacturers often do everything they can to confuse the average consumer. The easiest thing to remember is that eating healthy means eating food that’s closest to its natural state and less processed.
Eating healthy also means eating food without added sugar.
You won’t eliminate eating food with added sugar by skipping the bakery area or pushing the cart quickly past the candy area. Sugar is in everything. To make matters worse, the amount of sugar something contains is often hidden by using several different types of sugar and listing each separately. If there were just 8 ingredients in a food and four of them were different types of sugar, from dextrose to sucrose or HFCS, if they were listed separately, sugar might not be the top ingredient. The last four ingredients might be the sugars, even though combined, they equaled over 50 percent of the contents.
- You’ll be surprised at how good food tastes once you get your taste buds back to normal. Today’s eating habits overload them with sugar. Once you give it up for a while, you’ll get more of the true taste of food.
- Don’t despair if you think you’ll never get to have your favorite foods again. It’s just not so. When you eat healthy, you can eat almost anything, just not on an everyday basis and with portion control in mind.
- Smarter eating is also combined with regular exercise. When you workout regularly, you’ll build muscle tissue and that boosts your metabolism to help keep pounds off 24/7.
- Regular exercise also builds your energy level, so you’ll be more active. The more active you are, the more apt you’ll be to keep pounds off permanently.
For more information, contact us today at The Worx by Maia
It’s so much fun to watch clients in Alexandria, VA, get fit and make changes not only in their body, but also in their life. Whether it’s going from fitness zero to fitness hero or helping someone make the changes to extend their lives, it all brings satisfaction. It’s also why I do it. One of my biggest pleasures is seeing girls gone strong. Just thinking back and reading about the lives of women 30, 40 or 50 years ago, building muscles wasn’t encouraged or even suggested in many cases. Stick thin women, like Twiggy in the 1960s and the scary skinny models in the 2010s are gladly out of vogue and healthy and strong women are now a hit.
We have a lot of variety at The Worx in Alexandria, VA, that should help keep your interest and we take a great deal of pride in the motivation we provide. If you’re just starting a workout and healthy eating program, it can be overwhelming and you may need more to stay motivated as a beginner. Don’t worry, there are a number of things you can do until fitness and healthy eating become a habit and something you’ll look forward to doing.
While I love our P90X training, some of our members swear by the small group training or Beach Body Live events as the most fun. It’s important to enjoy what you do and also to try new things to get fit. In fact, finding more fun ways to improve your fitness is a great addition to any fitness program. It creates variety that even makes your normal workout more enjoyable because you aren’t doing the same thing every day.
If you want to get your fittest, there are some exercises or yoga poses you should do everyday. Keeping yourself limber and strong no matter how old you are is important. Many of the poses in yoga are similar or exactly like a Western alternative, but often done more slowly. In Alexandria, VA, I create many of the workouts that include these yoga like exercises to stretch the body, increase flexibility and strength.
Everyone has heard of someone that wants a breast implant to get a Hollywood looking bosom, but most people aren’t aware that there are women whose bust size is so big, it causes pain and discomfort. If you’re one of those people, you don’t have to go under the knife to get a bust reduction. There are methods and exercises to reduce breast size naturally.
Working out for beginners can be tough. You need to first find a program you like and then identify how much to do and how hard to workout. Too big of an effort early on can cause injury and stop the entire program before it starts and too little effort won’t bring the results you want. While I promote a formal exercise program that ensures you get all types of fitness training, strength, endurance, balance and flexibility, you can start simply by choosing an activity you enjoy that’s active and doing more of it.
If you come to The Worx in Alexandria, VA, you know that working out can make you feel great, both physically and mentally. There’s a reason for that. Whether it’s boosting your cognitive functioning or raising your spirits, fitness helps with mental health in a number of ways. One of the biggest ways is to burn off the hormones created by stress, which can clear your mind and help you to think better. Those stress hormones are for running or fighting if there’s danger and the changes they make in your body cause health issues and mental fog if they’re not burned off with exercise that simulates running or fighting.
When you hear the term muscle confusion you might envision arms and legs flailing everywhere, but that’s not how it works. Muscle confusion is a way to keep you burning more calories and avoiding a plateau. When you do physical activities, your body is always seeking efficiency and ways of saving calories. It happens when you do a workout for a long time. Not only does that lead to burning fewer calories, it also leads to fewer gains in strength training.
I love to see the changes in my clients at The Worx in Alexandria, VA. While all of them came expecting to see changes in their body, they never realized how good it would feel to be fitter and stronger. In fact, many start with one small goal, which they actually change as they see the changes in their body. Maybe their goal was just to get a little curvier or lose ten pounds, but once they start seeing their muscles tone and the changes in how they feel, they can’t help but to continue long after they’ve completed their goals.